NEW YORK (NY TIMES) - During the early days of the pandemic, designer Olympia Le-Tan missed travelling. Or rather, she missed hotels.
"I just wanted pajamas and nice sheets and table settings and robes," she said. "The stuff you steal from a hotel. At least, the stuff you'd want to steal."
And that's how she came up with her new line, Hotel Olympia, which was introduced on her website this month. Le-Tan's previous namesake line was known for its "book bags", minaudieres embroidered with the cover of Lolita or Valley Of The Dolls.
"If it's something you have at a hotel, I can make it," Le-Tan, 44, said. "It's like hotel life without the hotel, or an imaginary hotel, or what I would do if I had a hotel."
The Hotel Olympia line will focus on home goods: linen tablecloths and napkins printed with full English breakfasts and cakes; custom embroidered pillows with the letters of the alphabet; a ceramic ashtray; an evening bag in the shape of a luggage tag.
Prices will start at US$10 for a button pack (S$13.60) and go up to US$950 for a pair of embroidered slippers.
"I have a therapist, and almost every session she asks me if I remember a dream, and, nine times out of 10, it starts with, 'So I'm in a hotel'," Le-Tan said.
Her favorite hotels are the kind where no room looks the same as another and may be filled with piles of books or a claw-foot bathtub next to the bed.
She remembers having "insane holidays", travelling with her artist father, Pierre Le-Tan, and her family.
Olympia Le-Tan, who grew up in Paris and started as an intern at the Chanel studio in the late 1990s, says there is a "granny aspect" to her aesthetic, which includes sewing and embroidery.
While shopping at Colette, the influential Parisian concept store (it closed in late 2017), she carried a tote bag she'd embroidered. One of the store's owners ordered some for the shop, and soon she had orders from Isetan in Tokyo and Browns in London.
She moved to New York in 2018 to join the design team of designer Marc Jacobs' diffusion line called the Marc Jacobs. During the pandemic, the business shifted, but she decided to stay in New York.
"I stared at the ceiling for months," she said. That's when the idea for Hotel Olympia began to take form. Half of her time is spent on Hotel Olympia, and the other half is devoted to projects for other brands, like a collection she did for Maison Kitsune earlier this winter.
"When I say I don't want to do much wholesale, what I actually want is to do travelling pop-ups in actual hotels, like set up a mini-Hotel Olympia where everything you see is for sale in a suite at, for example, the Bristol," she said, and added, "if they'll have me."
