Winta Rowling
Google
I have long been a devoted patron of Lemaire not merely for the garments, but for the spirit they once evoked: an intimacy with fabric, intellect in form, restraint (I would often drive from Oxford to the Paris store)
But lately, I find myself watching the brand undergo a transformation so painfully familiar it borders on tragic and quite boring actually; the slow and predictable descent into corporate homogenisation in preparation -one suspects- for acquisition by one of the great luxury conglomerates…perhaps LVMH?
This transition carries with it all the symptoms of aesthetic flattening. Step into the Lemaire boutique today and the air no longer vibrates with individuality. Instead, one is met with a perfectly curated sameness. retail associates adorned uniformly in those now-ubiquitous engineer jackets, their expressions quiet, vacant, seemingly stripped of personality or personal styling. It is as though the staff themselves have become mannequins, reduced to silent placeholders in a set design optimised for efficiency and scalability.
once there was nuance, now narrative branding. once each employee wore the brand with interpretive agency, now only the unspoken imperative of uniformity…not in the poetic sense Lemaire once aspired to, but in the bleak logic of cost-saving and commercial legibility.
The garments themselves, once rich in tactility and complexity, have begun to betray the signs of their own dilution. The quality is no longer consonant with the price. And yet, the house insists with a sort of patronising persistence (the young French manager) nothing has changed. But something essential has changed: the soul of the brand no longer resides in the fabric, nor in the people who represent it.
And this is perhaps the most bitter irony: as the co-directors publish books and speak of poetry, ecology, and inner worlds, the brand's human front the people in the shops are reduced to hollow vessels. The gestures of care remain in theory, but are no longer embodied. One is reminded of Heidegger’s warning against the “enframing” of Being where people and things alike are reduced spectacle.
Lemaire, in its current arc, reveals a familiar trajectory: growth at the expense of interiority. The same pattern seen in countless other houses now replays here. Not to forget most of those who work in store and probably HQ all come from Prada, MiuMiu etc etc.
The brand may one day sell to LVMH or a comparable leviathan, the founders may retreat to pastoral life, speaking softly of sustainability even as their enterprise has succumbed to the very systems it once seemed to resist.
It is painful, because this brand once meant something to me. It clothed me in thought. I built a wardrobe on it. And now, I hesitate to wear it…not out of aesthetic boredom, but because I no longer recognise the ethical or spiritual signature that once made it worth inhabiting.
So let me say this, plainly:
If you wish to preserve what made this brand beautiful, begin with the people who animate it. Let them express themselves. Let them feel dignified in what they wear. A brand is not merely cut and cloth it is the lived experience of those who carry it forward, day after day.
Until then, Lemaire is in erasure.
