Toteme, the fashion label, is not a word. But it comes from one.
“I had the idea of ‘Totem,’” said Karl Lindman, who co-founded the company 10 years ago with his wife, Elin Kling. They married the same year.
“One of the meanings of the word ‘totem’ — and there are a lot — is a symbol for the like-minded,” Mr. Lindman, 42, said.
But Ms. Kling, 41, thought the name sounded too “masculine.” She was making clothes for women. So she suggested adding an “e,” elongating and softening the pronunciation. The addition also gave symmetry to a square-shaped monogram that Mr. Lindman, then the design director of Interview magazine, had been developing.
“It’s our take on the word,” he said. As I sat across from the couple at a long wooden table in the backyard of their Hamptons, N.Y., home, I wondered if there was a Swedish word for “totem.” Mr. Lindman paused for a moment: “It’s the same.”
Mr. Lindman and Ms. Kling are both Swedish, based in Stockholm, but they come to Long Island every July. Their shingled home in Amagansett, purchased about three years ago, is as close as you can get to the beach without living on it.
Yet they should not be confused for Hamptons types; they are walking advertisements for Toteme, a brand often referred to in fashion media as “minimalist.” That word makes Ms. Kling wrinkle her nose.
“To me, it’s more about strength,” she said. “Pragmatic.”
“It’s not wrong to say that sweet Swedish fashion has been quite minimal and utilitarian and practical in the past,” Mr. Lindman added. “That being our heritage is something that we embrace. But we’re not doing it only for the sake of it. We’re designing clothes that make sense for you and your life, and they tend to be quite minimal.”
Toteme is built around what fashion people call “elevated basics”: classic silhouettes in rich textiles, with just a touch of design. Like a nice blazer, somewhere between sleek and oversize, made from a fabric blend described on Toteme’s website as having “a spongy hand feel.” (It costs $980.) They are not reinventing the wheel, but they are dressing the wheel in a way that makes her feel composed, smart and secure in her style. Can an outfit be punctual?
Maybe if it’s Swedish. When I arrived at their Amagansett home exactly one minute before our scheduled meeting, the first remark Mr. Lindman made was that my timing was “very Swedish.”
The couple really is very Swedish: humble and hospitable, only dryly funny, with light hair, high foreheads, blue eyes — more blue when they have their summer tans — and two children, ages 6 and 9, who were seen but not heard.
They have an office in Stockholm with about 150 people, as well as employees in London and New York. Yet Toteme has found much of its success in the United States, the label’s “focus market,” Mr. Lindman said. On Sept. 10, when they open a boutique on Madison Avenue in Manhattan, four of their 15 stores will operate in the United States. These American stores are the largest and best-performing, according to the company.
Sales in the United States have quadrupled in the last three years, a spokeswoman said. The company’s global revenue was $150 million last year.
“It does incredible in the U.S.,” confirmed Alison Loehnis, the interim chief executive and president of Yoox Net-a-Porter, which has stocked Toteme since its first collection. (In those early days, the only place you could buy Toteme online was Net-a-Porter.) “I would not say in any way it is a specifically American aesthetic, but the fact that it resonates so keenly and in the biggest market, it doesn’t shock me.”
So it made some sense that Toteme chose to join the New York Fashion Week calendar this season. On Tuesday, it will present a summer collection of mostly black and white pieces meant for “high summer in the city,” Ms. Kling said. (Forget the Hamptons, although I did spot one lemony yellow look in the lineup during a preview with the designer on Zoom.)
Ms. Kling herself prefers to dress in black during the summer. She finds it looks more “sharp and elegant” than the typical colorful sundress.
“I like to wear a white dress in November and a black dress in July,” she said. When she’s not wearing Toteme, her uniform is a Charvet shirt, vintage Levi’s and Cartier jewelry.
Ms. Kling, a former fashion blogger and magazine editor, was already living in New York when she met a fellow expat, Mr. Lindman. As they built Toteme, she would focus on design, and he on packaging.
“Sweden is quite an equal country,” she said. “The women are quite independent. But I have to say, I also feel the same way in New York.”
Her goal has been to make “clothes for the working woman,” she said: “There needs to be a reality, a simplicity.” Ms. Kling and her husband often talk about how they’re more interested in style than fashion.
“I think they’re underplaying themselves,” said Camilla Nickerson, an influential stylist who is working on Toteme’s New York runway show, and who was “immediately inspired” by Ms. Kling.
“She has an uncompromising and quietly assertive sense of design,” Ms. Nickerson said. “That’s what women need right now.”
While the couple founded the company here, they returned to Stockholm in 2016 to find a “sense of purpose,” Mr. Lindman said. In the Swedish capital, he said, “people are sort of happier with what they’ve got.” It has been easier to retain employees and build a long-term business there.
They call Toteme their third child, and people sometimes ask whether working together ever complicates their marriage.
“For most people, it’s complicated to organize a trip or a renovation because suddenly you have to work together,” Mr. Lindman said. “For us, that’s our default mode. When we don’t have a project to work on, we’re like, ‘What are we going to talk about?’”
In the early days of the company, Toteme struggled to get the attention of department stores. (Wholesale today represents about 50 percent of sales; Nordstrom is their largest account in the United States.) Streetwear and logos were more trendy than “quiet luxury” at the time.
“We never had a strategy of ‘let’s conquer America’ or ‘let’s go to France,’” Mr. Lindman said. (The brand’s first runway show was held in Paris in January.)
But over the years, certain pieces, like a T-lock bag with a curved handle, have exploded in popularity in cities outside of Stockholm. Toteme has sold more than 30,000 of these purses, the company said, in different variations. A wool jacket with a built-in scarf, priced at $1,130 was once called a “worldwide phenomenon.”
The founders’ reaction to these viral moments is, of course, very Swedish: “For good and bad, we don’t really celebrate any success,” Mr. Lindman said. “We’re always sort of like, ‘What could we have done better?’”
Still, it is a success that these pieces are not yet passé to customers. The scarf jacket was released two years ago, which might as well be seven in fashion years. Yet Ms. Loehnis, the Yoox Net-a-Porter president, said new versions of the scarf coat remained Toteme’s top seller on the Net-a-Porter site.
“It’s also our most engaged kind of fashion-forward customers who are buying it,” Ms. Loehnis said.
Which may explain why I recently came across a box of matches that said, in capital letters on one side, “The Row & Khaite & Toteme.” The matchboxes were made by Jess Graves, who writes The Love List, a popular shopping Substack, as a kind of inside joke for her fashionista readers. These are the brands that excite them — Toteme because of how particularly unexciting it can be.
“They really know who their customer is,” Ms. Graves said during a dinner for her newsletter in New York last week. “I hate to use the term, but I think it’s the ‘quiet luxury’ girl. It’s the girl who likes to build a wardrobe of items that last a long time.”
“I mean, these shoes are cool,” Ms. Graves continued, pointing to the sharp square-toe Phoebe Philo heels she was wearing, “but they’re going to look stupid in two years.”
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