Today, you can’t go more than a few blocks before spotting a pair of cotton drawstring pants out in the wild. In 2019, Leset’s Lili Chemla was struggling to prove to retailers that a gap was waiting to be filled.
“The idea was creating clothes that were comfortable enough to wear at home and nice to wear out,” Chemla tells Marie Claire. At the time, she says, fashion offered ready-to-wear on one end and pajamas and loungewear on the other, with little in the space between. When she took the concept to department stores, buyers weren’t quite sure what to make of it. “They were like, ‘We can't put you on the ready-to-wear floor. We can't put you on the lingerie floor. Where do we put you? We need a floor in between,’” she remembers.
