“I don’t want clothes to overtake my life,” the designer Nili Lotan said in her TriBeCa showroom. “I just want to wear them and let them serve me.”
For 22 years, Ms. Lotan has owned her namesake line — a tight collection that synthesizes elements of Americana, 1960s bohemia, military jackets and barrel-leg pants. “I started my business for women with what you need, and then I’ve added what you want,” she said.
Ms. Lotan, 68, lives in TriBeCa with her husband, the singer David Broza. She has built the business, which generated $100 million in revenue last year, mostly by word of mouth. In late August, she will introduce her first line of handbags.
“I’m not really one of these fashion designers who was dreaming to be a fashion designer,” Ms. Lotan said. She grew up in Israel outside Tel Aviv. Her Russian father and Hungarian mother married two weeks after meeting at an Austrian refugee camp after World War II. When Ms. Lotan finished military service, she was accepted and graduated from Shenkar College of Engineering, Design and Art.
She visited New York for the first time in 1978 on a honeymoon with her first husband, with whom she has three children. They drove across the country from New York to San Diego, up the West Coast to Washington and back to Queens, where her husband had family. She worked on the design teams at Liz Claiborne, Nautica and Ralph Lauren.
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