How often does a fashion brand admit that its mission has nothing to do with looking good? J.J. Martin, the founder of La DoubleJ, shares that thought as she casually strolls down the street just outside her house in Milan and chats with me via video call. Wearing an olive cape and over-easy jeans she designed, she reflects that the real purpose of her independent label has always been to give people a reason to feel good. “I didn’t have words for it until halfway through the company, when I started calling our mission Raise Your Vibration,” she shares. “But that’s really what we’ve been doing since 2015: just give people an opportunity to feel good.” La DoubleJ started by accident.
Martin was living in Milan, working as a journalist, and selling vintage clothing on the side. She sold her pieces not by listing them on a website but by showing them to creative women around the city and photographing them in their homes, telling stories about how they dressed and decorated. It was a magazine approach to e-commerce before anyone had a name for it. In a rather organic evolution, when her supply of vintage ran dry, she decided to start making new pieces, but still with a connection to the past. A friend connected her to a silk archive in Lake Como called Mantero, which had been producing fabric for Louis Vuitton, Dior, Gucci, and Yves Saint Laurent for over a century but had never been mentioned publicly by any of them. “I said, I want to go into your archive, pick eight vintage prints, and tell the world they’re coming from your archive,” says Martin, who proudly recalls how she put the epic story of her supplier on the hang tag of her creations. “We were the very first client that ever mentioned them publicly in all their history.” That was the beginning. But what truly makes La DoubleJ different is not the prints—though the prints are unmistakable—it’s the absence of anxiety. “Most of what happens in fashion is coming from a place of lack or scarcity or fear or competition,” Martin says. “There’s not a lot about making you feel good. It’s really about looking good, and sometimes you’re looking good at the expense of feeling good.” Her clothes are the opposite of that. They are bold, colorful, and unapologetically effervescent. Martin’s background in journalism shapes everything she does with her brand. “I’m always thinking of magazine stories and the way we tell and narrate and communicate,” she shares. “I love being super creative, but I also love being very clear to people and being able to touch them.” Case in point: When she launched her outdoor home collection, she created super-sized versions of her key pieces and photographed them around Milan—coming out of the subway, in front of the Duomo, and on top of her Fiat 500. The result was her very own colorful take on an art installation, which she cleverly called Size Matters. As for her La DoubleJ stores, they are a more concrete extension of her unique design philosophy. Martin calls them Raise Your Vibration stations, and each one has a different concept.
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The Milan store is a Divine Mother cave; the Palm Beach location is a chakra station; Dallas is meant to embody an eclipse; and the new Capri store is a manifestation of a mandala. “It’s just a way in which we can transmit the energy frequency,” explains Martin. “I really like the idea that each of our stores is a little bit different, and it just invites some playfulness and discovery for our customers.” Interestingly, at La DoubleJ, items don’t go on sale in her stores. Martin follows the philosophy that the price of something at the beginning of the season reflects its true value. “I’m not jacking up the prices and trying to make huge margins and then crashing and putting everything on sale,” she says. “The price comes out at one time. It’s the right price.” It’s a choice that is grounded in the idea of both respecting the craftsmen who create her collections and hopefully an acknowledgement from her clientele that making the decision to buy a new piece of clothing or homeware item should always be done with intention and consideration.
In its own way, this move is an act of sustainability—and it’s not the only one. Sustainability, for Martin, is defined in multiple ways. Keeping all production in Italy means fabrics travel 50 kilometers instead of 5,000. Ensuring that every worker across every factory is well paid and well rested matters more to her than any certification. “What I’m trying to do is still be a very responsible company in the ways that I can,” she says. The Sisterhood, a free community she built around the brand, offers hundreds of workshops and access to healers and practices from around the world. “This is kind of how I can give back and be a sustainable brand,” she says. In line with the vision of her brand, Martin has crisscrossed the world for design inspiration—but only through the prism of transcendental travel. Going to places where she can connect with sacred land and ancient traditions. “I’ve spent a lot of time in Bali, but not on the beaches. I’ve been in the water temples with high priests,” she says. “I’ve been to Egypt five times, and four of those times I was co-hosting spiritual retreats.
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Sardinia, I went in December and January to archaeological sites, retracing sacred spaces and doing ritual work.” The patterns in her collections are born from these odysseys. In particular during her trips through Italy, “I’m getting a lot specifically from the Renaissance and the Baroque periods,” she says. When asked what her trips to the Middle East gave her, Martin recalls a memory from the Doha airport. “I went into the prayer room in the lounge because I was really into my meditation practice,” she recalls. “I started doing some of my toning and language and moving my hands. When I finished, I opened my eyes and found two women who were completely blown away. They said, ‘That was so powerful. Thank you.’ It was so beautiful to see that it doesn’t matter what religion you’re doing. We’re so connected.” She has visited the UAE three times and has organized sound healing sessions and meditative events each time. “We’ve had quite a few events like that,” she says. “We did a trunk show at a Lebanese woman’s house in Dubai, and we were doing a channeling in the next room with all her friends. That’s just DoubleJ’s vibe.”
But it’s when she opens up about the fire that destroyed her childhood home and her first American store in Pacific Palisades that Martin’s tone shifts to one of both reflection and heartache. “The fire burned down all of my ancestral homeland,” she says. “My childhood home from zero to eighteen, my grandmother’s house, my aunt’s house, my school, my church—everything burned, including our store that was going to open the next month.” She is now looking for a new space in Los Angeles and also in Miami. America is her biggest market, larger than Europe. “We’ll bounce back,” she says. “We’ll find a happy home.” For Martin, La DoubleJ is a brand that defies demographics. The connection she sees in the people who collect her pieces all comes down to a matter of attitude rather than age. “We’re so conditioned to think of customers based on age,” she says. “But really, what about attitude?” Young girls wear the capes with jeans. Older women wear them with evening dresses. And soon she will have even more to offer her devoted global tribe. A jewelry collection with semi-precious stones and a 24-karat gold plate is in the works, and she is expanding into scarves.
But the mission for Martin remains the same, to keep doing what she has been doing since 2015—lighting up people’s lives with the world she has created where good vibes are always welcome.
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Images: Supplied & Feature Image: sourced
