How Lucila Safdie Became the Go-To Brand for Internet It-Girls

That decision has shaped the label’s trajectory. Rather than allowing a single hero product to dominate, Safdie expanded the narrative across collections, pushing further into tailoring and Old Hollywood references. Notably, she initially removed the Peachy shorts in her second collection, before reintroducing updated versions as part of a broader balancing act. The tension between maintaining recognizable signatures and demonstrating evolution remains central to her strategy.

“It’s been a journey of pushing myself creatively — in pattern-cutting, in the pieces I want to make,” she says. Today, the brand’s revenue base is more diversified. Headbands, bikinis, shorts and polos form the commercial backbone, functioning as accessible entry points into the Safdie world. “The polos have been super successful,” Safdie notes, attributing their performance to their wearability and price positioning.

The result is a clearer product ladder. Entry-level pieces allow customers to “buy into the brand immediately”, while more directional runway looks reinforce the fantasy and press narrative. For Safdie, the challenge is ongoing: retaining the recognizability that made the Peachy shorts a breakout hit, without becoming defined by them.

Turning community into commerce

Safdie’s most distinctive growth lever is what she builds around the clothes. In an era when many young brands rely heavily on digital advertising and influencer seeding, Safdie has prioritized IRL experiences. Physical gatherings allow her to collapse the distance between herself and her consumers, turning what might otherwise be a passive online audience into an active network.

I first met the designer at one such dinner in 2024. She had hand-selected a book for every guest — mine was The Virgin Suicides — and I have since attended one of her screenings, where the audience itself felt part of the mise-en-scène. “When we do a pop-up or a film club and we see girls walking down the street, we’re like, ‘OK, they’re coming to the pop-up.’ You immediately know. It’s not even a question mark,” she says.

The brand’s protagonist is drawn from Safdie herself, plus the women around her — a composite of personal references and lived experience. “It’s intuitive. That’s why I don’t do menswear because I wouldn’t know from which place to make it,” she says. The instinct-led approach is commercially meaningful: it creates a customer who sees herself reflected in the brand, and a brand that, in turn, understands her intimately. Crucially, community-building was never conceived as a strategy. “It wasn’t like, ‘Oh, I’m going to make the film club for marketing.’ It was more like, ‘I want to decide which movies I want to watch on the big screen and invite all the girls that like the brand.’”

The next phase is geographic. With roughly 65% of demand coming from the US, around 20% from Asia, and the remainder from Europe, Safdie is looking to export the IRL model. “I really want to do pop-ups in the US and Asia. I really want to travel as well. Most of the stuff I do is in London, so I’d love to do things around the world,” she says. Rather than approaching international expansion as a wholesale push alone, she frames it as cultural replication, recreating the intimacy of her East London screenings and studio gatherings in cities where her online audience is already concentrated.

Runway ambitions are similarly measured. “I would love to do a fashion show at some point. I’m not saying presentations forever, but I feel like right now, at the stage my brand is at, it feels more fun,” she says.

In a market saturated with brands chasing algorithmic growth, Safdie’s approach feels almost countercultural: build the world, gather the people, and let the sales follow.