The air inside the old Georgian townhouse was thick with the scent of bergamot and oud, a lingering trace from the exclusive candle collection created by an emerging perfumer who had once designed private scents for European royalty. Through the arched windows, the afternoon light caught the velvet upholstery of a sapphire-blue settee and flitted across a mirrored sideboard topped with crystal decanters. It was the kind of space where fashion didn’t just hang in wardrobes—it whispered through every thread of tapestry, every brass doorknob polished by gloved hands. This is where Esmé Laroque, the 27-year-old face of a new movement in luxury fashion, found herself quietly redefining what elegance could mean in an era obsessed with hypervisibility.
She was not trying to be iconic. She was trying to be honest.
At the Met Gala just weeks earlier, Esmé walked the carpet in a sculptural, asymmetrical column dress handmade in Paris by a fifth-generation couture house most guests couldn’t pronounce, let alone afford. The gown took over 480 hours of embroidery, all silk-thread roses kissed with diamond dust. When asked on the carpet what message she hoped to send, her answer was simply: “That vulnerability is luxurious too.”
That one line trended more than the dress.
Fashion had taught Esmé how to posture, how to blink slowly in interviews, how to fold herself neatly into the corner of a frame and let other people project meaning onto her. But when she left the afterparties behind and slid back into the shadowy interior of her hotel suite, she often undid it all—stepping barefoot onto the marble floor, pulling out the long pins from her hair one by one. There was something sacred about those quiet moments: just her, the sound of passing traffic far below, and the soft rustle of silk puddled at her ankles.
Beneath the couture, she was unraveling in the best way possible.
Luxury fashion had once seemed to her like the sharp end of the social pyramid—its apex, its validation. She grew up in a small townhouse in Leeds, where she and her older sister used to flip through the pages of Vogue Italia at the local library while their mum worked double shifts. The stories she saw in those glossy editorials felt so foreign it was like they belonged to another planet. Ball gowns in meadows, stilettos in sand dunes, diamond cuffs wrapped around wrists like fairy-tale shackles. She never imagined her own name would be engraved inside the tag of a custom piece worn by a pop star or quoted in Business of Fashion next to words like market disruptor and next-gen muse.
But Esmé’s journey through fashion wasn’t a straight runway. It curved, dipped, and almost fell apart more than once.
When she was 19, she interned for a prestigious London fashion house whose creative director later became entangled in scandal. She remembers days when she stitched seams until her fingers bled, nights when she slept under the pattern table with her coat over her like a blanket. It was brutal. It was beautiful. It was what broke her open. That same pain carved out space for her later artistry—for the irreverence she brought when she launched her capsule line focused entirely on sustainable luxury fashion, long before it became an industry talking point.
The idea that slow fashion could be sexy was radical at the time. That one-of-a-kind garments stitched by women in Lisbon or Dakar could command the same price point as fast-turnaround pieces made in Milan’s glittering ateliers seemed, to some, almost laughable. But Esmé insisted: it wasn’t about the origin. It was about the intention. The craftsmanship. The soul sewn into every invisible hem.
Her first collection sold out in 48 hours, bought by an elite group of collectors whose names never graced headlines but whose closets held the kind of prestige fashion houses quietly coveted. One of them wore Esmé’s signature backless silk jumpsuit to a charity gala in Tokyo and told the press, “I’ve never felt so seen by a garment before.”
She smiled when she heard that. It’s what she’d been trying to do all along.
Recognition brought new rooms. She was invited to a roundtable in Florence on artisanal craftsmanship in contemporary fashion alongside CEOs from LVMH and Kering. She was photographed in The New Yorker sipping espresso in a double-breasted ivory suit beside a stack of her design sketches. She didn’t call herself a designer, though. She called herself a storyteller who happened to use fabric instead of ink. Her work was not meant to trend. It was meant to linger.
And yet, the celebrity machine spun on without asking.
Soon, stylists for Oscar nominees and music award winners were requesting her pieces. She sent them reluctantly, with handwritten notes tucked into the garment bags. “This piece was inspired by the stillness before a storm,” she wrote on one. “Wear it only if you’re ready to own the calm and the chaos.” That particular gown—an iridescent, floor-length number with sheer panelling—landed on every best-dressed list the following morning. It was priced at £34,000, though it had no label. Just a single stitched signature inside the waist: E.L.
When a global campaign from a heritage haute couture brand offered her a creative director role, she turned it down. “I want to create, not just curate,” she explained in a rare interview with Financial Times Style. That answer alone was enough to send the fashion world spinning. Why would a young woman refuse such pedigree?
Because what she was building didn’t have a lineage yet. It was a brand of one.
Behind the scenes, Esmé was still healing. Not from scandal, not from loss, but from expectation. The kind that trails women in luxury like a watermark—there but only visible in the right light. She spoke once about how early on in her career she tried to dress “fashionably small”: cinched waists, elongated limbs, deliberate silhouettes that made her feel less like a person and more like an object in an art installation. But now, her private wardrobe was full of silk robes dyed in turmeric and rose, vintage designer handbags she thrifted in Rome, and oversized wool coats from Scandinavian ateliers she never disclosed to press.
She wore these pieces not to be photographed—but to be herself.
There’s a photo from a recent trip to Morocco that says it all. She’s on a rooftop in the medina, barefoot in embroidered trousers, laughing with her head thrown back as a gust of wind carries the hem of her linen blouse into the frame. There’s no artifice in the shot. Just the raw luxury of presence. No styling team. No branding. Just a woman and the open sky.
That, to her, was the future of the luxury lifestyle.
It wasn’t about logos or runways or influencer seating charts at Paris Fashion Week. It was about moments. Intimate, honest, imperfect moments that still felt opulent because they were real. Luxury, in her philosophy, was the freedom to exist as one’s fullest self, regardless of whether it fit the trend cycle or not. It was about emotion over aesthetic. Craft over commerce. Essence over echo.
She recently collaborated with a retired Japanese textile artist on a single gown—just one. Made from naturally-dyed mulberry silk and hand-painted with sumi ink, the dress was never listed for sale. It was gifted to the artist’s daughter on her wedding day. When asked why she didn’t monetize the moment, Esmé replied, “Not all beauty is meant to be bought.”
Still, the industry keeps watching. Because Esmé, without trying, continues to shift the gravity of celebrity fashion trends. While others chase virality with crystal-studded catsuits and red carpet theatrics, she posts quiet videos of herself mending old garments, reading 19th-century poetry, or walking through the fog in the Scottish Highlands in an unbranded trench coat that took 76 hours to hand-stitch. Her fans—some affluent, some aspirational—eat it up. Because in her calm, there’s truth. And truth, in luxury, is rare.
The numbers prove it. Google searches for “authentic luxury fashion” have risen steadily. Affiliate earnings on her recommended investment handbags—timeless styles meant to be passed down like heirlooms—are outperforming mass-produced designer drops. Even platforms like Net-a-Porter and Farfetch have begun pivoting their language to include words like “mindful luxury” and “slow elegance”—all phrases Esmé has quietly championed in her interviews for years.
But she doesn’t call herself an influencer.
She still wakes up most mornings in her West London flat, makes tea in a chipped porcelain cup from her grandmother, and writes notes in a diary made of pressed cotton paper. Her phone buzzes with requests from stylists and editors, but she keeps it face down. When she creates, she does so in silence, away from the noise of digital metrics. And when she speaks—when she shows herself—it’s always on her terms.
Esmé Laroque is not here to dominate fashion. She is here to liberate it.
And perhaps that, more than any stitched signature or sold-out collection, is what makes her work so luxurious. Not the material wealth it gestures toward, but the emotional depth it insists upon. She reminds us that true style doesn’t scream—it listens. That the greatest luxury of all isn’t what you wear, but how you feel wearing it.
And in a world desperate for performance, she chooses poetry.
Even if only a few are paying attention.