Leland Kass

The quiet art of making people want things

There is a particular kind of marketer who understands that luxury is not about volume. It is about precision. Leland Kass has spent an entire career on that thin, expensive line, and has now arrived at the place where the line is drawn most carefully of all: Lafayette 148 New York, where the title reads Chief Marketing Officer and the brief, stripped of its corporate wrapping, is deceptively simple. Make people want the clothes. Then make them feel they belonged in them all along.

Lafayette 148 is not a household name in the way that a sneaker brand is a household name, and that is rather the point. Founded by Deirdre Quinn, it is one of the few luxury fashion houses to keep a vertically integrated atelier close to home, in the Brooklyn Navy Yard, stitching womenswear that runs from petite to plus with a seriousness most brands reserve for the runway alone. It is a house built on craftsmanship, inclusive sizing, and the unfashionable belief that clothes should actually fit. Into this world walks a marketer whose whole resume has been a rehearsal for it.

Consider the itinerary. Kass began in the orbit of Conde Nast, the publishing empire that taught a generation of executives that a magazine was never really selling paper, it was selling a life you had not lived yet. From there the path ran through retail proper at Saks Fifth Avenue, where the customer is not a demographic but a person with a name and a preference for a particular shade of camel. There was Jonathan Adler, the happy-chic design house that proved good taste could also be funny. And then the two roles that sharpened everything.

At rag & bone, where Kass served as Vice President of Consumer and Digital Marketing beginning in 2017, the challenge was denim and the downtown cool that surrounds it, sold to a customer who lives at least half their life on a screen. This was the internet era of luxury, where a brand had to be both effortlessly aloof and available for purchase at two in the morning. Kass learned the choreography of that contradiction: how to be desirable and clickable at the same time.

Then came Maria Tash, the fine jewelry and piercing house that turned the humble ear into a canvas for tiny, glittering ambition. As Senior Vice President of Marketing and PR, Kass was handed the most primal category of all. Nobody needs a diamond in their helix. The entire enterprise runs on desire, on the story a small precious thing tells about the person wearing it. If you can market that, you can market anything. It is the closest thing in commerce to selling pure feeling.

By 2024, Kass had done what only the genuinely confident do in the middle of a good career: stepped out of it. LKK Advisory was born, an independent consultancy through which Kass advised luxury and consumer brands from the outside, free of the politics of any single boardroom. It is a move that usually signals one of two things, either a graceful exit or a deliberate breath before the next big thing. In this case it was the breath.

Because the next big thing was the C-suite again, this time as CMO of Lafayette 148 New York, leading global marketing, e-commerce, and customer engagement across every channel. The round trip, out to advise and back in to build, is rarer than it sounds. Most senior marketers, once they leave for the freedom of consulting, do not come back to the trenches. Kass did, which tells you something. Some people like the view from the mountaintop. Others miss the climb.

What connects Conde Nast, Saks, rag & bone, Maria Tash, and now Lafayette 148 is not a category. It is media, department store, denim, jewelry, and made-to-measure womenswear, five different grammars. What connects them is a single question that Kass seems to carry from job to job like a favorite pen: why would anyone care? It is the only question that matters in luxury, and the hardest to answer honestly. A brand can spend a fortune shouting and still not answer it. A good marketer answers it before spending a dime.

The education underneath all this is quietly telling. An undergraduate degree from Haverford College, one of those small, serious liberal arts places where you learn to read closely and argue in complete sentences, followed by an MBA from Vanderbilt. Liberal arts to business school is a common enough path, but it leaves a mark. It produces the sort of marketer who reaches for a narrative before a spreadsheet, and who suspects, correctly, that the two are not enemies. The spreadsheet tells you whether the story worked. The story is still the thing.

There is a temptation, writing about a marketing executive, to reach for the language of disruption and transformation, the vocabulary that makes every LinkedIn post sound like a manifesto for a war nobody declared. Kass, by all available evidence, is more interested in something older and more difficult: engagement, the actual kind, where a customer opens an email or walks into a boutique and feels, however briefly, understood. That is not a growth hack. It is closer to hospitality, and it does not scale easily, which is exactly why it is worth so much when it works.

At Lafayette 148, the raw material could not be better suited to the marketer. Here is a brand that already does the hard part, the making, in-house and by hand, with a range of sizes that treats real women as the default rather than the exception. It sells luxury that fits, which sounds like a low bar until you notice how few houses clear it. The marketing job, then, is not to invent a story but to tell the true one loudly enough. That is a happier problem than most CMOs are handed. Kass has spent decades learning to solve the harder version, selling desire for things nobody needs. Selling clothes that people genuinely want, and that genuinely fit, ought to feel almost like a holiday.

Whether Kass turns Lafayette 148 into a bigger name or simply a better-told one, the approach will look familiar to anyone who has followed the career. Find the truest thing about the product. Say it with precision. Let the craftsmanship carry the weight the shouting usually has to. And keep asking, boardroom after boardroom, campaign after campaign, that one unglamorous question that separates the marketers who last from the ones who trend. Why would anyone care? For Leland Kass, the answer has always been the whole job.