From Her Parents’ Basement To Paris Couture Week

Monique Lhuillier is a name synonymous with glamour. And it’s taken some time to get there.

The 50-year-old designer has spent the last 25 years not only creating some of the world’s most exquisite bridal gowns and red-carpet showstoppers, but building an eponymous luxury lifestyle brand with reach far beyond her $7,000 dresses.

All of which, Lhuiller tells me, feels a far cry from the start of her journey in 1996, when she was fresh out of fashion school and newly engaged.

“I started the search for a wedding dress, but that proved to be a little challenging,” she says. “It was hard to find wedding dresses that were beautiful but contemporary, so I just started making one!”

Quickly, Lhuillier realized there was a gap in the market for more extravagant, hyper-feminine gowns, and began to work on a bridal collection of her own.

“I didn’t have a business plan and I didn’t think about the next 20 years, or even the next year. I just wanted to put beautiful dresses out there and worked hard day by day, week by week, to make it happen.”

Comparative to the industry standard, Monique Lhuillier was the leanest high fashion start-up around. Designs were drawn and brought to life from her parents’ basement for many years, and her financial strategies were brainstormed with her new husband, Tom Bugbee, as he took his MBA at USC.

“In hindsight, I’m so glad I started in bridal because the pace is slower than ready-to-wear,” she says. “There’s only two collections a year, so I was really able to hone in on the craft.”

To start, Lhuillier worked on the finer details of the collection from Monday to Thursday and left Fridays open to take samples to bridal boutiques.

“We struggled to be taken seriously; wedding dresses are not inexpensive, so getting people to trust in such a young brand isn’t easy,” she admits, “but we gained that trust by making women feel like the most beautiful versions of themselves.”

For four years she focused strictly on bridalwear, with word of mouth spreading like wildfire around the local Los Angeles area.

“Stylists would say to me ‘if you’ve made this in color, I would love to put this on the red carpet!’. It made me wonder. Why am I just dressing a woman for the most important day of her life, when I could be there for all the most important days of her life?”

As a business, ready-to-wear had the potential to turn one-off clients into repeat customers. And while being based in Los Angeles, rather than any of the world’s fashion capitals, might work against designers trying to create luxury products, Lhuillier’s unique and experimental creations slowly but surely became the go-to gowns for Hollywood’s elite.

Loyal celebrity fans include Reese Witherspoon, Emma Stone, Halle Berry, Blake Lively, Gwyneth Paltrow, Taylor Swift, Regina King, Jessica Alba, and former First Lady Michelle Obama, among others.

“Every time someone said my name on the red carpet, it helped market us and build brand recognition. They’re pivotal moments.”

At one point, Lhuillier dressed eight celebrities in one night for the Golden Globes—an all-time record for a single designer.

It is when those celebrities get married in her dresses, however, that Lhuillier feels most proud. And sanctions the biggest spike in sales.

Reese Witherspoon’s blush pink wedding dress, for example, caused such a stir for the brand in 2011 it has not only stayed in the collection permanently, but given Lhuillier a signature color.

She tells me the dress on the cover of her debut book (Monique Lhuillier: Dreaming Of Fashion and Glamour, with a foreword from Witherspoon herself) is a celebration of exactly that, spilling across the page in blush pink, organza-packed perfection (“people did not stop calling for that dress!”).

It is a collection of those moments, in fact, that have allowed Lhuillier to expand and create touch-points for every moment of her customer’s life.

To date, her licensed product portfolio includes fragrance, Monique Lhuillier & Pottery Barn collections (including Kids and Teen lines), the ML Monique Lhuillier diffusion line, lingerie, fine jewelry, wedding invitations and home fragrance, transforming the company into a luxury lifestyle brand.

Of course, some categories are more difficult to develop and manufacture products for than others. “I always want to do accessories but it was daunting because designing accessories actually takes longer than designing dresses,” she admits. “I had to learn a lot again.”

In time, Lhuillier was able to adapt to changing manufacturing demands between all Lhuillier productions, creating seamless collections she’d forever be proud to attach her name to.

But there was still something missing.

As the daughter of a French diplomat (a position her father held for multiple decades), Lhuillier had long set her sights on showing a couture collection in Paris, but felt the time was never quite right.

It was only four years ago, after showing in New York Fashion Week for a decade, that she took the plunge and flew her entire team to Paris to present at the Place Vendôme.

“It was exhilarating because it’s the biggest platform for fashion in the world,” she smiles, allowing herself to bask in the memory for a moment. “In the future I’d love a bigger presence internally so it felt like a dream come true.”

Dreams were halted throughout the pandemic, of course, thanks to many months of wedding and celebration-free lockdowns, but the recent return of said occasions has given Lhuillier a new—and interestingly, more digital—approach to expanding her business.

“When the pandemic first hit a lot of stores were on high alert and didn’t want that much inventory, so we put that inventory on our site and we were very encouraged by the results.”

Even better, her small but strong homeware collection was flying off the shelves as confined masses opted to splash their spare cash on interior spruce-ups.

“That business was thriving,” she says. “We were so grateful to be diverse”

It’s diversity—particularly into the beauty industry—that Lhuillier is drawn towards as she thinks about the next 25 years of her business, too.

“I mean, it takes a village. I am in front of a whole group of people who work tirelessly to make these dreams come true, so we’re all grateful when they do.”