You Can Dress Like Your Mom

Most young fashionistas don’t want to be told they dress like their mothers. But French fashion brand Comptoir des Cotonniers has built a business on clothing two generations in the same boutique. Comptoir, a French clothing maker which is expanding in New York this spring, has risen to success in Europe—where it has nearly 350 stores—on the idea that mothers and daughters can wear the same label. “Young women don’t dress like their mothers, but they’re happy to find items in the same brand,” says Comptoir Chief Executive Marianne Romestain, who has a 15-year-old daughter. “Women don’t dress depending on their age anymore.” Comptoir isn’t selling a mini-me look à la Laura Ashley, the English brand that sold flowery matching dresses to women and their daughters in the 1980s. The heart of its collections are work-appropriate jackets, pants and coats, and the mother-daughter pairs in its ads serve to drive home the point that Comptoir wants to dress women in a wide age span, from their late teens to 60.

Fashion marketing has become less segmented by age in recent years. Models in their thirties and forties are showing up more in fashion shows and advertising, brands’ strongest ways of communicating their image. The runways of Chanel, Louis Vuitton and Jean Paul Gaultier last season featured several models over 30. L’Oréal, the cosmetics giant, recently signed 53-year-old former supermodel Inès de la Fressange as its spokeswoman. At the same time, women up through their 50s have adopted a more relaxed way of dressing for the office; they are resistant to being boxed into one segment. That leaves an opening for more-casual labels that appeal to a broad age range. As in the U.S., where traditional brands for working women like Liz Claiborne have faltered, French brands that dressed women for the office, such as Sonia Rykiel, now struggle to appeal to a younger clientele.

A new crop of French brands has sprung up alongside Comptoir in the past decade, including Vanessa Bruno, Isabel Marant, Sandro and Zadig & Voltaire. They share a casual-chic aesthetic that stretches across ages and occasions; they can be worn by interns and top executives alike. “Everyone can mix and match and find their style,” says Ms. Romestain, dressed in ironed jeans and a blazer. For instance, she says, a younger woman might wear a jacket over a flirty silk chiffon dress, while an older woman could wear the same jacket with a pair of trousers. Since its founding in the south of France in 1995, the label has built its collections around basics made mostly of cotton, linen and silk. Its collections—akin to those of J. Crew—have enough of an edge to make them current, but they are not trend-setting. The creative chief, Brigitte Comazzi, has headed Comptoir’s design for five years.

COMPTOIR DES COTONNIERS – SPRING/SUMMER

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