If you’re lucky enough to be successful—and cursed enough to be “cool” at the same time—there’s always an awkward moment where your weirdest visions become someone else’s daily life. For French designer Natacha Ramsay-Levi, it happened on a street corner in Paris circa 2005…and it never stopped. “You see someone wearing your idea on the street, and you say to your friend, ‘Oh my God, I made that!’” says Ramsay-Levi from a studio in Spain. “And I still say that. Every time.”
She’ll soon have even more opportunities. This month, the veteran of Balenciaga, Louis Vuitton, and Chloé launches an unexpected new range called NRL for ECCO (as in, “Wait, like the shoes my Outdoor Ed teacher wore?”) that makes her coveted style available for far less cash. “I feel very good about it, because they have one of the best [design] teams I’ve ever met,” she says. “I was very impressed since day one by [their] innovation… the quality of the products are there. I would say the responsibility also with which everything is done is amazing."
