Since she launched her brand in 2012, the New York-based designer Rosie Assoulin has become known for bold statements of color and silhouette. Her eponymous line features Instagram-ready dresses in electric hues, skirts in irreverent prints, sculptural pants and button-up vests with floor-skimming capes. With it, Assoulin has built up a following of loyal customers who turn to her for big occasions — weddings, black-tie parties or any other life event that might call for a little drama.
So it feels like a departure that for her latest venture, the designer is embracing the quiet moments of the everyday. This week, along with her husband and the brand’s C.E.O., Max, Assoulin launches By Any Other Name, a stand-alone clothing brand entirely separate from the main Rosie Assoulin line. The debut 15-piece collection, which will be sold at retailers including Saks, Moda Operandi and Nordstrom, features a ribbed cotton blazer dress, an oversized boat-neck top, flared cotton pants and a stretch-waist dress in an eco-linen, which — with a mix of linen, viscose and elastane — makes it good for travel.
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Designers often talk about the need for uniform dressing — the kind of clothes that aim to solve a problem, or at least make it simpler to get dressed in the morning. But so often, and perhaps because of the influence of the former Celine designer Phoebe Philo, uniform dressing often boils down to white, collarless shirts, black pants, navy sweaters. By Any Other Name is not that. But it is, Assoulin hopes, what women will come to see as a new kind of uniform: Pieces that feel so fuss-free that you don’t have to think too much about what to wear.
In all, the pieces are decidedly more casual than Rosie Assoulin and, at $595 to $1,295, they clock in at a slightly lower price point. But this is not, as Max emphasizes, “Rosie Assoulin Light.” They are the kinds of pieces you’d want to wear to work or while running errands on a warm day — and then on to a casual dinner with friends. “Our collection and our customer is very attracted to the celebratory elements, they call it ‘occasion wear,’ and the reality is that there is also this other part of life that needs and deserves to be celebrated in its own way,” Assoulin says.
Assoulin conceived of the idea for By Any Other Name in the early days of her main brand, which she will continue to operate in parallel, but says she always imagined it as a project grounded in anonymity. Originally, she didn’t even want to put her name on it. This is in part because so many brands, she feels, are designer-lead — so focused around the person behind them and not the customer they’re trying to serve. With By Any Other Name, she seeks to change all that, and help her shopper dress for whatever she needs to accomplish in her day. “I have an aversion to ‘corporate wear’ or ‘mommy wear,’” Assoulin says, referencing different stereotypes of dressing for a specific environment. “My identity is spread out among lots of these different things, and I don’t know I can reach into my magic suitcase and change every time I’m one of those things. We are wearing many hats, and I would like to be able to wake up and feel like I can get through my day without any change whatsoever.”
Because they are both sprung from the same mind, there are similarities — or design “whispers,” as she calls them — between Rosie Assoulin and By Any Other Name: silhouettes, colors, even a knotted detail that shows up on the lapel of a blazer. While she hopes to satisfy a need for her existing customer, Assoulin hopes to attract new ones, too. “We love to be brought into people’s celebrations, weddings, but not everyone has that all the time,” she says. “Hopefully this is going to reach her, and she doesn’t have to feel as self-conscious about it.”
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