Clothing Company Definitions — United States clothing company definitions from Apparel Search
This index lists United States clothing company definitions for companies whose names begin with the letter L. The six companies are La Lumia, Lands' End, Le Tigre Clothing, League Collegiate Wear, Levi Strauss & Co. and London Fog, covering a TriBeCa designer retailer, a Wisconsin catalog clothing company, a retro logo sportswear brand, a college bookstore apparel supplier, the maker of Levi's denim jeans, and a raincoat manufacturer, and each name links to a full definition page describing the company, its products and its history.
Return to the Clothing Companies section in our apparel definitions area or check the fashion company profiles by Apparel Search in our fashion names directory.
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The six L companies span more than a century of American clothing and almost every way of selling it. The oldest is Levi Strauss & Co., founded in San Francisco in 1853 and known worldwide for Levi's riveted denim jeans, patented with tailor Jacob Davis in 1873. London Fog follows in 1923, founded in Baltimore as the Londontown clothing company by Israel Myers, maker of waterproof clothing for the United States Navy in the Second World War and later of the raincoats that, by the 1970s, accounted for two-thirds of all raincoats sold in the United States.
Lands' End represents the catalog model: begun as a sailboat equipment company in Chicago in 1963, based in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, and built on mail order and Internet sales of casual clothing, luggage and home furnishings under a Guaranteed. Period. return policy. La Lumia is the smallest operation on the page and the most personal: a retail and manufacturing company established in TriBeCa, New York City in 1985 by Fashion Institute of Technology graduate Jackie Sencion, who has designed, produced and sold her own clothing through her store since its opening.
Le Tigre Clothing and League Collegiate Wear complete the set from two licensed and logo-driven corners of the trade. Le Tigre, conceived in 1977 by Bob Rush of Hampton Industries around a leaping tiger logo, was relaunched in 2001 and purchased by Kenneth Cole Productions in 2007, positioning itself as a retro inspired alternative to other logo bearing brands. League Collegiate Wear, begun in 1990 in Bridgeport, Pennsylvania, sells university-licensed sportswear through the college bookstore market to over 2000 colleges and universities, blending Ivy League heritage with current styling.
United States clothing companies are filed alphabetically by company name, one letter per index page, so a company can be found by its first letter even when its full history is unknown. Each definition is a concise profile rather than a full company history: founding facts, headquarters, products, brands and lines, ownership where it is notable, and the events that made the company worth defining. The L page shows the range the alphabet produces, because a global denim corporation, a raincoat maker, a catalog retailer, a one-store designer business, a revived logo brand and a collegiate licensee share nothing except an initial.
Readers who need more depth on a company can follow the path into the Apparel Search fashion company profiles in the names directory, where major companies carry fuller profiles. Companies change — they are acquired, renamed, relaunched or close — so a definition records the company as described at the time of writing, including dated facts such as acquisitions and product launches with their years, so the record stays useful even after the company itself has moved on.
The letter also shows how many different meanings the word company covers in the clothing trade. Levi Strauss & Co. is a manufacturer and brand owner with divisions on three continents, while La Lumia is a single designer designing, making and retailing under one roof in one neighbourhood. Lands' End built its business without depending on stores at all, shipping from a Wisconsin base to customers it never met, while League Collegiate Wear sells almost entirely through other institutions, the bookstores of the universities whose names its garments carry. London Fog sold through its own stores as well as wholesale, and Le Tigre changed hands as a brand asset, its leaping tiger logo worth more than any factory. A definition has to capture each of those structures, because two companies with similar products can be organised in completely different ways.
Chronology is part of the value of the list. The founding dates on this one page run from 1853 to 1990, so the L index alone touches the age of riveted workwear, the age of branded rainwear, the catalog age, the logo sportswear age and the licensing age of American clothing. Reading the definitions together shows the industry changing its methods — from making garments, to branding them, to licensing the brand itself — while the garments underneath, jeans, raincoats, sweatshirts and polo shirts, stay recognisably the same.
For a researcher, the definitions also preserve details that company marketing tends to smooth away: the sailboat equipment behind Lands' End and the typographical error inside its name, the Honduran leather co-op behind LaLu Leathers, the removable liner patent behind London Fog, and the plant expansion figures behind Levi Strauss. Facts of that kind are what make a directory definition more useful than a brand's own current self-description, because they explain how the company came to be what it is, and they are exactly the details recorded on the six definition pages linked from this index.
The L list covers La Lumia, Lands' End, Le Tigre Clothing, League Collegiate Wear, Levi Strauss & Co. and London Fog. Each name links to that company's definition page.
Each definition page describes the company itself: what it makes or sells, when and where it was founded, the brands and lines it owns, and the notable events in its history, in a short standardised profile format.
Use the United States clothing company definition directory to reach the index page for every letter from A to Z. Fuller company profiles are also available in the Apparel Search fashion company profiles in the names directory.