If you’ve ever yearned to be a Cool French Girl, you can blame Natacha Ramsay-Levi. A teen intern for Balenciaga turned design director at Louis Vuitton and creative director at Chloé, the créatrice is behind some major signposts of undercover chic. The Olsen-beloved City bag that haunted our high school wish lists? Her fault. The undone blazer-and-scarf combo on Pinterest’s eternal “effortless style” scroll? Also her. Don’t forget the Horse Girl Fall of 2019 that never really died, and this year’s industrial ballet flat, which encases the pretty princess slipper of yore in a stomp-ready rubberized sole.
“Are they weird? Are they cool? Of course I ask myself that once I have finished a design,” Ramsay-Levi tells ELLE. “The truth is, you don’t actually know if fashion is weird or cool until you show it to other people. You have to be brave enough to do that. You also have to be okay if it doesn’t work.” But she has been doing this for a long time. So long, in fact, that Ramsay-Levi knew that the shoes—part of her second capsule drop for the Danish shoe brand Ecco—would walk straight into Cool Kid Land, and she was right. That elusive locale’s empress, Chloë Sevigny, has worn the shoes in multiple paparazzi photos. They even made an appearance at Sinéad O’Dwyer’s Copenhagen Fashion Week show. Art gallery owners in Japan slipped them on for work, then chronicled their commutes on Instagram. Fast-fashion retailers made passable copies.
Chloë Sevigny seen wearing Natacha Ramsay-Levi’s Ecco shoes in New York City.
Like all true arbiters of cool things, Ramsay-Levi is a little wary of starting trends. “I am kind of eh on [them],” she says when we talk in the corner hotel lobby in downtown Manhattan. “As a designer, it can feel like noise that interrupts the conversation.” The designer is fresh off a plane from Paris, and has just finished smoking exactly one-third of a cigarette. (“I am stopping; I am stopping…” she says, as if it’s a mantra.) She wears a tight black sweater with dark stovepipe denim, and a gold nut-and-bolt pendant that could either be a Cartier prototype or something she got from a hardware store. She sits next to a pile of new shoes—her third Ecco drop, which is available today.
If you need a quick refresher, Ramsay-Levi started working with Ecco in 2023, just after leaving Chloé, the French bohemian principality that rules a minor but coveted kingdom of lace ruffles and riding boots. It marked the first time she’d left the luxury world. “Covid was this moment where I realized, ‘I can’t keep doing this; something in my life needs to change,” she says, without a hint of irony. “I need to figure out more autonomy with my own life. I am not done with fashion. But I am done,” she gestures at the invisible world of bought-and-sold hierarchy around us, “with this. I was more interested in getting out into nature. What is the thing you say? Touch grass?” When Ecco called Ramsay-Levi a few weeks later, she was invited to its factory and design studio in rural Denmark. “I cannot make this up,” she says. “They are in the middle of the woods. I was like, ‘Great. Yes. Let’s go.’”
Aweng Chuol in Ecco’s new boots by Natacha Ramsay-Levi.
This was very good news for Ecco, a brand that sounds like “echo” but hasn’t quite reverberated across the U.S. yet. In fact, it admits to controlling less than 3 percent of the American shoe market, and unless your mom is a pottery teacher in Vermont, you likely haven’t yet experienced their chunk-tastic Offroad boots for yourself. But like many Scandinavian fashion brands—Toteme, Ganni, and Cecilie Bahnsen among them—the shoe company is committed to playing a longer game for world domination, one that won’t compromise quality or labor standards in favor of instant clicks. Instead, it’s investing in the ground floor of fashion’s creative communities by partnering with 1 Granary, London’s fashion incubation platform, and inviting on-the-rise faces like models Alex Consani and Aweng Chuol, musician Kacey Hill, and artist Marika Thunder to dine with Sevigny and Levi-Ramsay at a recent dinner party in New York’s Chinatown. “These kids are out. My bedtime is 9:30 P.M. now!” quipped Sevigny as the main course was being served—but at 11 P.M., she was still hanging out, clad in Ecco’s loafers. “Natacha’s designs for Ecco have a timeless feel that I love,” she said.
Ramsay-Levi is certainly aware that there are currently big jobs open at Chanel and Fendi. Still, the designer insists she’s hanging with Ecco for “at least a bit longer.” Why? “Ecco has an incredible design team, incredible leather and materials. And I appreciate the autonomy,” she says. “You know, you enter [your] 40s and you realize you just want to make the things you believe in. I believe in these designs. I think what we are doing here is very cool. And all the people in Paris going for these new jobs? I truly think that is great. Good for them. This,” she says, tapping her feet on the floor. “This is good for me. And for people who like exciting shoes? Good stuff is actually very hard to find. Only a few people really know how to make it.”
Faran Krentcil is a fashion journalist and critic based in New York City. She is the founding editor of Fashionista and a graduate of Duke University. Her work has been published in the Wall Street Journal, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, and more.