Here’s a name we haven’t heard in a minute: Sander Lak. The Dutch designer of Sies Marjan, a New York label that burned bright during its brief existence in the late 2010s, is reemerging with an eponymous collection grounded in menswear but designed for all. He’s launching it in Paris later this month.
“It’s small, but big,” Lak said over herbal tea at the Beekman Hotel, displaying his trademark contemplative nature. “For me, it’s a huge thing. It’s my name, it’s my company. It’s not a relaunch, but it is something new, something on my own terms. I’m not allowed to say scared; I’m only allowed to say excited, but it is a little bit scary.”
Lak’s star rose quickly at Sies Marjan, where he went from a virtual unknown at launch in 2016, when he was backed by Nancy and Howard Marks, to the CFDA’s Emerging Designer Winner in 2018. He developed a reputation for his vibrant color palette and the verve with which he mixed and matched pattern and texture, tendencies he nurtured while working in Dries Van Noten’s Antwerp studio, and his “grunge peacock” aesthetic was embraced by stars from Zoe Kravitz and Zendaya to Glenn Close, all of whom wore his designs on the red carpet. Still, the label was shuttered in 2020, a victim of the Covid pandemic.
Lak spent years laying low, focused on projects outside of fashion, including a graphic novel and screenplay. He counts himself a true movie buff, with favorites like Eugene Kotlyarenko’s The Code, Juho Kuosmanen’s Compartment Number 6, and Woody Allen’s Match Point, but he couldn’t quite turn the page completely. After publishing a book of his Sies Marjan work with Rizzoli in 2023, he started developing his new brand.
Sanderlak, as he’s named it, is a conceptual label rooted in what Lak describes as his nomadic childhood. “My upbringing was extremely transient,” he says, “I lived all over the world, and applying that same way of thinking to creating makes a lot of sense to me.” The result will be at least two, possibly more, collections a year of “really wearable clothes—shirts, pants, jackets, coats, a little bit of tailoring,” that are all inspired by a specific place—it could be a city, it could be an entire country—of Lak’s choosing.
“The original idea was to do a company without any real, actual roots, but the logistics of that were impossible,” he laughs. “What I will be doing is looking at what the textures are, what the colors are of a place, and that will be shaping what the clothes will be.” The concept goes beyond local inspirations; he’s set himself some ground rules, which include sourcing material and vintage garments only from the location of his focus, organizing collaborations and capsule collections with companies native to that place, and booking local photographers and models for shoots.
“Creativity happens from limitation. I’ve worked for amazing people and I’ve had freedom, but you can get a little bit lazy with the idea that anything is possible. I like the idea of parameters. I feel the work comes out in really surprising ways because I keep pushing myself.”
Backed by angel investors, Lak has declined to share the region he’s leaning into for launch, preferring to save that information for his Paris debut, but one thing is for certain: he won’t be moving on every season. He’ll “stay” a year in a place, maybe more. “I like the idea of continuing a conversation, instead of talking about Picasso one day and, I don’t know, Greece the next. I find that really disconnected. I like it when an artist works on something and perfects it and goes deeper into it, and then maybe goes elsewhere. This exploration, this deeper search for things, is something I was really hungry for.”
Another lure: “I wanted to go a little bit lower in price point. What I did before was a little higher end, made in Italy and New York.” Most of Sanderlak will be made in Portugal. “There’s not really a category, because it’s not contemporary, it’s not luxury designer, it’s this in-between thing, which is also what I am as a customer,” he says. “I wanted to connect it to how I spend my money and what my value pattern is.”
As for that screenplay? “I do everything according to my gut. We had a director attached and we were starting casting, but my gut was just saying, ‘hold on a second.’ The movie will happen at a later date. This is the right time for me to do this. I’m on the fashion train now.”
