Lafayette 148 New York Fall 2023 Ready-to-Wear

Over the last few seasons Lafayette 148’s creative director Emily Smith has cited paper and old-fashioned mail, rooted in the past lives of the brand’s namesake building as a paper factory and a former post office respectively, as inspirations. For fall 2023, she set her sights on a different building—the Brooklyn Public Library’s Central Branch—but funnily enough ended once again on paper goods (that would be books) as inspiration. “We started with the Brooklyn Library, which is in our own backyard and we felt that it was really beautiful, especially with Toshiko Mori, who redid the architecture,” Smith recalled at the brand’s showroom. “The wood panelings, the books, they spoke to us. And from there we took a journey to women authors that came from America and are under-celebrated.” The facade of the Brooklyn Library features an iconic grid design that references 15 important works of American literature, only one of them written by a woman (that would be Louisa May Alcott’s