where have all the ganni girls gone?
spoiler: they're shopping at damson madder now.
Good morning! I’m packing for a wedding in Chicago this week, then headed to Italy (would love to hear your food and vintage shopping recs in the chat). My current travel shoe lineup: cobblestone-ready Keen Jasper sneakers and a pair of Martiniano glove flats in tomato red. Honestly, given all the lost luggage horror stories I’ve heard recently, I’m trying not to pack any of my irreplaceable vintage pieces…feels too risky.
In other news, the Hayley Williams concert in Oakland was such a fabulous time. I’m putting together a newsletter of reader-submitted looks from her EDAABP tour shows. Email vivthmole@gmail.com with (1) your name, (2) 1-2 sentences about your outfit, and (3) a photo of your outfit for inclusion. Will cap submissions end of next week, or once I get ~15 submissions!
In 2019, if you were shopping for a wedding guest dress, you basically had two options in the retail landscape.
You could go the Reformation/Realisation Par route and pick out a dress somewhere in the flirty-to-sexy spectrum. These dresses had ditsy florals and polka dots, with subtle ruching and smocked bodices that would lay the groundwork for the milkmaid frocks of the early 2020s. I remember reading that Jia Tolentino New Yorker essay about “Virtue and Vanity at Reformation” published in 2019 and thinking, this style and brand of dress has really ascended into a cultural object, hasn’t it??
And then there was the Ganni route—edgier, funkier, more rebellious. Specifically, that green and black checkered dress was everywhere. Publications deemed it the “dress of the summer” in 2019. I distinctly remember microbang muse/novelist Abigail Bergstrom wearing it to officiate Lydia Pang’s goth wedding, which altered my 20-something brain chemistry.
I was never a bona fide Ganni girl, but a lot of my friends were. We were early career working girls in the 2010s when Scandi soft power was in full swing. No one was completely immune to the zeitgeist, which was all hygge and smiley face stickers and pastel-colored outfits. We read Refinery29 articles about why Copenhagen Fashion Week was “actually” the coolest fashion week, and spent our money on things like secondhand pink cocoon coats and lug sole boots.
At that time, Ganni was the brand on the lips of every plugged-in fashion girl on the internet. But slowly, it lost its cultural clout.
At some point, I remember deleting “Ganni” from my TRR saved searches. The brand stopped coming up in conversations. Honestly, I had not thought about Ganni in a very long time, until last month, when I saw Barbie Ferreira wearing this green spot dress from Damson Madder, a UK-based brand. I’d been aware of the brand for about two years—the swimsuits in particular caught my attention.
As I scrolled through the check print dresses on the website and the “Avo Choc” one-piece I subsequently ordered, I was struck by how much it reminded me of Ganni’s aesthetic.
While Damson Madder has been popular in the UK for a while, 2026 seems to be the year they’ve achieved that sweet spot in the American market—not totally niche, but not yet mass. They just opened an LA store last month, and the clothes translate well for a casual Californian wardrobe.
These observations culminated into a realization: Damson Madder has successfully wooed the ex-Ganni girl demographic.
I posted this throwaway thought on Notes and was surprised by how many people chimed in. Some replies:
“Audibly gasped bc I am a former Ganni girl and i’ve been debating on getting some adorable Damson Madder pjs!”
“Have been noticing this in Paris with every cool art curator girl I know.”
“Damson Madder’s probably one of the most colourful and eccentric big brands out there at the moment.”
I was just one of many fashion girls who were noticing this shift, and clearly, people wanted to discuss it. So I made a survey with these four questions:
What did you love about Ganni in the 2010s?
What was THE piece of clothing that was a dead giveaway that someone was a Ganni girl?
Why did you stop shopping and wearing Ganni?
What do you think Damson Madder is getting right as a brand?
A total of 45 self-identified ex-Ganni girls replied (if you were one of them, pls email me for a comped month sub!).
Below the fold, I share the top data findings, themes, and kicker quotes.
“For the girls who grew up worshipping Anna Sui, but couldn’t afford Simone Rocha, [Ganni] seemed to just get us.”
“Still can’t forget about the time I ran into a girl with the same detached Ganni collar at a bar and when we joined hands it felt like the sailor moon transformation sequence.”
1) What did you love about Ganni in the 2010s?
Here were four few words that came up repeatedly: