Net-a-Porter's Vanguard Programme Bets on Three New York Labels for Quiet Luxury Growth

When Net-a-Porter named its 2026 Vanguard cohort on March 23, it didn't just hand three small labels a platform. It handed them Gabriela Hearst, the CEO of Rick Owens, and two chief executives who built Toteme into one of the defining quiet-luxury brands of the decade. The mentor list alone signals how seriously the retailer is treating its annual programme this year.

The three selected labels, all New York-based, are Kallmeyer, Colleen Allen, and Heirlome. Each will receive bespoke mentorship, strategic business guidance, and dedicated campaign support to spotlight their Spring/Summer 2026 collections. Brigitte Chartrand, Net-a-Porter's chief buying and merchandising officer, said the programme "reflects our continued commitment to identifying and investing in the most exciting emerging talent shaping the future of fashion," adding that all three labels demonstrate strong brand identity and clear growth potential.

The mentor pairings were constructed with obvious intentionality. Daniella Kallmeyer, the South African-born founder who launched her label in 2012 and has spent over a decade building a cult following among tailoring-conscious New Yorkers, will work with Net-a-Porter CEO Heather Kaminetsky and Toteme CEO Johanna Sjöberg. The alignment is deliberate: Kallmeyer's signature language of modular suiting, cotton-poplin shirts, and draped stretch-jersey dresses maps almost directly onto the Scandinavian minimalism Sjöberg helped commercialise at scale. "Emerging designers bring strong points of view," Sjöberg said, "but turning vision into a brand requires more than creativity. It needs infrastructure and strategy behind it."

Brooklyn-based Colleen Allen, who made her New York Fashion Week debut only in 2024 after stints at The Row and under Raf Simons at Calvin Klein, was paired with Elsa Lanzo, CEO of Rick Owens, and Katie Shillingford, fashion director at AnOther magazine. Allen's work, which layers utilitarian fabrics over vintage-inspired silhouettes with velvet as a recurring signature, occupies a distinct position: romantic without being retrospective, feminine without softening its structural edge.

The third label, Heirlome, represents a different strand of the craft-forward conversation entirely. Founded by Stephanie Suberville and Jeffrey Axford, the brand collaborates each season with artisans in Mexico and Latin America, working across weaving, knitting, embroidery, and print. Their mentors, designer Gabriela Hearst and sustainability advocate Aditi Mayer, reflect a programme track built around responsible production and cultural continuity rather than commercial scaling alone. Suberville said she was eager to use the programme's reach "to promote our brand and the work we are doing at a global scale."

What the 2026 Vanguard cohort makes visible is a particular retail thesis: that the next commercially significant heritage-adjacent brands will not emerge from European fashion houses but from small, independently run New York studios with a rigorous point of view on materials and construction. All three labels speak directly to a customer who has moved beyond logo signalling toward a quieter, more considered form of dressing. Net-a-Porter is not simply discovering them; it is building the infrastructure to make them legible to a global audience before anyone else does.