Leah Gans of Les Miss
- nora comtois
- May 27
- 5 min read
At Gallatin, Leah initially started studying fashion but after some internships, she decided to change her concentration to Child and Adolescent Psychopathology and Education Policy with a minor in Child and Adolescent Mental Health Studies. After graduating college in 2020, she started working in retail when she was applying to graduate schools.
While working at a jewelry store, Leah felt inspired. With a gift card she got for Christmas, she bought beads and started making jewelry which she then sold at flea markets every weekend for the next year and a half. Quitting her retail job in 2021, Leah created the Les Miss brand where she sold her jewelry along with handmade clothing from other brands like her friends’. In May of 2022, she released her first clothing collection called the Daydream collection. Since then, Les Miss has been seasonally releasing collections.
Leah says the brand name Les Miss is a mix between French and English. ‘Les’ means ‘the’ in French and ‘Miss’ means a single woman in English. “Les Miss is also a play-on-words because my brand is an antonym of Les Mis since it’s bright and cheerful instead of depressing and dark.” She describes her brand as “playful, sometimes ethereal, with elements from nature, and a goal is to spark joy in our childhood selves.” The reason the brand’s logo is a mushroom is because Leah's first jewelry designs were mushroom-based.
Currently, her title is Founder and Chief Creative Officer. She spends most of her time designing and styling along with creating graphic designs for the brand’s social media, but she also spends a lot of time in the store. She wears many hats in the business, but she hopes to be able to focus just on the creative aspects in the future.
Les Miss is sold at the Les Miss store in New York City, at Custom Land in Los Angeles, and at the MINIPNG in New Haven. At the NYC location, Les Miss sells their inhouse brand which includes clothing, jewelry, and accessories (socks, trucker hats, notebooks, etc.) and handmade pieces from other brands which includes clothing and accessories (hats, scarves, bags, etc.). (But Leah doesn’t like to limit herself with her creations; in the Fall, Les Miss is releasing a stuffed animal!) Part of the inhouse clothing is knitwear which Leah designs and her mom knits. All of the jewelry is inhouse. Recently, Les Miss also introduced a vintage collection with curated pieces Leah sources from thrifting and other consignors.
“Opening the store was definitely a huge achievement; it was so much work. After signing the lease, I had only one month to build out the store so I could pay the rent. I spent countless nights painting till 4:00 am in Winter with no heat. On opening day, there was a line outside of the store, so I was really proud.” A goal of hers this year is to open up a second location this year in Brooklyn. She also wants to build out some more wholesale accounts so Les Miss can be sold on Ssense or other platforms like that.
Leah says the design process varies depending on the collection, but she gets a lot of inspiration from vintage clothing, along with inspiration from Anna Sui, Betsey Johnson, and Morgan de Toi. “I start by sketching and making pinterest boards. Usually I have a clear vision for what I want the collection to be, so I build off of that. Once I have my designs, I build a tech pack (a long document that lays out every stitch and measurement to create the garment) and send it to my manufacturer. They send me samples and then I make edits and send the samples back. Sometimes it takes multiple rounds of sampling before getting to the final product.”
The clothing is manufactured overseas in China at a small factory which allows her to price fairly reasonably. The factory focuses on slow fashion and has ethical working conditions, which is very important to Leah. Initially she looked into factories in LA, but she didn’t like the fast fashion working conditions. “Because of purchasing power parity in China, you can get a better bang for your buck while also making sure that you are producing in an ethical way.” She says it was difficult finding a factory she liked — there was a lot of googling and emailing in the process. “I tried multiple factories and got multiple samples made and chose this one based on the quality and the communication style and what worked best. There are language barriers sometimes, but my best friend is fluent in Mandarin which helps a lot.”
For the recent Spring ‘23 collection called Feeling Fruity, Leah says she was inspired by vintage Betsey Johnson and other fruit print dresses, so she wanted to create her own modern version. When she was sketching and drawing the fruits, she didn’t feel like she was accomplishing her vision, so she reached out to artist Jordan French (one of her first friends at NYU) who painted the fruits which she then scanned and digitized to turn into the prints and patterns. She is really happy about the success. “The Feeling Fruity collection is one of the firs t collections that I’m 100% happy with. It came out exactly how I wanted it to come out. It’s probably our most successful collection!”
There’s only been a few collections so far, but another one of favorites was the Fall/Winter ‘23 collection called Flip Your Lid. The collection was a modern reinterpretation on 50’s trends, like the poodle skirt which Leah reinvented into a mini skirt. She also created another version of that mini skirt but with a cat on it.
“I think that it’s just really important to believe in yourself and trust your vision. There have been things, like the Daphne tank – a tank top with my cat ‘Daphne’ on it with wings – when I remember drawing it out and thinking ‘no one but me would wear this because it’s weird,’ but then it was one of our best selling items. If you love it, there is an audience out there for it, so don't give up. It’s a lot of hard work to try to do something on your own, but it’s really rewarding. For me, I can’t imagine myself doing anything else or I’d be really miserable,” Leah says.
