After decades in the business, Nili Lotan still finds excitement in dressing her customer, and herself. The trick is to provide stylish updates to long-standing design language. “I’m really dressing women,” she said at an appointment at her downtown showroom. “I’m not making fashion. It’s really what I feel, what I feel I want to wear and what I feel other women want to wear. So it’s always ever an evolution of the same thing in a way. I can literally take all of this [collection] home.”
Resort sees her lean in on inky navy tones following up on her fall ideas in new fabrications meant for the season. She went gala in fall a bit; here she pulls back to deliver a mix of separates and outerwear. The great trench, short coats, cashmere blend sweaters, standout pants (a house standard) but in cotton, lighter and easily adaptable to her customer’s wardrobe. Denim is skinny. “Don’t throw away your skinny jeans, it’s coming back,” she quipped. She did add a few satin dresses, too, rounding out the assortment of minimalistic pieces.
A second chapter in the collection takes the shapes and goes bolder, reworking it with olive, gray and sand tones, her way to give her customer a range of options for the season. The collection is robust with nearly 200 pieces for her urban cool customer, many of whom have been fans for years. She likes to meet them at her downtown Manhattan store, getting real-time data on what they need and then delivering it each season. “Quiet luxury,” she said with a laugh. “I didn’t invent it but I’m been doing it for over 20 years.”
