Leading Lady: Interview with Lady Soule, Urban Outfitters Design Director
JUNK DRAWER EXCLUSIVE!! 👛
Most fashion fanatics can name the head designer at any luxury house within milliseconds. We live in an era of highly publicized designers – Tom Ford’s Gucci, Karl Lagerfeld’s Chanel, Phoebe Philo’s Céline. A brand’s history is inextricably linked with the minds of design geniuses.
Yet when it comes to the retail giants, the designers of the brands feeding the masses are a ghost to the public eye.
The chances that you know who concepted and created the garment you’re trying on in Nordstrom’s dressing room are slim. But if you did know who existed behind these savvy and smart clothes, it would reveal a deep appreciation for these individuals and their artistic backgrounds.
One of these design leaders is Lady Soule, the Executive Director of Design at Urban Outfitters. It’s about time you met the leading Lady of the brand.
When Lady walks into our interview, she’s wearing knee-length black gingham shorts, a lime green tee, and a silver Charlie Brown necklace. Her style immediately nods to Urban’s edgy, contemporary and nostalgic aesthetic. Her office wall is dotted with abstract, colorful framed prints. I notice one of my favorite design books, The Eye: How the World’s Most Influential Creative Directors Develop Their Vision, resting on her shelf.
She’s oozing cool, and I’m a young intern absorbing every second, diligently taking mental notes.
To love design, to do it on a large scale, one must live and breathe style. Lady, like many fashion designers, had a strong sense of personal style as a young girl. She tells me how she would always wear a Wonderwoman swimsuit, a knit pleated skirt, and cowboy boots as a young girl. This vision of Lady doesn’t seem so distant from the colorful woman sitting in front of me today.
While most people lose their sense of self in high school, Lady fell deeper into her passion for clothes. As a teen growing up in New Mexico, she would go thrifting, hunt at estate sales and flea markets, hydrating herself with style in a desert.
“That was the best shopping where I’m from. It’s a smaller city, we didn’t have an Urban or anything like that,” she explains. “My biggest and most fun times were thrifting with my brother, and giving him his ‘New Look.’ I would be like, ‘no, tonight, you will be Talking Heads.’ My brother actually ended up wearing a suit to high school for two years, every day. Smoking cigarettes at Denny’s.”
This love of thrifting didn’t fade from her design process. She still has giant racks of vintage clothing sitting outside her office that she uses for inspiration. Fashion is always moored in the past.
After high school, Lady had an innate sense that she didn’t want to follow the traditional college route. The direct path is never the most fun, anyways. She was good at art (duh), but the only career paths that seemed available at that time were to become a doctor, a lawyer, or a teacher.
So, she did what any vivacious Western teen would do: she moved to a Colorado ski town; Steamboat Springs.
To end up as the executive design director at Urban Outfitters, one might expect a traditional fashion career path, one that begins at FIT or Parsons. Instead, Lady’s career journey had a snowy, alternative beginning. Between snowboarding and waiting tables, Lady engaged with the local ski and skate shops. Her first true intro to the fashion industry was doing merchandising, buying, attending trade shows, and other miscellaneous adventures for these brands.
But after six years, it was time to leave Steamboat. Design was singing its alluring song.
“I always made stuff - I mostly deconstructed and remade stuff. Some people in this industry, they grow up sewing… I didn’t have any real, true skillset like that. I was like fucking stuff up. Then someone was like, ‘Oh, you’re really good at this stuff, you know there’s a design program at Colorado State, you should go to school there.’”
For someone who was always “fucking stuff up,” she successfully received her degree, honing her once hodgepodge skills.
Then, New York City called. Or rather, she called New York City.
It was the early 2000s in NYC fashion — a mythic time for those of us who missed it while we were busy in strollers and playgroups in Prospect Park.
Obsessed with the “cool, girly” brands defining the moment, Lady had her sights set on two iconic brands: Marc Jacobs and Plenty by Tracy Reese.
There was an article in Glamour Magazine, Lady explained, featuring a profile of the Plenty designer, Tracy Reese. In fine print at the bottom of the page was a number. “Being so naive,” Lady dialed the number. (This was before the era of LinkedIn and social media cold-messaging that’s come to define fashion networking.)
“The woman answered, and I assumed it was a receptionist, so I just kept talking to her about Tracy Reese the designer, in the third person - not knowing that she was Tracy Reese. I kept being like ‘I really admire Tracy…’ and she kept giggling at me. Finally, I was like, ‘Oh my god I think this is her.’”
Fortune favors the bold.
Lady traded the west for the east, landing in NYC for an unpaid summer internship with Tracy Reese.
As those who aspire to work in fashion understand, this is an intimidating industry to break into. It offers little compensation, promising hard work and long hours. One has to be scrappy and passionate to make it work. You don’t go into fashion for the sole purpose of making money. If anything, this prerequisite weeds out the passionless and the uninspired.
Passionate and inspired, Lady became a full-time employee for Tracy Reese after her summer internship. Diving into all parts of the brand’s operations, Lady did “everything from taking out the trash to getting coffee to hand-dying a hundred pairs of production tights to helping plan their fashion show.”
Lady’s description of working with Tracy makes the designer seem even more impressive than her Wikipedia page does.
“Tracy was by the books. She wasn’t just a stylist. A lot of people that started a company at the time were stylists, so they didn’t have the background or the technical skills - but she was not like that. She had every single technical skill dialed. She was so good at everything. She could draft any pattern; she could drape anything; she could sketch beautifully; she knew how to make all kinds of amazing prints.”
Lady beautifully says that she “grew up” in New York working for Tracy. She started when she was 25 and left when she was 37. “No one does that – I’m just weird. No one stays at a job that long in this industry.”
Spending 13 years working with Tracy, swimming through the daily ebbs and flows of a fashion brand, they inevitably became like family. This made Lady’s decision to move to Anthropologie difficult.
Change is difficult but necessary. Lady says that the move “felt like a natural next step” and that she “wanted to learn a bigger business.”
After being at Anthropologie for five and a half years and Urban Outfitters for three, she’s adamant about the fact that it’s the most creative place she’s ever worked.
“Sure, everyone’s going to sell a bomber and a moto jacket, but how can it only be this for brand? Could you mix it with weird textiles? I think that’s really been a creative push.”
Even though Lady’s Y2K NYC days are far behind her, the trend cycle has hurled her back into nostalgia for those early days. She points out that there’s a “trashy” and a “femme” side to Y2K, but she’s much more enthusiastic about the femininity reappearing.
“Sometimes feminine clothes are fussy, but right now I don’t think it feels fussy at all. I feel very excited about that,” she explains.
Beyond the aesthetic appreciation of fashion and beauty, when we pull back the sequins and the feathers and the silk– what are we left with? Why does fashion still matter?
Well, maybe it doesn’t. “If there was an apocalypse, I don’t know if any of this would matter,” Lady theorizes.
But for now, before the inevitable apocalypse, it still matters.
“Fashion for me is a way to express individuality and that’s important. It’s a way to show your personality before anyone even knows you.”
Fashion isn’t a “need” in the survival sense. We run on food and water, not really cool clothes. However, human expression is a need. It is a way of making sense of our worlds, revealing our inner selves to the outer world. Fashion makes us less animal.
Before our interview wraps up, I ask Lady what she would say to her twenty-year-old self. I’m twenty and sitting in front of her— I think that maybe I’m some distant mirage of her past self, a stand-in for a mirror of youth. Or maybe, that’s wishful, metaphorical thinking on my part.
“I probably would say: you cannot control this process, or really anything in life - so just find joy in the process of it, instead of trying to make it happen a certain way. Just accept it. Take it how it is. Find the little joys along the way. I think I was so concerned about being perfect all the time, and it really doesn’t matter.”
Oh, and “wear shorter skirts.”
Noted.
Bonus:💖💖 Lady’s Favorite NYC Vintage Stores 💖💖
“I have a real problem with T-shirts, like really bad. I probably have 350 vintage t-shirts. Most of them are dirty white t-shirts. I’m a sucker for a perfect, vintage, worn-in tee.”
“Last time I went I found this amazing Ann Demeulemeester skirt. It has all these buckles and removable cargo pockets. It’s really awesome.”
“I do love shopping vintage in Brooklyn. There are a lot of good little spots. I only know how to get places. I don’t even know their names.”