Stephanie Woo, the head of Ms. Lam Montessori School, joins our Zoom dressed in a tightly pleated salmon button-up shirt.
Though she’s calling in from Taiwan just after midnight, Woo looks ready for a full day at one of her five campuses across Brooklyn: all of the staffers at Ms. Lam wear colorful micropleated dresses and smocks that bear a striking resemblance to Pleats Please, Issey Miyake’s beloved line of lightweight separates in every color under the sun.
Yesterday, a post on the Williamsburg neighborhood subreddit went viral on Reddit—and later on X—about the ultra-stylish teachers at Ms. Lam. “[D]oes anyone know what the deal is Ms Lam Montessori…and why all their employees wear Issey Miyake (a very expensive and distinct Japanese designer) every day?” a user posted. “It’s true,” another person wrote on X. “These Brooklyn teachers are seriously dripped out in Issey Miyake.”
But for those who thought Ms. Lam staffers can write off designer clothing as a work expense, think again.
“Of course price is a huge concern, but [Issey Miyake] is also a little too fashionable for what we’re trying to do,” Woo says. “We work with children every day, so we’re looking for something that’s the right silhouette—not something that flows around a lot—the right length, the right fit.
We actually find that this brand works way better.”
Rather than outfitting all of her staffers in Pleats Please as the internet had hoped, Woo returns from her trips to Taiwan with a haul of Yamasaki Takashi, a Harajuku brand founded on bringing origami principles to clothing. The Yamasaki Takashi pieces are especially well-suited to working with toddlers (Woo notes that only staffers who wear a uniform are those who work with children under six).
“It washes really, really well,” she says. “You can wash it 365 times and it comes out looking the same.”
There is a pedagogical explanation for the stylish uniforms, though. “Between zero and six, children have what we call the absorbent mind, where they’re just effortlessly absorbing everything in the environment,” Woo explains.
“Children love beautiful things just like adults do. So because we know that children naturally love beautiful things, we actually create an environment that is very uplifting, very comfortable, very beautiful—lots of wood, lots of greenery—because children love that and we want to nurture that in them.
They can grow up in a beautiful place and know that those things are important. It just becomes a part of them.”
Woo’s mother, Ms. Lam, introduced the uniforms to her schools in Taiwan 12 years ago.
“In Taiwan, we actually have a very systematic way of doing it. Our lead teachers wear a certain uniform, our assistant teachers wear a different uniform, our front desk admin wear something else,” she explains.
Woo brought the practice to the Brooklyn schools eight years ago, where she noticed that teachers weren’t as keen to restrict their wardrobe to one single color. “I know that nobody wants to wear a uniform.
I mean, we’re New Yorkers,” she says. Instead, Woo lets her staffers pick from a wide variety.
“I gave a lot more room to choose because I know our culture.”
That’s not to say that Issey Miyake is unwelcome in Ms. Lam school. One of Woo’s teachers, a former model, asked for permission to wear her own Pleats Please collection. Now, as the teacher puts it, “I’m changing diapers, wearing my Issey.”