In a world that tends to reward those doing more, bigger, faster, who aim to offer something for everybody, it’s always nice to see a label focused on doing less, better. There’s a lot to be said for carving out a niche, and it’s certainly working for the up-and-coming Orley. A family business, the label was founded by brothers Alex and Matthew Orley and Samantha Orley (née Florence, now married to Matthew, and sadly unavailable for this discussion). The trio debuted a small selection of Italian-made knitwear in 2012 and have expanded the business quickly and comfortably since, now offering both men’s and, as of Fall 2015, women’s ready-to-wear. Critics have responded as strongly as customers — Orley was shortlisted for this year’s LVMH Prize and nominated for this year’s CFDA Swarovski Award for Menswear. Expect those plaudits to keep rolling in. This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

The label, I don’t think it’s an understatement to say, has grown very quickly. You’re three years old and have already gone from a tightly-focused knitwear collection to womenswear. Was that always the plan, or is it just the way things have worked out?

Alex Orley: We started really small. Every step has just been, like, steps that growth has allowed us to take. We didn’t anticipate that the growth would be as fast as it has happened, because when we started our first year in business, we worked out of Matt and Sam’s apartment. Our first collection was five sweaters and our second collection was eight sweaters. At the time, we felt we were working really hard to develop this really small collection in as high a caliber as possible, but on the inside, it never feels as fast as I think it looks on the outside. You’re chugging away, and you’ve got your head down, and you’re really focused on the task at hand. On the outside, people are like, “Oh!” It seems so immediate but we’re just taking… We’re putting one foot in front of the other with each step.

The growth in the knits allowed us to do a men’s ready-to-wear collection, but that first ready-to-wear collection was as small as the first knit collection, you know? It was a woven shirt in a couple of fabrications and an outerwear piece. The interest in the knits, not just from our male customer base but from a broad spectrum of women, pushed us to take a bigger step than we have before and launch women’s. That’s definitely been our first big jump. The response has been really good, and so I feel like everything we’re doing, we’re trying to do in a really focused way.

Matthew Orley: I would also add that all the steps we are taking are steps we have planned all along. We just have not necessarily realized that we were going to be doing them as soon as we have been. Women’s has always been something, from the beginning, that we had talked about as a long-term goal. We’ve been fortunate enough to be able to do it sooner than we thought.

AO: We’re not doing anything that we don’t want to do. The women’s collection we launched the same way we launched the men’s. It’s a really small collection of knits. Our first men’s collection was five sweaters. Our women’s collection is maybe 14 or 15 knit pieces. We’re doing double-faced knit cashmere skirts. 

MO: I think maybe from the outside it seems like we’re doing things in a much more seamless way than it does to us, because we went back and forth for a long time when we were anticipating doing women’s as to whether or not this was something we had to launch in a much more substantial way or if this was something that we could do on the small scale — which is how we did end up launching it. We had many, many conversations, many arguments.

AO: Matthew would call them conversations and I would call them fights.

MO: We had many, many discussions as to what the right way to do this was, and what would be the most impactful way to move into women’s, because it is so much more competitive and there is so much more noise. Ultimately, we made a decision. We went for it. We decided to do it in on a smaller scale. I think at the end of the day, it was no less impactful and I think that people really responded well to it.

Yeah, it certainly seems like it. When you were starting out, why did you decide to begin with knitwear?

AO: Knits are great category for making a really strong visual statement in a really small collection. With wovens, generally you’re buying fabric and creating a shirt or creating a jacket, but for a small company, for the most part, you’re not actually designing that fabrication. But with knitwear, regardless of what yarn you’re purchasing, you’re designing the fabrications. It’s a much more 360-degree design process. You can tell a much more visual story in knitwear. I also think it’s a much more challenging category, and by launching in knitwear you’re able to differentiate in a much stronger way.

For us, we knew we had limited resources, but we also wanted to do something that felt really impactful and bold and made a strong statement in a really small collection. It was the challenging choice but also the logical choice, if that makes sense.

You’ve developed strong relationships with fabric manufacturers with a ton of history like Loro Piana and Cariaggi. How have those relationships helped you guys grow as brand?

MO: Those are our partners and we’re using their products to make our finished product. They don’t work with everyone. You have to show that you’re producing something that has value and that is of a certain quality. To be able to work with them is great, it’s an honor. They’ve been really great about wanting to work with us and give us their newest and most special product. I think it’s definitely a two-way street.

How much input do you guys get in terms of developing new fabrics?

AO: For the wovens collection now, I would say 80% of the woven fabrications are custom fabrications that we’re designing. We’re working with specialty mills that can do really small fabric runs for us. If you look at our Fall ’14 show, we’re doing custom jacquard fabrications. All the prints we’re developing in the house. All our plaids we’re also developing in house. That’s a really important part of what we do because you can go to these stock service mills and you can get a plaid that might appear in, like, the Ralph Lauren collection, or it might appear in Dsquared2, or wherever. It’s about really working to differentiate ourselves. I think it’s the most important thing, especially in New York where there’s a lot of noise. You have to work twice as hard to say, “This is what we do and this is why it’s special.”

I imagine that the act of designing a plaid, for a lot of people would seem… I bet a lot of people have never thought about it. How do you approach something like that?

AO: We do a ton of research. We have plaid books that are thousands of pages. With all of our designs, it’s definitely a research-based process. Making a plaid is one of those things that was, like… Most of the other students in my class at Parsons were like, “When will I ever use this?” and I was like, “Yes, we’re learning how to make plaids.”

I’ve read you describe the label as a “subversive take on American iconography.” Could you unpack that a bit for me?

MO: That is so Alex. There is no way that those words are coming out of my mouth.

AO: Yeah. It’s funny. We get asked the same questions all the time, so it ends up… We don’t want to be, like, rote when we’re talking about the label. The way you talk about it tends to evolve until you’re like, “What is that? What was the context that I was talking about that?”

Matt and I are from the Midwest and we went to a really classic, Goodbye, Columbus-type of boarding school. I think just coming from a big family and being surrounded by lots of people with their own take on style, I do think we have an American sensibility, but Thom Browne also has an American sensibility and I think our sensibilities are quite different. It’s about taking all of these ideas that Matt and I have and putting them together and trying to create something that isn’t necessarily linear but feels like it tells a familiar story, if that makes sense.

Yeah, totally.

AO: Good, because I never know. You can tell me if it doesn’t.

It makes perfect sense to me. I was just thumbing through your lookbooks today and running that sentence through my mind and thinking it’s actually similar to a lot of my favorite pop music, which is always familiar but a little bit fucked up.

AO: Can I tell you something? We mostly listen to pop music in our office. I wouldn’t mind the comparison to a pop song. Dr. Luke, we love Dr. Luke. Pop and jazz. Jazz, as well, can be very subversive in its take on itself. Matthew is the jazz guy, I’m the pop guy.

We spend so much time on the music for our shows. We end up at the end of every season when we’re putting the shows together, like, deconstructing the aesthetic of that collection so deeply to be, like, “What does this mean in song? How can we convey the meaning of this collection in song?” We argue about that more than we argue about the development of the collection.

What scored the last collection?

AO: Fall ’15, when people were coming in we were playing Led Zeppelin, and then the show was Natalie Prass.

MO: A song called “Reprise” by Natalie Prass. Maybe a month before the show we heard the song and were like, “Oh my god, this is the song.”

AO: It’s like really soulful, updated take on Dusty Springfield. Really soulful, has a bit of country to it, but is also like really slow and has these really amazing horns. We played an extended version of that. Then, after the models had finished their walk and then came out to hold positions, we were playing, I believe it was Dizzy—

MO: Miles.

AO: I thought it was Dizzy Gillespie.

MO: No, it was Miles Davis.

AO: Spring ’15, we played The Sonics, “Have Love Will Travel.” Spring ’15 was like a little bit more raucous and a bit more lighthearted, so it was like The Zombies and that era of music.

How did the Fall music match up with the collection?

MO: The thing about the specific Natalie Prass song that we used was that it really feels like you’re being told a story. It’s this mournful story that’s unfolding but also getting bigger and reaches this apex with this massive horn section. It’s, like, this triumphant sadness. There’s a lot of tension to it. It’s like this beautiful tension that stretches through it.

AO: I think Fall ’15 was our biggest step with the women’s, and also we were telling a different story than we had been telling for the past few seasons in the men’s. We had been using, for the last three seasons, heavy psychedelic music, whether it’s contemporary like Atlas Sound or something older. It was always this very youthful, psychedelic sound and we wanted something that was a bit of a pivot from that, a bit more soulful, and maybe a bit more contemplative. And that’s how I’d say that the collection differed from the last collection, too.

A lot of the references that get mentioned in concert with your collections are fairly esoteric. There’s not a lot of brands that will be name dropping like Eliel Saarinen or William Merritt Chase.

MO: [Eliel Saarinen] was the architect of our school.

Yeah, I read that. How do those show up in the clothing?

MO: I think that plays back to the American iconography that you’re talking about. Saarinen is not American, but I think it’s that kind of art and architecture and those classic things that are so heavily tied to that 20th century that play so heavily in to everything as a whole.

AO: For us, it’s about taking these ideas that really feel familiar. I think it’s just as difficult to create something that feels like you’ve engaged with it before as it is to like try and create something that feels totally new. We are starting from scratch and you’re like, “I want to create a familiar feeling,” that’s a challenge. It’s a challenge to say, “How do I immerse myself in this feeling that carries all these connotations with it?” It’s not easy to inject something with these really subtle moments. How do you execute a jacquard that is new, that you’re designing, it’s not taken from somewhere else, but also feels like it’s steeped in this 1950s, retro moment. It’s not easy to do that. For us, it’s about immersing ourselves in those moments as much as possible to create something that actually is new.

I guess it has to work, to some degree, on a subconscious level.

AO: Totally. It has to be, “I think I once saw that in my dad’s closet,” but you haven’t. You have to evoke that emotion and evoke that in that person who’s looking at it.

The brand is priced at a level that is not accessible for a lot of people. That said, the stuff you’re designing is very approachable. It’s refined, but I think that you don’t have to be super into fashion to look at it and appreciate it and want to wear it. Do you have any ambitions to design stuff for a broader audience?

MO: I would rather just, like… I’ve never really been asked that. Are you asking if we’d like to do like an H&M collaboration or something like that?

Not necessarily.

MO: I’ll say this: I think we see that there is a real importance to the growth of the brand at this level. We are constantly looking at how other brands are growing and how other brands are positioning themselves. We have made a very conscious decision to play at this level and to be at this price point. Down the road, when we’re a bigger brand, it’s hard to say what that will look like. I think at the stage that we’re in, there’s an importance to being at the highest level, to having the highest quality product–

AO: I don’t foresee that ever changing. We launched the way we launched for a very specific reason.

MO: Totally, and I’m not implying at all that as a brand gets bigger, the product have less value. That’s not what I’m implying at all.

AO: For us, I would rather speak really well to a niche audience than speak with broad strokes to a large audience. That’s something we talk about all the time.

MO: What you’re saying is that you think the product speaks to a broad audience, it’s just that the price point that’s considered niche.

Right.

AO: I hope so. Right now, I think I would describe us as… niche in distribution. The designers that I really admire are the designers who really feel strongly about who they are and don’t waver. I love Rick Owens. I think Rick Owens is a fantastic designer. What we do is not like Rick Owens at all. I have a deep appreciation for people in design in all mediums who are build out their world completely. We have to do what feels natural to us. We really need to tell our story the way that feels authentic.

Q&A by Adam Wray, Curator of FashionREDEF. You can follow Adam on REDEF and Twitter (@FashionREDEF, @terminal_avenue), or reach him at adam.wray@redefgroup.com