The cofounders of women’s luxury label La Ligne, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary, have something that a lot of other founders don’t: a leadership dynamic rooted in friendship.

Cofounders Molly Howard, Valerie Macaulay and Meredith Melling joined a conversation called “Made Together: Friendship, Ambition & the Future of Fashion,” moderated by WWD news director Lisa Lockwood, at the 2026 WWD x FN x Beauty Inc. Women in Power event in New York on Monday.

All three left established careers to build La Ligne from the ground up. The spark for their wardrobe staple-focused label came when chief brand officer Melling and chief creative officer Macaulay were working together at Vogue. One day, Melling came into Macaulay’s office with an idea. “She said ‘Wouldn’t it be great to just have a line of stripes?’ and it was like a lightning bolt,” Macaulay recalled.

La Ligne’s chief executive officer Howard, who came from business development at Rag & Bone, rounded out the group with her finance expertise. The three operate with a majority-rule decision-making process and defer to the others’ strengths based on the matter at hand.

When Macaulay walked into Melling’s office at Vogue, it aligned with a cultural turning point with the advent of Instagram and faster trend cycles. Despite the very name of their publication, the Vogue staffers weren’t buying into the fads — and that spoke to something which La Ligne tries to embody.

“The way we were consuming content was changing,” Melling said. “The way designers had to make clothes to feed the beast was changing. We found ourselves having to report on all these micro-trends churning over and over, but when we looked around the offices, there was this idea of a uniform dressing. A lot of women we worked with, who could have access to any of the trends they wanted immediately, were often reverting to a classic Breton striped shirt or a Charvet shirt that they picked up at the shows in Paris.”

The staying power and versatility behind La Ligne pieces are the driving forces behind the designs, which include pieces like striped sweaters, jeans, collared shirts, lacy camisoles and more.

Throughout their 10 years in business, the founders have dealt with their fair share of obstacles, from the COVID-19 pandemic to tariffs. But their small leadership team has been a boon throughout, and they’ve kept their start-up mentality even as the brand has grown.

The brand takes pride in having only three board members, the founders themselves, which allows them to make decisions more rapidly.

La Ligne is focused on championing and collaborating with other women, like Dianna Agron and Erin Walsh. La Ligne doesn’t do runway shows and prefers to let the women who wear the clothes tell the brand how they want to style them. The founders launched a portrait series alongside the brand called La Bande, which features women, some men, some children — and some dogs — modeling La Ligne pieces in the ways they choose to style them.

With 10 years in the books, La Ligne is still climbing; a collaboration with Banana Republic, which the larger brand initiated, is evidence of its growth.