Made To Be Lived In

New Orleans designers and vintage curators believe the future of local fashion is found in the sensibilities of the past

by

People & Places

In the modern world of cheaply-made, algorithm-inspired, single-wear trends, there persists a thread of fashion that stitches the past to the future, turning back to what’s almost been forgotten, and re-emerging with the intention of lasting through all that is to come. 

This resurgence reflects a resistance to the relentless, wasteful cycle of the current fashion landscape. People are tired of wearing things that hold no meaning, that have been made to be seen and then instantly disappear. They want something that, spiritually and physically, stands the test of time. 

In New Orleans, a subset of designers, ateliers, and fashion aficionados are resurrecting the spirit of fashion as it used to be, as an art form infused with intentionality, time, and often—grit.  

Design

Nathaniel Adams’s custom clothing shop on Toulouse avoids the dark, hyper-masculine atmosphere of traditional tailoring spaces. Records lay in painted crates and bookshelves stand beneath eclectic artwork. Rich textures rest beside polished tailoring. Nothing feels sterile or overly serious. The space is elegant, slightly indulgent, unmistakably French Quarter. It is clear that what happens in this room doesn’t take place in haste but rather, through careful consideration and thoughtful decision.

On a regular workday, Adams sits at a large cylindrical marble table with his customers, several leather-bound books bearing the name Holland & Sherry open between them. Checkered fabric samples, along with swatches of rustic tobaccos, and an array of blues from navy to azure all vie for their chance to be seen. The materials Adams presents to his clients are light, breathable, and perfect for the New Orleans heat, or perhaps even a South African soirée. This assortment may seem haphazard, but with Adams at the helm, nothing ever is. Everything displayed has reason for being here—every fabric having earned its spot.

What starts as simple chatter about the basics of a jacket fit quickly becomes in-depth conversation about climate, movement, travel, dinners, temperature, time worn, and the difference between something that looks decent at first blush and something that feels alive. Adams lays a cream linen fabric against a dark green silk lining. He holds horn buttons beside those of polished mother-of-pearl. At one point, the spacing of a cuff is discussed as deeply as the drape of a shoulder. Nothing is rushed and nothing is accidental.

Under Adams’s careful craftsmanship, his eye for design, his knowledge of material, and a love for fashion made to stand out, the garment starts to take shape, even before the first stitch has been made.  

The designer is now known for his work as one of New Orleans’s foremost luxury clothiers, a leader in the bespoke suit space. He approaches his designs from the perspective of both a vintage loving dandy and modern fashion intellectual, and has worked in showrooms such as Canali, Doyle Mueser, Against Nature, and Paul Smith and helped found the Secret Empire custom suit company in London. 

But he began his education as a young man, shopping in vintage stores around his home in New York City’s Greenwich Village. “When I was younger, I didn’t have money, but I had time,” he said. “I could go hunt, learn, look, compare, and develop a sense of taste that way.”

Some of his favorite fashion staples, and the ones he seems most fond of to this day, are Old Fred Perry polos, neckties made from Italian silk, and the distinct aesthetic of mid-twenties Brits during the 1960s. For Adams, these pieces hold memories of lives lived richly. 

“There’s real value in that kind of searching,” Adams said. “It teaches you how to see.”

Adams moved to New Orleans a decade ago to launch his own company, drawn to the Quarter’s walkable street culture and aesthetics. He refers to his adopted home as “a city of occasions”—a rather suitable place for a suitmaker. 

This is a city, after all, built around reasons to gather. Mardi Gras balls. Second lines. Easter parades. Dinner parties that stretch into the early morning. Events where showing up looking anything less than your best simply doesn’t cut it. The garments Adams creates respond to that culture. Lightweight cream suiting meant to persevere in the summer heat hangs beside colorful dinner jackets and sharply cut separates designed less for office buildings and more for candlelit courtyards, crowded bars, and long nights that refuse to end.

Curation

For Chris Olsen, owner of vintage shops Vice & Graft and Swamp Rags and founder of the Louisiana Vintage Festival, New Orleans sensibilities aren’t only held by fashionable New Orleanians, but by the clothing itself.

Around 2011, Olsen and his wife Megan moved to New Orleans from the Rust Belt, drawn by the city’s rich material history. The pieces he curates for his shops have moved through entire eras without losing their relevance. “There are just really cool garments that exist here that don’t exist anywhere else in the world,” he said.

Inside Vice & Graft on Royal Street, ceremonial wear from fraternal organizations hang beside Victorian lace negligées and workman’s coveralls. Traveled jackets brought home at the end of tours of duty sit near self-printed t-shirts, antique trinkets, and denim softened by decades of wear. There are century-year-old mourning garments, embroidered team bowling shirts, personalized Members Only jackets. Sometimes the pieces feel less like clothing and more like artifacts. Their value lies, intrinsically, in their very survival into the twenty-first century. 

Just as Adams carefully creates his pieces to respond to New Orleans’s relentless social calendar, so too did the fashion makers whose garments endured long enough to end up in Olsen’s shops. Clothing of the city couldn’t just be worn, it had to perform. It was sweated through, danced in, patched up, reinterpreted. Worn to Mardi Gras parades and second lines, clothes have been expected to carry presence and symbolism. They were altered, repaired, repurposed, passed between generations, stored and then pulled back out when the right moment called. Even after Katrina, even after entire histories nearly disappeared, certain pieces held on.

Olsen describes New Orleans as an international crossroads shaped by tourism, shipping, military history, film production, and ceremony. Fashions that arrived here hold stories of soldierly travel, trading routes, gifts from abroad, and times both of prosperity and hardship. Brought together, those histories created a fashion archive unlike anywhere else in the country.

And increasingly, curators like Olsen and designers like Adams, as well as haute couturier Magdalene, are able to treat these archives less as pure nostalgia and more as everyday raw material.

Repurposing

Most of Magdalene’s creations are stitched together using textiles that might be described as ‘secondhand.’ “Almost everything I make starts with already worn material,” he said, explaining that used fabrics aren’t dead fibers waiting to be recycled but rather, beautiful tools waiting to be collaborated with. Often, these older materials, after all, are superior to the plastic-heavy textiles rapidly overtaking modern day clothing production. 

“I work almost exclusively in natural fibers,” Magdalene explained. “If I find an old linen set or a tablecloth with a stain on it, I don’t see anything ruined. I see material with life left in it.”

Inside his French Quarter studio apartment—which also functions as his workroom—discarded linens, hand crocheted doilies, even flour-sack fabrics wait to become something else entirely. One ensemble, which became the final look and showcase design of his most recent collection, was constructed from a circa-1930s hand-embroidered tablecloth from Magdalene’s home in Kansas. The dimensions of this now upcycled work completed the multi-layed, floor-length gown, dictating its silhouette and forcing the garment into existence like a puzzle.

The aforementioned collection, named “Dairy Magdalene,” debuted last fall in a runway show at the Marigny Opera House.  What began as a fascination with dairy packaging evolved into a mostly-off white landscape of sculptural scoop forms and flowing silhouettes inspired, somewhat absurdly, by postwar farm austerity.

“I’ve always wanted to build whole worlds,” said the designer, who came to New Orleans in the years following the pandemic after years spent studying fashion at prestigious overseas institutions including Central Saint Martins in London and ESMOD in Paris.

His commitment to using reclaimed textiles goes deeper than sustainability. It’s an exercise in memory and inheritance, and a gesture of respect toward the labor of those who came before us. He speaks often about his grandmother hand-beading the collar she wore to his parents’ wedding, and about growing up around women who transformed found materials into objects of beauty.

It’s a legacy that Magdalene carries on through his couture collections, which present less like seasonal ready-wear releases and more like participants in an immersive environment, full of emotional logic, humor, and internal language. And despite the designer’s penchant for theatre, the clothing is never mistaken for costumery.

“A costume is made to be seen,” Magdalene said. “Fashion is made to be lived in.”

It’s an important distinction to be made in New Orleans, where extravagance quickly blends into the ordinary. Magdalene describes the city’s style as “almost like haute couture ready-to-wear,” a place where visual boldness and everyday life coexist naturally. 

Perhaps this is why New Orleans continues to attract designers and curators like Adams, Olsen, and Magdalene. Here, arguably more than elsewhere, there survives an appreciation for the remarkable—existing alongside a culture with a historic tendency toward rebellion. Raging against the now-societal-norm of fast fashion, New Orleanians are primed to reject disposability in favor of something slower, stranger, and far more personal—allowing fashionmakers the opportunity to build a new creative ecosystem rooted in preservation, reinvention, and individuality. 

Learn more about these New Orleans designers at nattyadams.com, olsen.ventures, and mgdln.com.