Lifestyle

Toast, the Low-Key Brand, Expands Its U.S. Presence

Published

2 months ago

January 18, 2025

At the end of last year, the lifestyle brand Toast quietly opened its second store in the United States on Elizabeth Street in New York’s NoLIta neighborhood.

Suzie de Rohan Willner, its chief executive and an unassuming and warm presence, had flown in from London opening week.

Standing by the newly installed store shelves, with glasses and close-cropped hair, she could easily be mistaken for a Toast customer. She also likes to wear Toast’s clothes, which are utilitarian and no-nonsense.

On the nearby racks hung smock dresses in earthy colors called basalt and scarab, barrel-leg ecru denim trousers and seaweed green hooded wax-cotton parkas.

“I always think that when you’re sitting in a concept store, you should be able to identify a brand from a distance, just by the colors and the silhouettes,” Ms. de Rohan Willner said. “With Toast, I think you can do that by our colors that are inspired by nature, as well as the pops of color that bring it all to life, as well as the craft pieces.”

Evidence of her vision was in practically every element of the space, including its hand-thrown stoneware mugs and its repair station, where customers can bring old Toast pieces to be mended free of charge.

Ms. de Rohan Willner — who previously was the chief executive of FitFlop, and has worked for brands such as Levi Strauss, Timberland, Dockers and Puma — joined Toast in 2015. She slowly put into motion a plan to revitalize the fashion brand, which, at the time, one fashion writer for The Times of London described as “a bit hippy” and “too expensive.”

“With clothes that are loosefitting and comfortable, there’s always a danger,” said Rosie McKissock, the brand director of Toast.

“We went back to basics,” Ms. de Rohan Willner said. “It’s always a joy to be able to do that, right? Just to say, ‘Let’s pare it all back.’”

Toast’s founding ethos was strong. It was started in 1997 by two archaeologists, Jessica and Jamie Seaton, as a mail-order business out of their farmhouse in West Wales. They initially offered just nightwear and loungewear.

“A piece of toast is a very humble thing,” Ms. Seaton once explained in an interview with The Modern House.

But their romantic, hippie aesthetic — what today might be labeled cottage-core, with a touch of bohemian chic — caught on quickly. Catalogs from the brand’s heyday in the early 2000s feature wholesome-looking models in “sari apron trousers,” “kurta dresses” and Uggs.

Kate Berry, a creative consultant and editor at large for Domino, hosted a breakfast for the opening of Toast’s Brooklyn store on Atlantic Avenue last year. She remembered well the power the brand had early on and how it held weight in certain circles for its rustic style.

“When I worked at Martha Stewart in 2007, every art director had Toast catalog images on their mood boards,” she recalled.

Ms. de Rohan Willner knew she needed to remind customers of Toast’s original philosophy while making the brand feel more contemporary.

The Seatons, who sold their final stake in Toast in 2018, “had a beautiful appreciation of navigating the world in a slower way,” Ms. de Rohan Willner said. To her, the name conjured an image of a lazy breakfast at home on a Sunday, with a hot cup of tea.

First, Ms. de Rohan Willner hired a new head of design, Laura Shippey, who had worked for eight years at the British brand Margaret Howell, followed by a stint at J. Crew. For inspiration, Ms. Shippey looked to Japanese and European workwear, menswear-inspired silhouettes and vintage textiles worldwide.

Ms. de Rohan Willner then began “dialing up the craft,” she said.

Collections heavily feature hand embroidery, shibori, tie-dye, indigo and hand-printed fabrics, such as ikats and block printing. Toast also began to spotlight local artisans. The brand now resells creatively repaired pieces and vintage and newly returned secondhand items, donating a portion of the sales revenue.

It also hosts clothing swaps and mending events at its stores, where consumers can bring in items they want repaired using various techniques, including sashiko, the Japanese practice of decorative reinforcement, and darning, patching and appliqué.

In addition to its two American stores, Toast has a robust presence in Britain with 20 stores..

The brand had thrown a quiet dinner at the Elizabeth Street shop a few weeks before the opening. The walls were bare. Boxes of clothes still needed to be unpacked.

Even the event — during which humble dishes like white bean soup and braised kojinut squash cooked with local ingredients were served — kept a low profile and did not have a photographer shooting publicity and marketing images.

The actress Beanie Feldstein had stopped by during cocktail hour. Ms. Feldstein first discovered Toast when she auditioned for the film “How to Build a Girl” in London.

“The casting director in the audition was shaped like me and she was wearing these amazing overalls,” Ms. Feldstein recalled. “I told myself that if I got the role, I would buy the overalls. And I did. And it’s actually how I met my wife, from that movie. Then the director and the writer, all of us bought the overalls.”

How many items of Toast clothing does Ms. Feldstein now own?

“Between me and my wife?” she asked, and paused. “A lot.”

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Lifestyle

Why Gucci Picked Demna

Published

14 minutes ago

March 14, 2025

Press Room

The era-defining Balenciaga designer will take the reins of Italy’s biggest luxury brand in a surprise shakeup of parent company Kering’s creative ranks. The French group is under pressure to turn around performance after profits tumbled 46 percent last year.

Lifestyle

Gucci Taps Demna, Balenciaga’s Creative Director, as New Designer

Published

11 hours ago

March 13, 2025

Press Room

Gucci Taps Demna, Balenciaga’s Creative Director, as New Designer

The great Gucci reset is here. On Wednesday, the Italian fashion house named Demna, the mononymic designer who transformed Balenciaga from a niche luxury house into one of the most provocative, boundary-breaking brands of the last decade, as its new artistic director. He will be in charge of women’s wear, men’s wear and accessories.

Gucci and Balenciaga are owned by Kering, the French conglomerate that also owns Saint Laurent, McQueen, Brioni and Bottega Veneta. A new designer for Balenciaga has not been announced.

“Gucci stands for fashion authority,” Stefano Cantino, the chief executive of Gucci, said. “This is what we want to bring back.”

Demna will be the first “star” designer with a proven track record in Gucci’s 104-year history, a seeming acknowledgment of the crisis it has experienced over the last two years after an apparent attempt to recast itself as a timeless luxury brand. Revenue plunged 23 percent in 2024, and the Kering stock price has more than halved since 2023. (Gucci is by far the largest brand in the Kering stable.)

The appointment will add yet more turmoil to an already unsettled fashion world in which a record number of fashion companies have changed design heads in the last year. Half of Kering’s brands alone will have new designers in 2025.

“We were looking for a strong and opinionated designer,” Mr. Cantino said. “Demna is one of the few.” He brings with him not just design skills, Mr. Cantino said, but “an understanding of contemporary culture, of what is luxury today and a deep understanding of the new generation.”

He also brings a certain knowledge of Gucci. In 2021, Demna and Alessandro Michele, the Gucci designer at the time, “hacked” into each other’s brands to reinterpret their most recognizable designs, with Demna replacing Gucci’s famous double Gs with Bs on its classic logo canvas accessories. And he has the confidence of the Kering chief executive François-Henri Pinault, who once told The New York Times he believed Demna could create a “megabrand.”

When Mr. Pinault named the Georgian-born Demna Gvasalia (he dropped his surname in 2021) to Balenciaga in 2015, however, the fashion world was shocked.

Though Demna, now 43, had received his master’s degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium, and trained in the studios of Martin Margiela and Louis Vuitton, he made his name at Vetements, a cultlike label created in 2014 that became a fashion sensation almost overnight because of its nose-thumbingly antifashion aesthetic. (Demna left Vetements in 2019.)

Nonetheless, during Demna’s 10 years at Balenciaga, revenues grew close to $2 billion from an estimated $390 million, challenging the meaning of luxury, value and authenticity in the process.

He took the quotidian — Crocs, IKEA totes, even garbage bags — and put them on a pedestal. He almost single-handedly started the monster sneaker trend. He put all ages and genders and kinds of beauty on his runway and created shows that were immersive, apocalyptic experiences that acted as forms of social criticism as much as fashion: shows about the climate crisis, the war in Ukraine, celebrity and the rule of capitalism. He scandalized and thrilled in equal measure.

He collaborated with “The Simpsons,” made Balenciaga video games and attended the Met with Kim Kardashian. He also restarted the couture line and never lost sight of the purity of silhouette that characterized the work of Balenciaga’s namesake designer, Cristóbal Balenciaga.

Balenciaga’s momentum came to an abrupt halt in 2023, when a misjudged holiday ad campaign precipitated online allegations of pedophilia, and Demna’s deep friendship with Ye cast a shadow on the brand in the wake of Ye’s antisemitic rants. Cancellation loomed, but Balenciaga eventually distanced itself from the controversy, and it has since recovered some of its strength. In January, Demna was made a Chevalier des Arts et des Lettres in recognition of his contribution to French fashion. He wore a T-shirt.

Demna’s last Balenciaga show, held on March 9 in Paris, was a career retrospective of sorts and a reminder of just what he had brought to the house. After the show, he joked to reporters that the reason he was wearing a suit for the first time was that he was Demna 2.0.

The Gucci news suggests it was less a joke than it seemed at the time.

“Demna’s contribution to the industry, to Balenciaga and to the group’s success has been tremendous,” said François-Henri Pinault in a news release. “His creative power is exactly what Gucci needs.”

Francesca Bellettini, the deputy chief executive of Kering, called him “the perfect catalyst.”

Demna replaces Sabato De Sarno, a designer who had worked behind the scenes at Valentino before being charged with Gucci’s reset after the seven years of Alessandro Michele’s magpie maximalism. (Mr. Michele had likewise been a number two before ascending to his position, working for the former Gucci designer Frida Giannini.) Though the Michele era had buoyed Gucci to annual revenues of about 10 billion euros, tastes began to swing away from his trademark eccentricity, and Gucci management thought a return to discretion was the answer.

That turned out to be wrong. Instead of positioning the brand as a somewhat more hip equivalent of Hermès, Mr. De Sarno’s luxury minimalism simply made it seem diminished. (It turns out one Hermès is enough.) Demna’s job will be to change all that, though he will have to overcome not just the problems of Gucci, but also the challenge of a slowdown in the broader luxury industry.

In that lies a certain appeal, Mr. Cantino said.

For Demna, Mr. Cantino said, the idea of “being able to make a success at Gucci, prove he is capable of doing something different than Balenciaga and show a different point of view, was very exciting.”

Gucci did not confirm when Demna would show his first collection, but he will begin in early July after his final Balenciaga couture show. (Gucci is not a couture house.) He will split his time between his home in Switzerland and the Gucci headquarters in Milan.

Lifestyle

After developers gentrified her old neighborhood, cherished plant shop owner starts fresh

Published

12 hours ago

March 13, 2025

Press Room

After developers gentrified her old neighborhood, cherished plant shop owner starts fresh

On any given weekend, Degnan Boulevard, bookmarked by West 43rd Street, vibrates with activity. As you walk down the street, the sound of African drums blends into Snoop Dogg’s “Drop It Like It’s Hot.” The music comes from massive speakers propped beside various street vendors: people selling clothes, books, cannabis, sea moss and more.

A customer lifts up a prayer plant.

(Juliana Yamada / Los Angeles Times)

If you continue this casual stroll north, you’ll eventually spot an orange wall with green accents. The vendors’ music — Stevie Wonder is playing now — flows through its low gate. As you follow it, you step into a verdant oasis. A wide open green space big enough for two boys to pass their soccer ball back and forth gives way to a greenhouse teeming with “wishlist plants.” And if you’re brave enough to step deeper into the lot, yet clearly not confident in ascertaining a Golden Pothos from a Pothos N’Joy, a woman with a warm smile will approach you kindly.

“Welcome to the Plant Chica. Have you visited us before?”

In spring 2023, developers in the quickly gentrifying West Adams neighborhood handed Sandra Mejia a 90-day eviction notice on the lease for her plant store, the Plant Chica, a business she started in 2018. Having a bricks-and-mortar store was a dream for the onetime medical assistant. Therefore, Mejia had to reckon with whether to open herself up to more emotional turmoil as she searched for a new location to reopen in.

“We were super sad about losing the space and we were having a really hard time letting go of it,” said Mejia, who co-owns the Plant Chica with her husband, Bantalem Adis. “I felt like I was never going to find anything as special as that space was — not just for me but for the community.”

While the Plant Chica continued to complete online orders after the eviction, Mejia doubted whether to continue the business at all. Business had been slow during winter 2023; and although the community poured into a GoFundMe page dedicated to helping the store stay afloat, Mejia and her husband had sold or given away nearly their entire inventory before closing. “Should I be doing this?” Mejia asked herself.

Co-owners of Plant Chica, Sandra Meija, left, and Bantam Adis, talk inside Plant Chica.

Ironically, it was a 2023 Times story published about the store’s eviction plight that led Mejia to a solution. Robbie Lee, interim chief executive officer of the Black Owned and Operated Community Land Trust, read the article and thought Mejia might be a good fit for what his organization was trying to build in Leimert Park, the heart of Black Los Angeles.

“The energy that she brought to the area that she was at in West Adams was something that we specifically felt would be a good energy for Leimert,” Lee said. “She seemed to have some really strong ties to the South L.A. community and she seemed to also have an interest in being a part of a community that was really tied to a community of color and culture. And so we felt that it would be a good fit to try to help support her in identifying a space.”

At first, Lee showed Mejia a few bricks-and-mortar options on Degnan Boulevard, but they didn’t quite fit the greenhouse feel Mejia was looking for. Then Lee walked Mejia over to an empty lot managed by Community Build Inc., the L.A.-based nonprofit offering education, training, support services and employment placement assistance. The lot had previously been rented for various community and private events throughout the year, but otherwise it sat unattended to.

Two people shop for houseplants at the new Plant Chica store in Leimert Park.

Reopening would take a lot of sacrifice — namely, in March 2024, Mejia and her husband had to give up their place and move in with her parents to save money. But Mejia instantly knew she found the shop’s new home.

“It feels like the space was literally sitting here waiting for us because it cannot be any more perfect for us,” she said.

After signing the lease in June 2024, the Plant Chica reopened in Leimert Park Village in October.

Originally, the Plant Chica store, which opened on Jefferson Boulevard in West Adams in 2021, had been an old auto body shop that was retrofitted to be a greenhouse. But with the open lot in Leimert Park, Mejia could craft the plant shop of her dreams: a big dome-style greenhouse designed to be weather-resilient.

“It just feels so magical, especially when the sun is hitting the greenhouse, the way the sun bounces on the leaves,” Mejia said. “I always also wanted rocks, which I know is something so small, but to me, to be able to hear people walking on rocks is so therapeutic.”

The new space is also special for another reason: The open space allows Mejia to more easily facilitate the community events and collaborations she is well-known for.

Sandra Mejia, left, helps Reginald Alston pick out a plant.

“Most people see a plant shop,” said Jasmine Clennon, 36, a regular customer and friend of the store. “We see a communal space so we can come together.”

Clennon knows Mejia through their kids and recalls Mejia turning the new shop’s lawn into a Halloween party for the kiddos after trick-or-treating. Other hallmark Plant Chica events include queer poetry readings hosted by Cuties Los Angeles, yoga classes hosted by Black Women’s Yoga Collective, and of course, the store’s popular Adopt-a-Plant series.

“How do I say this without getting emotional?” said Clennon on a recent trip to the plant store as her school-aged daughter played at her feet. “Seeing her resiliency, opening it back up and specifically being intentional about it being in a Black community, is great.”

Customers browse the Plant Chica greenhouse.

This significance is also not lost on Mejia, who shared that the transplant identities of many of the business owners in West Adams precluded her from feeling connected to them.

“In West Adams, I was trying to create community, and it was kind of exhausting,” she said. “There’s already so much culture here [in Leimert Park]. I just get to add to that.”

Mejia added that she feels exceptionally seen and supported in Leimert Park, which lends itself to a natural reciprocity on her part.

“A lot of businesses will take, take, take and not put back into the neighborhoods they’re in,” she said. “But I think it’s different when you’re from the neighborhood. You’re like ‘No, I grew up here. I want to see this neighborhood thrive.’”

For her part, Mejia created maps of the historic Degnan strip to give to her customers. The idea, she said, is “Don’t just get back in your car after visiting the Plant Chica. Here’s this map. Go support the other businesses.”

That peer-support includes businesses found on the Plant Chica’s own lawn.

Owner Sandra Mejia offers free greenhouse space to other small businesses to sell their merchandise.

Amorette Brooms, 47, ran a storefront on Pico Boulevard for over a decade before financial shortfalls in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic forced her to close down. When the Plant Chica reopened in Leimert Park, Brooms reached out to Mejia via social media to see if they could collaborate in some way. She was shocked when Mejia offered her a free space to sell her merchandise instead.

“I was like ‘What do you mean you’re not going to charge me?’” said Brooms, who sells planters. “It kind of restores my faith in humanity.”

Today, four businesses, Brooms’ Queen, Louis LIV Design, Golden Garden and Plant Man P, sell their products rent-free at the Plant Chica. The retail model allows small business owners to fully sell through their inventory without falling prey to pop-up events that typically leave them in the hole, Brooms said.

Now Brooms, in turn, is planning to bring her Tiny Plant Desk series — a play on NPR’s popular Tiny Desk series — to the Plant Chica. Which for Mejia is exactly the point of giving back.

“I feel like people support us so much because they know that if they spend money here, there’s going to be an awesome event that’s going to be free to the community, which is hard to get,” Mejia said.

In addition to helping customers with their plant selections, Mejia also rings them up at the register and then busies herself with tidying and organizing the shop. She has no employees, but she still has ambitious goals. Two weeks ago, she officially filed the paperwork for her nonprofit, co-founded with Brooms, Plant Power to the People. And she’s hoping to organize a Los Angeles Earth Day Festival, hosted in Leimert Park, by April. To outsiders, Mejia’s pursuits and projects may seem overwhelming, but where Mejia had doubts about her future a year ago, she now knows she’s exactly where she’s meant to be.

“People are always like ‘Oh, you do so much for your community,’ and I’m like ‘Yeah, but my community does a lot for me too,’” she said, explaining that community members cleaned her wind-strewn lawn in the aftermath of the Eaton and Palisades fires while she was busy organizing donations for Altadena residents who lost their homes. “I’m being so fulfilled and feeling like I’m walking in my purpose, and as a person, I don’t know that there’s anything greater than to be like, damn, I love what I do.”

It’s impossible to not feel this love — this sense of community — when you walk through the Plant Chica’s Degnan Avenue gate humming the soulful tunes — Luther Vandross is playing now — of the vendors outside.

“I feel like everything is a lesson,” Mejia said. “[My son] saw us open on Jefferson and he cut the ribbon then. And then, he cut the ribbon again here in Leimert Park. I think that was super special because it shows him that if things sometimes may not go your way, you can’t just give up. You got to keep going and find new ways.”