Earlier this week, I made the mistake of asking Phillip Lim to tell me about the moment he knew he’d “made it.” I was hoping the designer, who is celebrating his brand’s 20th anniversary with a runway show this afternoon, would give me an anecdote that would tap into the current wave of Y2K nostalgia. Something about one of his early Met Gala dates (Alexa Chung, Solange), something to embody that particular giddy era when fashion blogging was new and everyone was talking about a cool young crew of New York designers who were capturing the vibes downtown. Turn up the LCD Soundsystem and let’s party like it’s 2007.
But that’s not at all how Phillip Lim operates. Over the past two decades, he and his business partner and close friend Wen Zhou have built their company not via flashy celebrity endorsements (although they’ve had plenty) or social media moments (although of course they’re playing that game), but by taking a humble, thoughtful, deeply sincere approach to making clothes they know people will want to wear.
So when I ask Lim about the moment he knew he’d made it, he does something I didn’t expect: He says he’s still not sure he has.
There have been career highlights, of course—the brand’s first presentation, in 2006; the show in the Forbidden City in Beijing; the 10-year anniversary show when they worked with Maya Lin to truck in 60 tons of topsoil; not to mention all those CFDA awards—but when you’re an independent designer running a brand that has never taken outside money, you can never quite kick back and indulge in a game of Remember When. In general, nostalgia isn’t something Lim does. “I'm reflective,” he tells me, “but I don’t like to live in the past.”
You can see that practicality in his clothes, which fashion writers have been describing for 20 years now as “classic with a twist.” Lim designs for women who want to look pulled-together but maintain a sense of personality. The inspiration is New York, but the vibe is global, and the price point is relatively accessible for a luxury fashion brand (especially these days).
“What I love about what Phillip and Wen have done is that it’s clothes for real women with lives to live,” says Rickie De Sole, the VP fashion director at Nordstrom. “We’re always talking about this idea of being dressed yet casual, and he strikes the perfect balance between feeling polished and not feeling constrained by your clothes.” A recent khaki dress, for example, comes with a pleated skirt peeking out the bottom, as if a trench coat and a striped shirtdress went into the transmogrification machine from The Fly—a clever play on the corporate boss-lady uniform.
According to Zhou, the brand’s top category is dresses, followed by trousers. This feels intuitive, but De Sole points out that the accessories have always had a devoted audience, too. “His footwear is part of his staying power,” she says, citing a mesh Mary Jane embroidered with little flowers as a recent winner. Back in 2011, it was the Pashli, a top-handle satchel with zippers up both sides, that captivated fashion lovers and entering the era’s pantheon of It bags. Even that came from a sense of practicality: Lim thought it was chic when women biked to work, so he tried to create a bag that would be useful for them. “It goes back to that versatility,” De Sole says. “It wasn’t heavy on logomania. It meets the needs of the working woman with a life to live.”
Phillip Lim grew up in Southern California, the son of Chinese immigrants. (He was actually born in Thailand, and his parents lived briefly in Cambodia.) A job at Barneys as a college student inspired him to go into fashion, and he found some success with his first label, Development, but left over creative differences. That’s when Zhou, a friend who worked as a fabric sourcer, invited him to move to New York City and start a brand with her. Because they were both 31, they called it 3.1 Phillip Lim.
“We met in Paris,” Zhou explains. “He was my client for my fabric company, and we just had this incredible friendship. I’m very emotional; I wear my heart on my sleeve. So if I like someone, I’m going to tell them immediately. And I let Phillip know immediately how much I admired him and that his designs really spoke to me.”
Zhou was born in Ningbo, China, and immigrated to the United States at the age of 13. A die-hard garmento, she maintains an archive of every 3.1 Phillip Lim piece she’s ever owned and still lights up when she starts talking about her love of clothes. “Every time I unboxed a sample, I felt like it was Christmas all over again,” she says of her fabric-sourcing days.
When she heard Lim was leaving his company, she talked him into getting a one-way ticket to New York and gave him her young daughter’s bedroom as a home base. “She was three, and at that time, her room was Dora the Explorer, and pink. He stayed in his room for a month or two.” She laughs. “My friend gave me advice. He said, ‘Phillip loves beauty. I don’t think you should keep him in your daughter’s room for longer than that.’ ”
“I arrived on Thursday, and by Monday we were in an office trying to figure it out,” Lim remembers. “I had just stepped away from my previous brand, so I was kind of in this transition phase. I was 31, and I was like, ‘Why not? Got nothing to lose.’ And the rest was history.”
They began work in 2004 (hence the anniversary this year), launched 3.1 Phillip Lim in fall 2005, and almost immediately took off. By 2006, Lim had won the Fashion Group International’s Women’s Designer Rising Star Award. The next year, he won the CFDA Swarovski Award in womenswear, followed by the same award in menswear in 2012 and in accessories in 2013. In 2011, when First Lady Michelle Obama attended a state dinner with leaders from China, she wore Phillip Lim.
One observer who took notice was Eric Daman, the costume designer for Gossip Girl, whose job was to reflect the tastes of young New Yorkers with money to spend. “It was important to get young designers on board: the Phillip Lims, the Alexander Wangs, Rodarte, Thakoon,” Daman says. “Phillip’s designs had a functionality and beauty to them—they were classic but twisted, so perfect for Blair’s character.” (Blair Waldorf, the show’s preppy teen queen of the Upper East Side, played by Leighton Meester, could certainly be described as classic but twisted.)
“In that era, when there was such an overload of boho chic, Phillip was using these beautiful, almost retro patterns that felt very sophisticated,” Daman says. “His lines felt very sharp, chic, with a classical structure. It’s not minimalist—well, it’s minimalist compared with what was going on at the time—but it’s beautifully designed and it hung beautifully in the stores. It’s wearable but also fash-un.”
Women found Lim through Barneys, or through the Pashli, or maybe even through Blair Waldorf, and they stayed. In an era when there are no longer rules about how to dress according to your age, the clothes you love at 31 can be the same clothes you love at 51, or longer. Lim is thoughtful when I ask him about growing alongside his clients. “In the end, I want to feel youthful, I want to feel experimental,” he says. “Even though I have more responsibilities and a bit more gray hair, I still think of myself as playful and fun and curious.” So why shouldn’t the women he dresses?
What’s changed is the way that he, and Zhou, and their clients, see the world. “Back in the day they would always say, ‘Let the clothes speak for themselves,’ or ‘Keep your mouth shut, don’t share what you believe in.’ Those days are gone, and now we’re very engaged. I live in this world too—besides my career as a fashion designer, I’m a citizen of this country. It matters to me what happens. And it should matter to all of us.”
During the COVID-19 pandemic, Lim began speaking out against anti-Asian hate crimes. Along with his friends—designer Laura Kim of Oscar de la Renta and Monse and Prabal Gurung, influencer Tina Leung, and restaurateur Ezra Williams—he is part of a collective known as the Slaysians, which raises money for victims of assault and supports the national Stop Asian Hate movement. (His work with the group won him yet another CFDA Award, this one for Positive Social Influence, in 2022.) “Phillip says that he’s not an activist, but he’s been activated,” Zhou tells me. “I love that about him, and I love what he stands for.”
This advocacy work, and the way it supports up-and-coming designers and Asian-American artists—like the “Crafting Selfhood” exhibit, which showcased 13 female AAPI artists at the downtown store—now feels baked into the brand’s DNA. De Sole sees it as part of why Lim has managed to stay relevant for so long. “He’s such a collaborator. He’s someone who really gives back to his city, his community, his partnership with Wen, and I think that’s given him staying power.”
Lim credits the longevity to his and Zhou’s ability to stay hungry. “I was given the best advice early on by a friend who was a buyer for American Rag Japan back in the day, and he’s like, ‘Phillip, I see so many people, so many brilliant potential stars. But once they get a whiff of success, they start to rely on the money that comes from success to substitute for the creativity and the push and the curiosity.’ And I never forgot that.”
Zhou believes there’s another reason the two of them aren’t resting on their laurels. “I mean, Phillip won every single award, but I think there’s a constant reminder of our ongoing challenges and the complexity of navigating life between cultures. As an immigrant, you never, never celebrate, because imagine you constantly feel the fear that it could all go away,” she says. Which maybe explains why Lim was so reluctant to tell me when he knew he’d made it. “I think 20 years in fashion is rare, but 20 years as an Asian-American designer in fashion is even more rare,” Zhou adds, “and it’s really becoming a unicorn.”
Last fall, 3.1 Phillip Lim returned to the runway after a four-year hiatus. It felt like a rebirth of sorts, and this afternoon’s show should strike a similar note. Two days before showtime this past Friday, when I drop by the Union Square studio, it is filled with models tramping around in highly desirable puffy thong heels as the team tries to finalize the casting. Clad in a loose yellow shirt, cinched-ankle cargo pants, and sandals, Lim is everywhere at once, fixing looks, checking in, but his energy isn’t anxious; he seems to be in his element. “I can’t even explain to you how it happens, because it really requires a group of people who can speak in very nonverbal ways,” he told me earlier when I asked about his process.
A model emerges in a lace dress covered in hand-appliquéd rosettes, and everyone murmurs, “Beautiful.” The rosette technique was featured in the seminal 2007 collection, but that’s the only shred of nostalgia Lim is allowing himself this season. “[The motif is] sort of an ‘if you know you know’ thing, and that's the furthest thing I’ll look back at,” he says. “Because with fashion, it’s all about the present, the evolution.”
His goal for spring 2025, he says, is to convey a sense of joy. “That word, joy, it materializes in all parts of our society, like with the recent DNC convention,” he says. “It really is in the air. I think we’re just all craving the simplicity of just being—the joy of being able to play again.”
