Sylvie Millstein grew up on Chanel. As a teenager in Paris in the 1980s, she would pour over pictures of Inès de la Fressange — then muse to the recently appointed Karl Lagerfeld — adamant that she would someday work for the esteemed fashion house. Following a business degree and a marketing stint at McQueen’s Givenchy, that’s exactly what she did. But you wouldn’t surmise this back story from the clothes she makes today. At Hellessy, the womenswear label she founded ten years ago, Sylvie has established an aesthetic that plays with proportion, centres drama through silhouette, and typically favours a bold palette. At surface level, at least, the handwriting is all hers.
“Working at Chanel was wonderful, my teenage dream,” she relays on a call from Miami. “I was the fashion director for almost a decade. I started as a buyer and was in charge of the Japanese market, so I was based in Tokyo at a time when Japan was really important for Chanel.” Her transition to design was largely a response to new surroundings, having left Tokyo for New York after starting a family. “I was coming out of a long career on the business side and found it was hard to replicate what I had experienced in Japan with Chanel,” she explains. “So I decided to be more creative.”
Hellessy, which takes its name from the first two syllables of the names of her first two sons and her own, initially began taking shape in Sylvie’s apartment, from where the business ran for three years before moving to a studio in Soho. “I’m self-taught, I didn’t go to fashion school, so I had to learn how to drape, sketch, source fabrics… I had to knock on the door of all the factories in the fashion district and beg them to take my designs,” she says. Quickly picked up by New York institution Barneys (RIP), today the label has a glossary of stockists and considers Rihanna, Aubrey Plaza and Joan Smalls fans.
“It’s weird to say it’s been a decade since I launched the brand,” continues Sylvie, “fashion has evolved so much.” Indeed, independent of the pandemic’s effect on young businesses — which left some shuttered and others restructured — the landscape that Hellessy arrived into looks a lot different today, as trends, shopping habits and technology have transformed the way we live and how we get dressed, and the designer is forthcoming about what this means for businesses like hers. “It’s a hard time, right now, to be a small, independent label. It’s a very saturated market, and it’s competitive. Things happening on social media make the game a little trickier too, but we adapt.”
In 2020 Sylvie left New York for Miami, and the city’s influence can be read in the details of the collections (namely the use of neon shades and the playful architecture of recent designs). “Before I moved here, all I knew was South Beach – I thought that was it,” she muses, reflecting on the clichés the area attracts. “But it is where everything is happening.” Hellessy, however, remains wed to New York, while Sylvie’s approach to design is similarly tied to her merchant’s mentality. “When we develop collections, there’s no wastage,” she says. “I hate to develop something that’s not viable for me, just to put it out there with a bang on the runway — that’s not how I think; I always have my customer in mind when I design. Will she love it, wear it, would I wear it?”
Celebrating its tenth anniversary in 2023, the label returns to the NYFW schedule next month for the first time since 2020. “I didn’t think it made sense for a small label like us [to put on a catwalk show], in terms of resources,” Sylvie says, opting instead for intimate salon shows from the studio. The label will show its new AW23 collection on Valentine’s Day, and when i-D speaks to Sylvie, it’s with a calm rationale that she considers what will follow. “I wish I had a ten-year plan, but I take it collection by collection. There is a vague plan, but things are moving so fast right in fashion; my plan right now is New York Fashion Week,” she offers. “But we’re evolving, and we’ve had many lives. Hellessy is ready to enter the next decade.”