During
the early days of the pandemic, designer
Olympia Le-Tan missed traveling. Or
rather, she missed hotels.
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“I just wanted pajamas
and nice sheets and table settings and robes,” she said. “The stuff you steal
from a hotel. At least, the stuff you would want to steal.”
And that is how
she came up with her new line,
Hotel Olympia, which was be introduced online
this month. Le-Tan’s previous namesake line was known for its “book bags,”
minaudières embroidered with the cover of “Lolita” or “Valley of the Dolls.”
“If it’s
something you have at a hotel, I can make it,” Le-Tan said. “It’s like hotel
life without the hotel, or an imaginary hotel, or what I would do if I had a
hotel.”
The Hotel Olympia
line will focus on home goods: linen tablecloths and napkins printed with full
English breakfasts and cakes; custom embroidered pillows with the letters of
the alphabet; a ceramic ashtray; an evening bag in the shape of a luggage tag.
Prices will start
at $10 for a button pack and go up. “It’s not completely cheap,” Le-Tan, 44,
said over cookies in her New York apartment.
Charvet slippers
will likely be the most expensive, she said, referring to embroidered suede
slippers in hot pink and Kelly green made for her by the vaunted French
menswear house and which cost $950. The line’s embroidery is done by
Maximiliano Modesti, who is French and Italian and runs an embroidery and
textile company in Mumbai that works with such fashion houses as Hermès,
Saint Laurent, and Dior.
The problem with
luxury hotels these days is that they’re too minimal, Le-Tan said. “I was
Googling hotel rooms, and the nicest ones are gray or beige. I want something
more quirky.”
Her favorite
hotels are the kind where no room looks the same as another and may be filled
with piles of books or a claw-foot bathtub next to the bed. She likes to stay
at the
Portobello Hotel in London, Hôtel Amour or Château Voltaire or Le
Bristol in Paris, and the Carlyle in New York.
When she was a
child growing up in Paris, her father, artist Pierre Le-Tan, had a contract to
illustrate travel stories for a magazine with the stipulation that he could
take his family along with him.
“There is a granny
aspect to my aesthetic,” said Le-Tan, whose grandmother taught her to sew and
embroider. Her home has collections of objects that are dear to her, including
a wall behind the kitchen table that’s hung with many of her father’s
illustrations. In her living room there are drawings by artist Aurel Schmidt,
who drew the crossed legs logo for Hotel Olympia. In her bedroom is a vinyl
record by the Ronettes signed by Ronnie Spector.
In the late
1990s, when Le-Tan was 19, she worked as an intern in the design department at
the
Chanel studio. “While I was there picking up scraps of fabric, I would try
to make something for myself,” she said.
While shopping at
Colette, the influential Parisian concept store (it closed in late 2017),
Le-Tan carried a tote bag she’d embroidered. One of the store’s owners ordered
some for the shop, and soon she had orders from Isetan in Tokyo and Browns in
London.
“It led to a
small enterprise making these bags,” she said.
She started
taking the bag business more seriously in 2009 with her book bags, and she
introduced clothes — Spector played a runway show — in 2012. She left that
clothing business about five years later. “Once I decided I was leaving, a
present from the sky came in the form of a job offer from Marc Jacobs,” she said.
She moved to New
York in 2018 to join the design team of the designer’s diffusion line called
the
Marc Jacobs. During the pandemic, the business shifted, but she decided to
stay in New York.
That’s when the
idea for Hotel Olympia began to take form. Half of her time is spent on Hotel
Olympia, and the other half is devoted to projects for other brands, like a
collection she did for Maison Kitsuné earlier this winter.
Hotel Olympia
will be sold mostly via her website.
“When I say I don’t want
to do much wholesale, what I actually want is to do traveling pop-ups in actual
hotels, like set up a mini-Hotel Olympia where everything you see is for sale
in a suite at, for example, the Bristol,” she said, and added, “if they’ll have
me.”
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