Last summer, pop star Addison Rae stepped onstage at Wembley Stadium to open for Lana Del Rey — the former’s biggest show to date — wearing a custom striped Lucila Safdie set, matched by her dancers.
Rae joins a legion of internet It-girls, from Alex Consani to Rachel Sennott, who are fans of the brand and who embody the distinctly Safdie archetype: Tumblr-raised, steeped in Sofia Coppola’s aesthetic, oscillating between glamor and melancholy. That sensibility materializes into Peter Pan-collared tops, micro-shorts, frilly skirts, cutout neon bodysuits, polo tops with sculpted puff sleeves, headbands, and knee-high stockings. Priced north of £30 for accessories, up to the mid-hundreds range for dresses, the label occupies an accessible premium space within the contemporary designer market. This weekend, Lucila Safdie returns to the official London Fashion Week schedule for her second presentation, after debuting last season.
While synonymous with internet girlies, it’s through real-life community that Safdie has scaled her brand. Many of London’s young designers have prioritized expensive runway shows to generate brand buzz, but Safdie opted to build a grassroots community of brand fans via her East London cinema clubs, where she screens women-directed works that shape each collection, from Girls of the Night by Kinuyo Tanaka to Cléo from 5 to 7 by Agnès Varda, as well as intimate studio pop-ups and brand dinners.
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The strategy is paying off. Direct-to-consumer (DTC) sales account for 75% of revenue, while the remaining 25% is generated through wholesale. The brand has seen sales rise more than 50% year-on-year, alongside growing international visibility and an expanding retail footprint: the label now works with 10 retail partners across Australia, China, Japan, the US, Georgia, and South Korea. Including strategic sponsorship support, overall revenue doubled year-on-year from 2023 to 2025, and production volumes are set to rise by nearly 80% next season, Safdie says, to meet escalating demand.
“Our most recent London presentation, supported by Nike and held at the Argentine embassy, reflected both our international momentum and the backing we are receiving from Argentina as we expand abroad,” she adds. But as growth accelerates, can Safdie’s tightly controlled world expand without losing the very intimacy that gave it power.
How not to be a one-hit wonder
Safdie graduated from Central Saint Martins (CSM) during Covid, without access to studios, fabric stores, or a final show. “When I graduated, I felt quite empty. I had moved to another continent, did all that effort, and then it was the end of university,” she says. Her brand emerged from a desire to create a collection she was genuinely excited about, rather than something shaped by circumstance. “My final collection didn’t feel like me. I really wanted to vindicate myself, and that’s where everything came from.”
Safdie’s first collection, developed in 2021 while awaiting her Spanish passport, established the codes of her universe, think: schoolgirl silhouettes, diaristic references to Coppola’s short film Lick the Star, and the soft-focus eroticism of early 2010s American Apparel. But it was a single product — the now-signature ruffled Peachy shorts — that accelerated the brand’s visibility.
The micro-style, trimmed with frills along the back, quickly found its way onto creator Devon Lee Carlson and rap artist Sexy Redd at Coachella, before subsequently selling out on the brand’s site. But virality presents its own crossroads. Safdie could have doubled down on the shorts, scaled production, and chased the surge in demand. Instead, she chose to treat the momentum as a platform rather than a formula. “At that point, I had the choice of either making loads of those shorts and trying to make money, or using the chance to build a brand,” she says. “I studied design — that’s what I love doing — so I was like, ‘OK, I have a platform now that I can grow and make what I want.’”
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That decision has shaped the label’s trajectory. Rather than allowing a single hero product to dominate, Safdie expanded the narrative across collections, pushing further into tailoring and Old Hollywood references. Notably, she initially removed the Peachy shorts in her second collection, before reintroducing updated versions as part of a broader balancing act. The tension between maintaining recognizable signatures and demonstrating evolution remains central to her strategy.
“It’s been a journey of pushing myself creatively — in pattern-cutting, in the pieces I want to make,” she says. Today, the brand’s revenue base is more diversified. Headbands, bikinis, shorts and polos form the commercial backbone, functioning as accessible entry points into the Safdie world. “The polos have been super successful,” Safdie notes, attributing their performance to their wearability and price positioning.
The result is a clearer product ladder. Entry-level pieces allow customers to “buy into the brand immediately”, while more directional runway looks reinforce the fantasy and press narrative. For Safdie, the challenge is ongoing: retaining the recognizability that made the Peachy shorts a breakout hit, without becoming defined by them.
Turning community into commerce
Safdie’s most distinctive growth lever is what she builds around the clothes. In an era when many young brands rely heavily on digital advertising and influencer seeding, Safdie has prioritized IRL experiences. Physical gatherings allow her to collapse the distance between herself and her consumers, turning what might otherwise be a passive online audience into an active network.
I first met the designer at one such dinner in 2024. She had hand-selected a book for every guest — mine was The Virgin Suicides — and I have since attended one of her screenings, where the audience itself felt part of the mise-en-scène. “When we do a pop-up or a film club and we see girls walking down the street, we’re like, ‘OK, they’re coming to the pop-up.’ You immediately know. It’s not even a question mark,” she says.
The brand’s protagonist is drawn from Safdie herself, plus the women around her — a composite of personal references and lived experience. “It’s intuitive. That’s why I don’t do menswear because I wouldn’t know from which place to make it,” she says. The instinct-led approach is commercially meaningful: it creates a customer who sees herself reflected in the brand, and a brand that, in turn, understands her intimately. Crucially, community-building was never conceived as a strategy. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m going to make the film club for marketing.’ It was more like, ‘I want to decide which movies I want to watch on the big screen and invite all the girls that like the brand.’”
The next phase is geographic. With roughly 65% of demand coming from the US, around 20% from Asia, and the remainder from Europe, Safdie is looking to export the IRL model. “I really want to do pop-ups in the US and Asia. I really want to travel as well. Most of the stuff I do is in London, so I’d love to do things around the world,” she says. Rather than approaching international expansion as a wholesale push alone, she frames it as cultural replication, recreating the intimacy of her East London screenings and studio gatherings in cities where her online audience is already concentrated.
Runway ambitions are similarly measured. “I would love to do a fashion show at some point. I’m not saying presentations forever, but I feel like right now, at the stage my brand is at, it feels more fun,” she says.
In a market saturated with brands chasing algorithmic growth, Safdie’s approach feels almost countercultural: build the world, gather the people, and let the sales follow.
