Working From Home? LessLess Designs Robes That Makes You Feel “Comfortable, Safe, and Sexy”
Comfort—fashion’s current byword—doesn’t preclude style, but it’s tricky to strike the right balance between the two in these working-from-home days. Enter LessLess, a one-year-old brand based on the simple robe silhouette, founded by the husband and wife team of Alya and Tim Gonta. The pair met while working in television in their native Kiev, and eloped in California. They operate between the U.S. and Ukraine.
Alya, responsible for design, studied marketing and fashion and worked in media before launching LessLess. The brand name, she explains, refers to the less-is-more idea. “For us,” the designer says, “it’s about conscious consumption; it’s about your inner feeling of yourself. It’s not necessary to buy a lot; you can buy one piece and and style it in many different ways.”
A materials obsessive interested in sustainability, Alya uses only natural materials like linen and silk that she makes into robes and wrap dresses that can be styled to read as sensual, sporty, or sophisticated. “The thing is, you can never be under- or overdressed whenever you’re wearing a LessLess piece,” says Alya. “We strive to strike the perfect a.m.-to-p.m. ratio.”
Depending on the style, about eight to 15 hours of handwork goes into each LessLess garment. While Alya’s overarching inspiration is “the dressing-gown aesthetics of golden-era Hollywood,” each collection begins with research and a mood board of images pulled from disparate sources. In addition, Alya creates “art drop” capsules. The graphic geometrics of the work of the Swiss artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp, inspired the “After Dada” prints used on this season’s reversible silk robes and scarves.
Despite the pandemic, the spring LessLess collection is available online. The Gontas’s continent-hopping has been stalled, however; the couple are holed up at home in Kiev. While it’s too early to gauge how COVID-19 will impact the brand, because of their narrow focus and small size, they have a certain amount of flexibility. They do production in Kiev and have sewers who are ready to work from home. “We are still thinking about [how to handle] this situation,” says Alya. “We’re really happy we have our stock and we can sell through our website.”
