The colourful world of the designer behind Sies Marjan.

Mr Sander Lak is strangely calm for a fashion designer about to present a new collection. He speaks to us three days before his SS19 show at New York Fashion Week, so stress would be understandable – expected even – but the handsome Dutchman appears wholly unfazed by what many designers would consider the most chaotic period of their year. The collection for his brand, Sies Marjan, is “basically finished already”, and the designer is just putting a few final touches on things. “If you do this every few months, you kind of need to know what you’re doing,” he shrugs.

No worries there: it appears Mr Lak is a man who knows exactly what he’s doing. Sies Marjan (which launches on MR PORTER today), has only been around for three years, but has already become one of the most buzzed-about brands in fashion. And, well, that’s because there’s nothing else like it. “There’s so much of roughly the same kind of thing out there, and we have this kind of sweet spot in the middle that’s not streetwear, but it’s not tailoring. It has this ease and this slouchiness to it, but there’s also a luxury factor that elevates it,” he says. “We don’t have a lot of competition at the moment.”

Having originally wanted to become a film director, Mr Lak was too young to get into film school in the Netherlands, so instead went to study menswear at London’s Central Saint Martins under the late Ms Louise Wilson. He wanted to start his own menswear label immediately, but, he says: “Louise talked me out of it. I didn’t know what I was doing. When I started in college, I didn’t even know what a sewing machine was, and I was with people that had been dressing their Barbie dolls from childhood, and they already had sewing experience.”

He knew what he calls “the innate language of clothes”; he just didn’t have the skills he needed to communicate with it. “All the technical stuff was just stuff I needed to learn. But I knew that in there somewhere, once I was actually able to use all the practical things I was learning, I would be able to do something with it. For years, I had to learn everything from scratch. I didn’t even know there were patterns involved in clothing, I thought it was like knitting, or you just make them on a machine.”

Again, Mr Lak shows his confidence: “Saying that, I never felt that it was an uphill battle or struggle. I really wasn’t doing any kind of good work whatsoever for years, but [designing clothes] still made sense to me.” From there, he went on to work for Dries Van Noten, Balmain and 3.1 Phillip Lim, before finally gathering the skills he needed to start Sies Marjan (taken from the given names of Mr Lak’s father and mother respectively) in 2015.

Mr Lak’s particular skill – and what has afforded Sies Marjan its highest praise – lies in the erudite way in which he employs colour. From deep blazing blues on silk and velvet to pastel mints or soft mandarins dyed on alpaca wool, the fabrics are sluiced with colour, and it’s this variegated alchemy that lies at the heart of the brand. The process? “It’s very organic. My team select images based on colour, or they find what they like,” explains Mr Lak.

From there, he builds a world in colour, distilling a scene from a movie or a piece of art into shades, shadows and tones – a shirt might take you to a Wong Kar-Wai film, say, or a throw you back to a childhood video game like Spyro The Dragon. “The colours mean different things to different people. One person in my team might say that it reminds them of their childhood teddy bear, or a dress they had. The colour takes people to different places. I never look at what is on the image, just the colours. It doesn’t really matter that you have one image that is My Little Pony or one image that is a Picasso painting.”

There can be up to half a million images that Mr Lak and his team sift through, making swatches and distilling them into what will eventually make the clothes. If that sounds painstaking, welcome to Mr Lak’s world: “Colour is one of those things for me that doesn’t cost me any energy whatsoever,” he says. “I take something and I never know where it comes from. I know that my intuition is right, and it’s one of the very, very few things I know I can do. Louise Wilson always said this to me when I was at St Martins: ‘Stick to what you know. What’s the point in trying to be Chinese when you’re not? Stick to what your gut is telling you.’ All these big machine, corporate ways of communicating, it’s not working any more. It needs to come from the heart and the soul.”

That might sound glibly spiritual or even hippyish, but to assume that Mr Lak is not a businessman would be a mistake. “We’re not stupid,” he says. “We’re very aware that everything we do has the end goal of selling a product.” He talks about the perpetual tug-o-war between art and commerce in fashion, and how a separatist approach no longer makes sense in that context. “Maybe that’s why this is working for us because it’s the zeitgeist… people want to see a runway and fantasise, but then also want to buy into that fantasy directly and not walk into a store to find a watered-down shitty T-shirt version of it."

Fortunately, “shitty T-shirts” are not in Sies Marjan’s vocabulary, and the brand’s menswear is extremely well executed. This, in part, is because it’s something that Mr Lak approaches from a personal perspective: “I’m a trained menswear designer, so I’ve always related clothes to myself and what I would wear without ever compromising all the creative and beautiful and soulful parts.” There’s the velvet corduroy shirt, for instance, which uses a corduroy technique woven with velvet threads: “It’s very liquid but has this kind of washed feel to it, and it feels very masculine,” he says. “It’s very bright, and it’s a very good colour for every skintone.”

Many of Sies Marjan’s clothes are things that Mr Lak enjoys wearing personally: “I wear [the shirt] all the time because it’s one of those pieces, you can just wear it with anything, and it’s so soft. I love things to be comfortable.” Also take the alpaca wool raglan coat: “It’s all hand dyed in different spots so every coat is kind of unique. Again, it’s a material that speaks the language, and the fit is just a really simple easy fit that’s very every day.”

Beyond the colour and the clothes, it’s the optimism that surrounds the brand – from within and without – that perhaps sets it apart the most. “I’m not a tortured soul, I’m not the person who needs to be in a breakup to be able to create something beautiful,” says Mr Lak. From an industry that is still in many ways obsessed with the idea of brooding artist or histrionic diva, Mr Lak is the clean air above the clouds of chaos below. “I have to be happy, healthy, preferably in love, and then I can really do my work and really create,” he says. “If you didn’t love it then why would you do it? Enjoy it and make beautiful things and make things that people want. It’s not rocket science.”

Shop the Sies Marjan collection here