Jackson Jambalaya

Just a small town girl. The small-town girl from Hazlehurst reached the pinnacle of the fashion world.  The Wall Street Journal featured Nina McLemore in a recent article:




Exiting a television appearance recently, Sen. Elizabeth Warren and PBS NewsHour co-anchor Gwen Ifill stopped and had a laugh. They were wearing nearly identical blue jackets by a designer named Nina McLemore.

Though she is little known in the wider world, Ms. McLemore's clothing is well-known in the circles of powerful women. Hillary Clinton wears her. So does PepsiCo Chief Executive Indra Nooyi, Federal Reserve Chairwoman Janet Yellen and U.S. Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan. At least a quarter of female chief executives at Fortune 500 companies have appeared publicly in her clothes or shopped with the label, according to Wall Street Journal research.

Nina (pronounced Nine-ah) McLemore is a weapon in the wardrobes of authoritative women. To those in the know, the label's tailored clothes stand out for their richly woven fabrics, strong jackets with signature stand-up collars and brilliant colors....

Her success owes a lot to a paradox in women's fashion. Women hold more government and corporate leadership positions than ever, and workplace style is more varied, flexible and creative than ever—far from the gray man-style tailoring of the past. Yet the fashion industry has been focused on other markets, leaving women leaders underserved. ....

The rise of Mississippi-born Ms. McLemore comes at a time when femininity and color no longer signal a lack of authority. "I wear colors that men would never wear," says Eileen Crane, chief executive of California winemaker Domaine Carneros and another Nina acolyte. "But at the same time I'm wearing clothing that no one would mistake me for an assistant."

One part of Nina McLemore's appeal is that her clothing doesn't scream brand name and doesn't call attention to itself. This isn't lost on female executives who want to look sharp but not have the focus on their clothing and appearance.

Of 21 women identified as Nina McLemore clients who were approached to comment for this story, 12 declined to comment or didn't respond, including Mrs. Clinton, Ms. Nooyi, Sen. Warren, Ms. Yellen, former Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano, Irene Rosenfeld, chief executive of Mondelez (formerly Kraft Foods), Beth Mooney, chief executive of KeyCorp., Doris Meister, president of U.S. Markets-Tri-State, at BNY Mellon Wealth Management, and Debra Reed, chief executive of Sempra Energy. In addition, Justice Kagan and DuPont Co. CEO Ellen Kullman confirmed that they wear the label's apparel but declined to comment further.....

Ms. McLemore, 68 years old, grew up in Hazlehurst, Miss., a town which had a population of about 3,000. Her mother made her clothes. She learned to sew as well, but studied economics in college and went to work as a buyer in 1969. Ms. McLemore rose through a series of executive jobs at Liz Claiborne, helping to develop some early professional-apparel lines like Dana Buchman (selling a lot of those now-despised lady-neckties in the 1980s). She left to earn an M.B.A. from Columbia University in 1995. She worked for several years in private equity, where she met her husband, and then decided to retire.

That is when friends of hers began to complain they had few professional clothing options. Curious, she posed as an investment banker (making up a story about working for Goldman Sachs and negotiating a big deal) and went shopping on Madison Avenue. She discovered "a problem of fit, quality, and appropriate clothing for business women," she says.

She launched her label in 2001, with one sales representative doing direct sales in New York, and expanded as she sold to more stores. She opened her own first store in 2010 in Nantucket, Mass. Today, she has 12 stores and plans to open two more this year in Atlanta and Birmingham, Mich. Based in Washington, D.C., and New York, she locates stores where leaders live and play—in Aspen, Colo., and Martha's Vineyard, Mass., for instance. She offers a full line of office, casual and evening wear. Sales, currently under $20 million, she says, grew 25% last year.... Rest of article