Most fashion labels sketch in one country, cut in another and ship from a third, stitching their reputation together across a supply chain they do not own. Lafayette 148 New York took the opposite bet. Founded in 1996 by Deirdre Quinn and the manufacturing duo Shun Yen Siu and Ida Siu, the company set out to keep concept, design and production in the same hands - and it still does. The result is a rarity: a genuinely vertically integrated luxury womenswear house, designing in a converted loft at the Brooklyn Navy Yard and making in its own atelier in Shantou, China.
The name is not a fashion flourish. It is an address. The three founders opened on a single floor at 148 Lafayette Street, in the SoHo neighborhood of New York, and named the company after the door they walked through each morning. Nearly three decades on, that literalism has become the brand's argument: proximity to the work is proximity to quality.
What the company actually does
Lafayette 148 New York designs, manufactures, markets, sells and fulfills its own luxury womenswear. The catalog runs from professional suiting and tailored jackets to dresses, blouses, denim, cashmere knitwear and elevated essentials, extended by leather handbags, scarves, winter accessories and, since 2020, footwear produced in Spain with Italian materials. What distinguishes the assortment is not any single garment but the fact that one company controls every step behind it - the pattern room, the fabric sourcing, the sewing floor and the shipping box.
That control is what lets the brand offer things its peers struggle to: reliable fit across petite, missy and plus ranges; made-to-order and custom sizing; and the ability to change direction quickly. When the pandemic closed New York in 2020, Lafayette 148 did not wait for a plan - it partnered with the Brooklyn Navy Yard and Crye Precision and turned its atelier over to sewing surgical gowns for hospitals. A house that owns its factory can retool in a week.