That very sweater served as a touchpoint for J.Crew’s new collaboration with Eckhaus Latta, the label that Latta oversees alongside her design partner, Mike Eckhaus (whose own first memory of the brand is of wearing the same J.Crew sweater vest as a classmate for their middle school book report on The Catcher in the Rye). Since founding Eckhaus Latta 15 years ago, they’ve built a mystique as scrappy downtown darlings specializing in a gritty, modern version of American sportswear, all earthy funk and sleek subversion.
If the linkup seems unexpected, well—that’s the whole point. “We really celebrate the everyday,” says Olympia Gayot, J.Crew’s creative director and head of womenswear, “and then they come and add a twist, a tension. That’s very exciting for us.”
How else could J.Crew give us a chunky-knit skirt suit in a flecked acid yellow, like some wayward cousin of Chanel? (Latta says she was looking for “gross” colors, including a “puke green.”) Elsewhere, there’s a riff on the ladylike twinset, in striped cashmere, frisky in its cropped proportions; and classic oxford shirts, now slashed up the back, featuring a deep, overlapping vent.
“Some things felt very us, others felt very J.Crew,” Latta says of working together. “If it was one or the other, we’d get rid of it or push it toward the middle.
Nothing that’s in here feels preposterous to me. There’s a person for all of it.”
“There’s this foundation with Eckhaus Latta of denim, jersey, and knitwear,” Eckhaus says. “And I could say the same of J.Crew—they’re just realized differently.”
While he and Latta have made their name with wide-cut denim dyed in murky shades; shaggy, sculptural knits; and shirting with sexy-strange cutouts, in recent years their work has gained a finesse that comes with experience, and now includes handsome leathers and more streamlined silhouettes. Much like J.Crew’s elevated staples, these are real clothes worn by real people in their real lives—though from the start, Eckhaus Latta has attracted a coterie of creative types (e.g., indie actors, gallerists) who often sit in their fashion shows’ front row and, occasionally, are persuaded to walk their runway.
“What defines their brand is not only what they design, but the world that they build around it,” observes Gayot, recalling a show where the casting director held a model’s baby as she traipsed the catwalk, or the time a gaggle of friends provided full-throated musical accompaniment. “It’s not pretentious—it’s familial, it’s beautiful, it’s downtown,” she continues.
“It’s like all of those things that you look at as an outsider, and you’re like, ‘I want to be part of that world.’ ”
Their 27-piece collaboration, which includes men’s, women’s, and children’s pieces, comes on the heels of a smaller project earlier this year in which Eckhaus Latta reimagined J.Crew’s signature roll-neck sweater, rendering it in earth-toned patches. The entire run sold out in a few hours.
“We’re not a hype brand—we’re not used to putting something out and having it be gone,” Eckhaus says. “But selling out that quickly was really fulfilling, and being able to expand that into a full collection feels exciting in a whole different way.”
A lot of the work happened at J.Crew headquarters in downtown Manhattan, amid mood boards pinned with old campaign images, fabric swatches, and new sketches. “There’s just so much inspiration,” Eckhaus says of mining the J.Crew archives. “There’s this wealth of things to explore and riff off of, and then subvert and digest and play with in a way that feels us.”
“We had to keep asking, Does this still speak to the J.Crew customer?” Eckhaus continues. “How do you push the silhouette without it feeling alienating?
How do you make it feel cool and very now while still being wearable?” Funnily enough, the collection as a whole embodies what Latta first felt all those years ago while flipping through the pages of a J.Crew catalog—an American perspective that isn’t singular, but expansive, that somehow captures something ineffable about our kaleidoscopic sense of self.