“They totally could sneak into a salad,” Gayot says. She gets it.
Of course, we’re not meeting to discuss my root vegetable preferences, but it suffices as an icebreaker for two strangers meeting over lunch. Though, as a fashion writer, I’ve been aware of Gayot since she was named head of women’s and kids’ design at J.Crew in late 2020.
Having previously worked at the storied American label from 2010–2017, the 41-year-old Toronto native rejoined during a pivotal time for the brand, herself, and the world. “They approached me during the pandemic,” she tells me. “It was a conversation that happened over a few months, and I was pregnant by the end of it. I was like, This is going to be intense; I’m pregnant and it’s the middle of a pandemic.” Plus, J.Crew had just come out of bankruptcy. The sterling mid-aughts era marked by soaring profits, Michelle Obama–approved designs, and the Midas touch of former president and creative director Jenna Lyons was in fashion’s rearview mirror. “But I knew that I wanted it,” she says. “It was such an incredible opportunity. I was just really excited.”
“Really?” I ask. “She discouraged it?”
“I think she just knew how fast-paced it is. And she just was like, ‘You’re a talented painter, and you can draw, so you should be doing that.’ And I loved it, probably more than anything.”
After a stint at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts in Boston, Gayot hopped on a bus to New York, applied to the School of Visual Arts, and promptly transferred. (She filled her parents in after the fact.) “I was always studying art and painting, and then doing fashion on the side—styling, assisting; I worked at DNA, the modeling agency, filing models’ portfolio pictures.” Living in Murray Hill with a friend she met bartending, it was not the college dorm experience you see in the movies. “I didn’t want that,” Gayot says between bites of salmon tartare. “I was ready to be an adult. I really wanted to start working and live my life.”
The drive followed her to Paris, where she moved after college with a former boyfriend. “It was always a dream of mine to live there,” she says. “I was doing portraits at the time, so I was surviving off a mix of random fashion jobs and selling paintings.”
Describing her time there as “amazing,” Gayot maintains she was “always really happy to just go wherever the wind took me. And in the beginning, honestly, I don’t think I had a plan. I just wanted to be busy. I loved art, I loved fashion, I loved getting dressed and going out at night. All that.”
Back in New York, the balance Gayot had struck between art and fashion began to tilt towards the latter. Painting, she says, “was very solitary,” and also “a boys’ club” that was often discouraging. She was finding more opportunities—and having more fun—doing freelance design projects, assisting on Vogue shoots, and styling retail displays. A friend she met while designing a private label for Urban Outfitters had landed at J.Crew, and encouraged Gayot to interview.
“I came in and met Jenna and I got hired.”
“I never thought I would end up at a big brand, but it was so amazing. Even though it is a big company, there’s a family style vibe to it, I think because it’s so creative. It was a really great place to be. I was there during the Jenna years. I stayed for seven years, worked my way up the ranks, and worked with her pretty closely; worked with Mickey Drexler closely. I did knits, I did swim, sweaters, collections—lots of different categories.”
Recalling J.Crew’s cropped kaleidoscopic pants, glitter pumps, and elevated takes on nautical- and military-inspired dressing at the time, I’m curious to know if she had a favorite.
“I love designing swim. Everybody’s the happiest when they’re on the beach, right? just a joyful category.” The role also came with a welcome dose of nostalgia. “My parents had a place in Florida, so growing up we’d go there for Christmas and we’d always go to the J.Crew store in Miami, or we’d go in New York. I loved it. It was so iconic.”
During Gayot’s initial tenure, J.Crew reached an unprecedented level of popularity. The brand’s collections were breathlessly covered by fashion media alongside luxury counterparts, and the pieces became a favorite among celebrities. Lyons became a star herself—her every outfit snapped by street style photographers and move documented by Page Six. After getting married and having her first child (she says she wore “a tight, black crochet dress with a six-month bump” to her 2016 City Hall wedding), Gayot was ready for a change. “Seven years was a long time for me to be at one place, and I feel like it’s really important to try multiple things to keep things fresh,” she says. “I got an opportunity to leave, and I just took it.”
That opportunity was at Victoria’s Secret, designing apparel, sleepwear, and lingerie. “Not bras and panties,” she clarifies, “but actual teddies.” It proved to be a tremendous learning experience. “Lingerie is a completely different world. It’s super technical, working with lace and constructing things that to your body. It’s literally intimate.” Given the fabrics she was working with and the volume of product the brand was producing, there were also big financial implications tied to her work. “That gets you into business mode, which is important. You can’t just design in a bubble.”
Gayot’s decision to step away after almost three years was largely influenced by the amount of traveling she was doing. Financial meetings were held at the company’s headquarters in Ohio, and the design aspect of the job required frequent trips to Europe. Mounting public scrutiny of the brand, it seems, wasn’t a factor.
“Fashion is tumultuous. It’s not always comfortable, but you have to just focus on—for me at least—I’ve always just focused on what I love to do, which is the design part of it.” Most large American brands, she notes, have struggled in recent years, for various reasons. “Everybody’s sort of having a hard time trying to find their place. Whether it’s about the items and what’s working and what’s not, and the financial success of the business, or if it’s a situation like Victoria’s Secret where there’s a lot of other stuff going on, there’s always something. I’ve never been anywhere where there hasn’t been something. So, you kind of have to just go with it.”
“The goal is to really just make clothes that people want to wear,” she says of what she’s aiming to accomplish. “J.Crew has so much heritage, and heritage is so crucial to the brand, obviously. However, I do really care about what’s happening in the industry, on the runways, in the streets, what people are actually wearing. And I think that in order to be a modern, relevant brand, you have to be aware of what’s going on, and you have to integrate that into your heritage to help build something new.”
She’s wearing some of those new pieces today: a convertible apron dress in yellow, and a metallic pair of lug-sole fisherman sandals. The outfit is complemented by her long, wavy blonde hair, which she tells me she has done by “the nicest guy on the planet,” Mauricio Bermudez at Suite Caroline in SoHo. Accessories include a beaded bracelet her son made at camp, a few others by AGMES, and various rings and necklaces—some vintage, some Repossi, some passed down from her mother and great-grandmother. The look was one of many Gayot has shared on Instagram, where she has more than 97,000 followers.
“Before J.Crew, I was private ,” she says. “I was not interested in ever being public.” While it wasn’t a mandate that she open her account up for public consumption, CEO Libby Wadle, who joined the brand a month after Gayot from sister brand Madewell, encouraged her to post snapshots of her life. “At first I was like, ‘Are you sure? I have, like, 300 followers—it’s kind of embarrassing. Do you guys want to help me somehow?’ And they were like, ‘No, no, you’ll get there.’” She started by sharing mood boards. “They’re a huge part of what I do, connecting the dots between fashion, art, furniture, architecture, culture—all that is super, super important to me. That’s how I build a collection. So initially, it was just sharing those, putting them on stories and letting people see the daily behind-the-scenes.” Next, she put the large mirror in her office to use, snapping pictures of how she styled and wore J.Crew pieces. “There were so many DMs that would come through, and a lot of people asking questions.” The engagement and feedback, she says, has been helpful in gauging what resonates with the J.Crew customer. “I don’t want to design in a silo. I want to know if people like things or not.” Her social media presence began to “snowball” when J.Crew started resharing her posts on the brand’s account. And though Gayot isn’t on TikTok herself, her designs and personal style are all over the app, as fashion enthusiasts regularly share and dissect screenshots of her outfits.
“When I think back to when I was really young and throughout my teens, and then living in New York in my 20s with all my friends, I loved to get my friends dressed up,” she says, shortly after we both decline a coffee or tea. “The pre-going-out was more fun than the going out for me, and it was always about accentuating their natural beauty and making them feel good. It’s a thing that I’ve always loved to do, and I guess now it’s my career.”
What’s on her schedule for the rest of the day before seeing them back home?
“I gotta go and do a bunch of meetings,” she says. “Fun stuff, though. Fittings.”
