Leave it to a fit model to know how clothes should feel, move and look.
Knowledge is one thing. It’s another to parlay that into a denim brand — a tough business dominated by the likes of Levi’s and Gap, except at fashion’s highest echelons. It takes a certain fearlessness to pull it off.
Fortunately for Paige, the Los Angeles-based luxury apparel brand marking its 20th anniversary, and its eponymous cofounder and chief creative officer, Paige Adams-Geller, the cup appears to runneth over when it comes to fearlessness.
For proof, consider her trajectory.
As a small town teen, she fell in love with fashion by poring over magazines. It’s a familiar story, with a crucial twist: This wasn’t Ohio or Iowa, but Alaska. In an era without style blogs, TikTok or Expedia, that might as well have been Mars. Her fashion dream wasn’t going to come to her.
So the intrepid Alaskan crossed the expanse instead — and found it in California as a fit model and then design consultant before becoming a fashion founder with her husband, Michael Geller, and Michael Henschel.
Together, they launched Paige in 2004 as a women’s denim brand. Today, it’s a bustling, multicategory apparel company for men and women with a growing spate of retail stores, product in high-end department stores and a revamped e-commerce business — led by the Geller family, including Michael’s children.
But those early memories in Alaska aren’t forgotten. In fact, they inspired Paige’s new 20th anniversary capsule collection, coming this month, its namesake founder told WWD.
Paige Adams-Geller
The 20th Anniversary Capsule, Fall and More
It’s easy to imagine a young Paige Adams-Geller flipping through glossy pages and marveling at the supermodels of the era. She loved the glamour of icons such as Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista and Naomi Campbell.
The black-and-white photography of Peter Lindbergh and Helmut Newton stuck with her too and served as the inspiration for her anniversary collection palette.
“It felt really right to put together a capsule that was representing the past, the present and the future of the brand and to have everything in the collection black and white, and to represent some of our iconic silhouettes — like the Laurel Canyon, the first jean I ever designed — but bringing it forward in a new way, like in a beautiful leather fashion silhouette,” Adams-Geller said.
One grouping will show elevated pieces and fabrics such as lace, a pearl-coated white or ivory denim and cashmere — like a long cashmere turtleneck dress, which is part of the lineup.
Another set offers a dramatic tonal shift. That little jolt, however, seems like the point of a selection meant to be striking and impactful.
“If it was sitting in a pop-up at Selfridges, it would be like something that would look completely different,” Adams-Geller said. “It would be edgier, cooler and more rock ’n’ roll, and have a little bit of that British rock star element to it. And [I’m imagining] the supermodels that I was obsessed with wearing it and being photographed in black and white.”
The fundamental themes and colors set the anniversary capsule apart from the softer approach of the brand’s fall 2024 line, which invokes warm fall tones and bohemian elements, though there’s some fashion time travel here too, given the 1970s energy.
The men’s fall 2024 line also includes odes to the past: A new fabrication called “Paige Heritage” combines aspects of vintage 20th-century denim with a modern touch via a softer, more comfortable feel. Meanwhile, Paige is staging a comeback for the Doheny, its original relaxed straight-leg fit.
Women’s fall 2024
Men’s fall 2024
The Family Business — Then, Now and What’s Next
Paige has come a long way from its initial focus on premium jeans for women, opening the aperture to take in a broader range of fashion, such as blouses, dresses, shoes, outerwear, accessories, men’s, swimwear and others. Some debuted early, while others, like swimwear, arrived just this year.
There’s a growing number of Paige stores to carry them all too. The first one, in L.A., opened in 2005 — which was a bold move for a young brand that was a year old or less. But Adams-Geller loves to see customers enjoy or play with the clothes, so it’s not entirely a surprise. Now there are 25 U.S. locations but the brand wants to open more.
Last year, Paige set up its first shop in London, which really seems to delight Adams-Geller, who’s an anglophile.
“It’s my favorite city in the world,” she said, adding that the locals have been so warm and welcoming that she’s weighing a second boutique there. She figures shoppers probably recognize it from online shopping or places like Harrods and Selfridges. That’s a powerful perk of selling both direct-to-consumer and wholesale. It’s not clear if this effect will her next UK opening in Bicester, which is an hour and a half from London, this November.
A constantly iterating business — adding categories, entering markets, designing collections, not to mention e-commerce — looks like a lot to handle. But Geller and Adams-Geller picked up reinforcements: the CEO’s daughter and son, Allie Geller Brown and Jon Geller, joined over the years and have turned Paige into even more of a family affair.
Jon Geller, men’s president
Geller Brown, a degreed public relations pro, first worked in PR at Paige before rising to chief marketing officer and e-commerce lead.
Jon Geller brings chops in fashion, product development, merchandising and sales to his role as men’s president.
“Men’s has become a massive, massive part of our business,” he said. “And much like women’s, it’s as much lifestyle and ready-to-wear product as it is denim these days, which is really exciting.
“We’ve introduced shoes and additional accessories, much like the women’s team has,” he said. “I think for us, as we lean into this 20th anniversary, we’re recontextualizing [this] classic, modern man. That’s sort of how we’ve approached it.”
As the men’s president was transforming today’s man and Adams-Geller stylistically decoded time travel, Geller Brown was swathed in actual code and data working on Paige’s e-commerce overhaul — for a year and a half.
“From start to finish, it was about an 18-month process, and we decided to essentially dissect the entire tech stack, top to bottom,” she said. “We kept joking we were looking under the hood and pulling every part apart and assessing if every single vendor was the best in class, best for our business.”
Allie Geller Brown
Performing an e-commerce autopsy like this — or perhaps a deep tech cleaning — is not for the faint of heart. But the work seems to have paid off, because that forensic evaluation led the company to implement a Shopify integration to improve the brand’s e-commerce experience.
Specifically, Paige chose Shopify Plus for headless e-commerce — a scenario where the front end (such as public features and customer experiences) gets separated from the back end (like business databases, inventory or other operational systems).
Once free from those shackles, merchants or developers have more flexibility and freedom to develop better, more cohesive or more ubiquitous features. Naturally, in a Shopify context, the platform offers tools to make that easier.
It’s all part of what the platform calls Unified Commerce, where selling can happen IRL, online or even in third-party apps or sites. Shoppers would get a seamless, ubiquitous and consistent experience, while brands manage it all in one place.
That place would be Shopify, of course.
“We wanted to make sure that a customer, whether they’re international or here in the States, they could shop our inventory from our website or stores, make sure that they have the information on the stores to shop there as well,” she added. “So I think our biggest goal was to really make that process as easy as possible for the customer.”
Toward that end, the business also migrated to Shopify POS as well, which keeps it in the same ecosystem. According to Paige, it’s among the first apparel brands to go all in on both Shopify Plus and Shopify POS. Working with digital design agency Pattern, Paige launched the revamped site in June, but given the nature of this project, there are likely more changes to come, especially after the brand debuts their upcoming loyalty program.
Right now Paige, as well as the Gellers, are meeting their milestone, perhaps as one should — with a little nostalgia, an eye on the future and a little fearlessness.
