Local designers Gillian Rose Kern and Laura Hall of For Love and Lemons create a festival line dedicated to looks for Coachella and other festivals for later this year.
What to wear to Coachella has become as intense a dilemma for many festival-goers as deciding which acts to watch perform. Crop tops, everything fringe, flower crowns and flowing dresses are high in demand come festival season, and a growing number of designers big and small are dedicating entire collections to bohemian attire fit for the three-day party in Indio.
One such company is For Love and Lemons, a six-year old fashion company based in the Arts District in Los Angeles, founded and owned by longtime best friends and Wyoming-natives Gillian Rose Kern and Laura Hall.
The pair has never actually attended Coachella themselves, but Coachella’s ballooning influence came to them about three years ago when they noticed a spike in customers seeking apparel specifically for the annual music festival in the desert. To address the demand they created a specific “festival line,” for the first time this year . The clothing is meant to also apply to other music festivals and mass gatherings such as Burning Man and Outside Lands .
Their Festival Collection is about balancing comfort and risk taking and consists of sixteen pieces in an ivory and black color palette with a few florals, mainly all dresses, and a few exclusive high waisted undergarments to wear underneath the sheer garments. It was designed as a collaboration with the jewelry line Jacquie Aiche.
DnA talked to the designing duo and learned about what makes the quintessential Coachella outfit, how Instagram has been a game-changer and why big companies like H&M are getting in on the action.
DnA: How did your brand For Love and Lemons get started?
Gillian Rose Kern: Well Laura and I have been best friends since we were very little. We used to have lemonade stands together, that’s where the name comes from. We’ve been in business pretty much ever since.
Then I went to design school and Laura majored in marketing. And after that we met back up and moved to Australia and we did fashion internships there, and while we were there we decided to start our own line.
So we moved back home, we are from Wyoming, and we were working and saving up money and sewing our collection, and we took those samples and went to Bali, because the people we worked with in Australia told us about factories we could go to in Bali, so we went there and made a very small production run and brought it back and did trunk shows throughout California, Colorado and Wyoming and we finally found a showroom, and then we moved our production to L.A., and we started growing and getting in great stores here and online and we started growing our social media presence pretty quickly. We started with clothes and then expanded into lingerie and now we are also working on a knitwear collection as well.
DnA: Tell us about your festival collection.
GRK: We wanted to create something that we knew a girl had to wear at any festival throughout the summer. It’s basically an extension of our normal clothing line, it’s just a little easier to wear, it’s light, airy, sheer-looking pieces.
Some of the garments are a little bit more risky than our normal collection, because we know that girls at festivals like to wear their bikinis underneath. We do do a lot of lace dresses, so I would say that with the lace dresses you wouldn’t wear a lining underneath, and you might wear a bikini or a body suit or paired up with our Skivvies, our lingerie line which is a little bit more full coverage than normal lingerie, but it also does the easy, airy, casual cool.
DnA: Collections tend to revolve around seasons, and you guys have a festival collection. So is this is I guess a new type of season that’s emerging?
GRK: Yeah it is. But this is the first time we’ve done it. Normally we just design our spring collection with some pieces for festivals in mind, because that’s the same time that it comes out. But this time we decided to create this festival capsule collection, and it’s crazy how well we do with it. It’s insane. We sent some girls to the festival this year to take pictures, and they said that there just were so many people in our stuff.
Laura Hall: Our spring collection has been out for a couple of months now, so girls want to be wearing something brand new that nobody has ever seen before.
You just want to feel like you are going to stand out in it.
DnA: What is the quintessential Coachella outfit?
LH: I would say a sheer long maxi dress and and pairing under it a highwaisted underwear and a bra with a pair of comfortable boots and a little cute hat to protect your face from the sun and a backpack.
DnA: What do you think about H&M’s Coachella-specific line and other big brands getting in on the Coachella bandwagon?
GRK: I mean it’s smart for them to do that, because there’s a huge demand for it. But I do think that girls when they are going to festivals, they want something from a smaller brand, because it’s more unique and they won’t run into a bunch of people wearing the same thing. But I think that all designers are looking at these festivals and saying this is something I need to pay attention to and be a part of.
DnA: Did you participate in Los Angeles Fashion Week?
GRK: We haven’t. We are more of a lookbook brand, so we are really big on our images, so we put most of our advertising into our lookbooks.
DnA: It seems like in a way Coachella is an unofficial version of Los Angeles fashion week.
GRK: I think you’re definitely right on that, because it’s the California fashion right there, it sums it up at those festivals.
Los Angeles Fashion Week is not New York, it’s not Paris. So for us when you showcase what you’re wearing, what your personal style is, festivals are the best way to do it, people really go all out for it.
People think about their outfits weeks and weeks in advance, people treat Coachella and other festivals like their runway in a way. They know they’re going to get photographed, and they know they’re going to be on blogs, and they know that their Instagrams are going to go everywhere. So it really is where L.A. fashion is.
LH: And all the celebrities and influencers that go, they all want to be wearing exclusive styles, so we actually created exclusive styles this year that we made sure that nobody else was going to wear.
