Two twenty-something girls sit in a SoHo bar, dressed like they inherited a tasteful fortune. They’re not drafting a marketing strategy but, however they’re naming one thing—one thing plural, private, with id and intent. Mestiza. A lady of combined blood. A phrase loaded with lineage and complexity, and the primary choice Alessandra Perez-Rubio and Louisa Rechter will make in constructing a trend model dedicated to heritage and the hope that class doesn’t need to be elitist.
After they met as college students at Washington College in St. Louis, bonding over shared reminiscences of trendy grandmothers, the seeds of Mestiza have been planted. Perez-Rubio remembers visiting her grandmother in Manila: classic customized robes draped throughout furnishings like jewels ready to be rediscovered. “My grandmother was a social butterfly,” Perez-Rubio tells Observer, “all the time dressed to the nines. That afternoon, throughout what I feel was some manic spring cleansing, was any outdated day for her. However for me, it was a formative reminiscence as a result of she gave me items that also cling in my closet.”
Earlier than Mestiza, Rechter labored at a boutique on Madison Avenue—small, elegant, high-stakes in its personal manner. What stayed together with her wasn’t the glamour upstairs however the basement. “I’d go into the inventory room simply to look at what was shifting,” she says, not out of hysteria. It was one thing nearer to compulsion. Stunning garments didn’t belong in storage. They wanted to be worn, to discover a house. That intuition calcified into a private rule: stock shouldn’t linger. “Even now, I don’t see our warehouse every single day, however I’m all the time checking what’s promoting. I’d fairly purchase much less and watch it flip over than sit on piles of product.”
Perez-Rubio and Rechter aren’t opposites, however a sort of deliberate counterpoint. Perez-Rubio speaks with a designer’s precision, describing materials and silhouettes as if narrating a love letter. Her presence matches the refined formality of Mestiza’s extra opulent items. Rechter, in contrast, brings a sharper edge: direct, strategic, pragmatic in tone and private fashion. The place Perez-Rubio talks in textures and references, Rechter talks in timing, stock and technique. Collectively, they transfer like longtime collaborators: one setting the imaginative and prescient, the opposite steering the ship. They’re united by the shared conviction that there’s room within the trend world for a model that treats heirlooms as inspiration fairly than advertising and marketing copy. Mestiza isn’t making an attempt to be the subsequent massive factor. It’s making an attempt to final.
“We’re not a model obsessive about tendencies,” Rechter says. She is frank about it: positive, there are moments when shifting sooner would possibly look tempting. “Possibly we want we have been, in some methods,” she admits. However Mestiza was by no means constructed to chase tendencies. Their prospects care about timeless fashion. “We keep related as a result of we’re not trend-obsessed,” Rechter repeats, emphasizing the purpose much less like a marketer, extra like somebody who’s made peace with constructing one thing slowly.
That unhurried strategy—intentional from the start—now underpins a enterprise with actual construction. From day one, Perez-Rubio dealt with model and design as artistic director, specializing in Filipino heritage parts—embroideries, silhouettes—that come from lived expertise. Rechter, as CEO, oversees operations and development. Quick ahead ten years, and the division stays. At present, they lead a 12-person staff, backed by outsourced gross sales and advertising and marketing, and the model’s aesthetic is unmistakable: Palm Seaside polish with an Higher East Aspect wink—daring florals, preppy stripes, lemony jacquard and fit-and-flare silhouettes meant for yacht decks, bridal brunches or summers in San Miguel. The temper is breezy: wicker clutches, wide-brimmed hats and a figuring out embrace of femininity as each armor and asset. It’s sunny, structured, and deliberate a yr prematurely. Wrinkle-free materials. Convertible robes you’ll be able to put on 4 methods. They keep away from waste, each for moral and monetary causes.
Mestiza’s development hasn’t been hockey-stick, nor was it meant to be. They began DTC, now promote by means of retailers like Neimans and Saks, and have thoughtfully expanded classes: loungewear, bridal and shortly, swimwear. Rechter emphasizes restraint: they check merchandise in small batches, reordering solely what resonates. “If one thing is working,” she says, “we run with it.” That strategy has saved them nimble and related, helped alongside by best-sellers just like the Georgiana robe—a strapless, traditional silhouette, fitted by means of the bodice, with a dramatic high-low hem and a skirt that flares in sculptural quantity, meant to carry its form and its presence in a room.
At their worth level, Mestiza isn’t fairly mass market, neither is it high fashion. It’s that sliver of trend occupied by girls who by no means appear to want a reservation—discreet however unmistakably polished. The identical girls who accumulate Markarian’s night coats or La Ligne’s striped knits would possibly discover themselves drawn to Mestiza’s jacquard robes. “We’ve all the time favored the concept discovering us appears like discovering a treasure,” Rechter says.
On the similar time, as Perez-Rubio frames it, “We don’t consider trend needs to be elitist or unique to be particular.” She and Rechter got here into the business as outsiders—no trend pedigrees, no investor Rolodex—and constructed Mestiza with out the same old social credentials. That outsider standing formed how they consider luxurious: polished, sure, although with out gatekeeping. Perez-Rubio, who grew up shifting between Manila and the U.S. as a Spanish-Filipino lady, sees the model’s identify as greater than a label. Mestiza displays her personal twin id: two cultures, two aesthetics, belonging in all places and nowhere directly. That layered sense of self is identical high quality they design for. “I don’t assume coming from a spot of heat sacrifices the mystique,” she says.
Fairly than billboard their values, they fold them into observe: convertible designs, gifting extra stock, measured manufacturing. Rechter’s favourite phrase, if one should choose? Empowerment. Least favourite? None precisely. “It’s troublesome to be all of these issues,” she says. “We do what we will.”
At their latest 10-year anniversary, they threw a celebration full with a gown from every defining yr modeled reside—a residing archive. Households flew in. Longtime collaborators joined. A decade in, Mestiza isn’t pivoting or rebranding. It’s refining, deepening. “We’re at an inflection level,” Perez-Rubio says. “And we’re simply actually glad that we get to do that.”
