LISA MIMOUN: It truly began with a little black dress. At the time, I was working in the art world, traveling constantly – New York, Los Angeles, London, the Middle East. On one trip, I lost my luggage. I was away for two months, with professional obligations almost every evening: dinners, galas, exhibitions. And suddenly I realised that the one thing I needed most was missing: a little black dress. What shocked me was that, despite having access to beautiful stores and budgets, no one was really focusing on that essential piece. From 25 to 75, women often want the same thing in their suitcase: a few garments that can shift with context. You change your shoes, your jewellery, and you’re ready. So I decided to design those pieces myself – but with an absolute obsession for quality. For me, true luxury reveals itself when you turn a garment inside out. The lining, the construction, the finishing – this is where confidence is born. You feel it immediately. It changes how you stand, how you move. You stop thinking about your clothes, and that in itself is empowering.

LM: Completely. Empowerment doesn’t come from spectacle. It comes from how a garment supports you throughout the day. When something is properly cut, lined in silk, finished the way couture used to be finished, it gives you a sense of grounding. There is also something quietly sensual about that relationship between body and clothing. Not loud, not obvious. When you take the dress off, it is just as beautiful as when you wear it. That intimacy matters.

LM: Because quality and know-how cannot be rushed. When I decided to produce in France, I quickly realised that many ateliers could no longer execute this level of finishing—especially silk linings. It’s technically difficult. The fabric moves, it slides. I left everything else behind and committed fully. I met Nadia, who became my atelier partner, and we decided to work the way couture houses once did: one piece at a time. It’s more expensive, yes. But the world does not need more clothes. It needs fewer, better ones. Pieces that last, that can be transmitted. It took five years to train our small team to achieve this level of craftsmanship. But once know-how disappears, it is gone forever.

LM: Hubert de Givenchy dressing Audrey Hepburn is an obvious reference. I also love early Courrèges, Pierre Cardin. That clarity of line, those A-shapes – they flatter almost every body. They are chic, intelligent, and uncomplicated. One of our dresses is even named after Audrey Hepburn’s character in *Breakfast at Tiffany’s*. But it’s not nostalgia. It’s about translating that elegance into today’s reality.

LM: They are empowered women. They have careers, responsibilities, ambition. They don’t have hours to spend getting dressed. They move from meetings to dinners, from travel to events. They need clothes that don’t wrinkle, that feel good after a flight, that allow them to focus on their lives. Comfort is essential. I truly believe women are most beautiful when they are comfortable. Fashion has too often used the female body as an object, a surface for effect. That is not respectful – and it is not feminist. I try on every single piece myself. I move in it, I sit, I walk. If it doesn’t feel right, we change it. Clothes should accompany women, not restrict them.

LM: Of course. When you design for women but don’t wear the clothes yourself, something is missing. This is not about being against men – it’s about lived experience. You cannot fully understand what it means to inhabit a female body if you’ve never done so. There are incredible female pioneers – Elsa Schiaparelli, Sonia Rykiel – who understood that femininity and power are not opposites. Today, too often, women are told they must become more masculine to be taken seriously. That misunderstands power entirely.

LM: Female power is not about erasing softness. It is about owning it. You can be strong, ambitious, intellectual – and still deeply feminine. Equality alone is not an ambitious goal. Women bring something else into the world. A powerful wardrobe allows you to enter the world fully present. When you don’t have to think about how you look or whether you feel comfortable, your energy goes elsewhere – towards creation, leadership, change. I’ve had women cry in my atelier. They see themselves differently for the first time. Clothing can be therapeutic. It can truly change how you move through life.

LM: She was incredibly elegant. She had a room in her Paris apartment filled with clothes—a private archive. Sometimes she would take me inside and show me the linings, the lace, the finishing. She treated her garments like works of art. That sense of reverence stayed with me. Today, it is rare to feel that intimacy with clothing. I wanted to bring it back—to create pieces that are cherished, not consumed.

LM: Know-how is everything. Creativity and craftsmanship are what make us human. Once they disappear, they cannot be recreated – not even with unlimited money. Look at the sculptures in the Louvre. No one could make them today. Creating beauty is an act of resistance. Supporting artisans, preserving techniques – this is cultural work. And it matters deeply.

Jonathan Saunders: It’s a love brand. I think a lot of people hold a real place in their heart for them  from when it was founded. A lot of my girlfriends have always bought things from them and what I love about the brand is that it has always pushed clothing with a fashion point of view and a unique perspective, but at a price point that makes it accessible to a wider audience, while still offering enough value and quality to make it something you want to keep forever. It was an interesting idea to be able to create a new interpretation for the brand. It was a big change, moving to Sweden, and I still have my apartment in New York, so I go back and forth. But now I live in Sweden pretty much full-time. It’s really nice so different from New York, almost the opposite in so many ways. I really like the people I work with; it’s a really nice team. And I’ve been able to work in a way that is actually very similar to how I work within luxury. I think that was the point: even though the audience is broader and wider, I still believe we should approach design in an authentic way, from an authentic viewpoint and starting point. Of course the audience is broader, but still with that same creative way of approaching design and ideas.

I’ve definitely got some experience. What’s important is that I’ve worked for a lot of brands. I had my own line, but while I was building my own brand, I also worked as a consultant for many others. I was able to start seeing and understanding, from different brands’ viewpoints, how different brands do things.

I’ve learned that you really have to understand and respect what is unique about a brand. Every brand you go to is about the brand, it’s not about me bringing in my aesthetic necessarily. It’s about how I can use my design taste, skill, or whatever it is, and interpret it in the right way for that brand. & Other Stories is a brand where colour, print, and expressive design feel believable, and that’s something I’ve always focused on in my own work. So there was definitely an affinity in that way. But there’s also a lot of really great daywear within the brand’s collections that goes beyond that, and it has enabled me to learn a lot more about clothes for much more everyday use, which has been great.

I think expressive design can take many forms. We have a lot of minimalism in the industry right now, and a lot of quiet luxury, and I feel there is space for a much more creative expression within fashion, especially at this price point. The modern way to do that has to align with our lifestyle, because our lifestyle is so transient and changeable. I think customers need more from their clothes. So versatility, as well as originality, is important. I’d say that’s the modern interpretation of expressiveness or expression: people want to say who they are through clothing, but they don’t want the clothing to wear them.

Value. I think the customer expects more. People are jaded by the ridiculous prices of luxury, and I feel that no matter what price point a product sits at, the most important thing is creating value. So the way I work with the teams is really to push for the best possible quality we can achieve with the best materials, the best finishing, and real time and consideration spent on making something special.

I think that, in that moment especially in London people wanted to get dressed up. Youth culture wanted to feel dressed, wanted to express themselves, wanted to feel strong and powerful, and so they became inventive. They mixed and matched different things to make the overall expression feel strong and powerful. There was still this feminine, decorated kind of elegance, but with an almost punk attitude when it came to colour mixes, strong shoulders, exaggerated volume that kind of moment in time I really love. I’m a kid of the ’90s, so that super-expressive ’80s energy moving into the minimalist, everyday ’90s, and the combination of those two things together, feels super exciting to me.

It still speaks to so many people. I think people are nostalgic for a moment in time when youth culture used what they had to express themselves. It was also a time when there was less visual stimulation from the outside, so people looked more to themselves and their own peer groups. They were affected less by the globalization of the world that we live in today. The world we live in now is fascinating and interesting, and everything is great, but sometimes it’s good to look to the past in a nostalgic way to understand how, in a simpler time, creativity flourished.

I love it. I think humility is an important skill to have as a creative, especially when you’re a man designing womenswear. I learn so much from the people who wear the clothes. I don’t think it needs to have a gender associated with it, but in terms of the feminine expression of the brand, I love seeing how it gets interpreted in different ways. Because I’ve always designed a lot of separates knitwear is something I really love working with, as are tailoring, structured pieces, and jackets when you design separates, they’re open to interpretation. People wear them in different ways, and I love that. I get inspired by it.

I always ask the models, the talent, or whoever we’re working with how they feel in the clothes. Would they wear this? Does it feel believable for them? And often, whatever those people say is inspiring for me, because I learn how people can use a collection to express their own personality and style.

Of course, within campaigns, we have a vision, an idea, and a concept. But I always love that freedom of expression the ability to wear it in different ways. The whole thing is always teamwork; it always has been and always will be. Empowering the people I work with other creatives to interpret things in their own way or contribute to the creative vision of the brand is super important. Teamwork makes the best work.

From the perspective of the model, the person creating the image, the photographer, the stylist, everyone has an idea. And I think as long as you have clarity of vision for the overall collection and concept, people understand that vision and can interpret it in their own way, put their own spin on it, and make their contribution.

I think it’s about uniqueness, about making some brave choices. It’s very easy to fall into a minimalist expression because it feels like it’s for everybody, but by making brave choices through colour, fabrication, print, and textiles, you’re bringing something unique. In a saturated world of stuff, maybe that’s a nice way to work. It’s unusual for a broader-audience brand to make such brave choices when it comes to colour and textile design, and so we’re trying something out. Hopefully it works.

My tutor, Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martins, always taught me: find what you do well, find what you can execute that feels original and unique to you, and do it to the nth degree. Do it until it’s maxed out. It was interesting because I studied print and textiles, and I didn’t really wear print and textiles. It was never really my thing. I loved colour maybe not in a way you can see today but at the time I was into Margiela and Helmut Lang, and quite minimalist but sexy clothing. Then gradually, as I started to learn the skill, optimism, colour, and femininity became my strength. I guess it’s about embracing that and understanding how you get good at a craft, a specific skill set and doing it well, rather than trying to be all things to all people.

Red. I don’t know, I think because we’re living in a complex world right now, everybody needs strength and a dynamic, empowering feeling to support them, and I feel like red symbolizes that. Spicy, convincing, strong, that’s the colour that stands out to me right now.

I think it’s about balancing craftsmanship and authenticity with a celebration of everyday life.