Allison Lanyard - Part 1
A Very Important Person You Should Know About because she is related to Very Important White Men You Should Know About
For five years, Allison Lanyard took the Q train from the Upper East Side downtown to Hester Street and tucked herself in a co-working space for budding millennial entrepreneurs. Ms. Lanyard, who designs jersey-knit sweatshirts with inspirational messages for her eponymous athleisure brand, typically sported a top bun and a dewy moisturizer. She worked with her best friend and business partner, Rebecca Stanner, with whom she also shared custody of an adopted cat named Purlina. “I had every girl’s dream,” Ms. Lanyard says.
Then, she lit it up her stable life like a dumpster fire under an abandoned pedestrian bridge.
Over the course of ten weeks, beginning in August 2017, Ms. Lanyard cut ties with Ms. Stanner, abandoned their prized adopted cat, and was formally accused of setting fire to her co-working space. (The charges were later dropped.) What would cause Ms. Lanyard to upend her entire life? As it turns out, she was under the romantic influence of Mortimer Edgar Taulette, the heir to the as-seen-on-television cheddar popcorn empire and a one-time cast member of The Real World: Boise.
“I fell for Prince Charming,” Ms. Lanyard tells me, sprawled on her loveseat in her recently renovated Bedford-Stuyvesant home which sits atop the ruins of the former notorious crack den where the rapper Toothy Pitbull was found dead in 2005. This is the first time Ms. Lanyard has agreed to speak publicly of her relationship with Mr. Taulette - a relationship that changed the course of her life and made her rethink her role in the fashion industry. She says she doesn’t live life by any regrets, offering: “I would rather love a monster than not love at all.”
The decisions that radically changed her life in 2017 have their roots in a chance encounter three years prior. It was an unusually sunny morning in January 2014 when Ms. Lanyard stood outside a Horse Power training studio in Midtown around the corner where, unbeknownst to her, Mr. Taulette was meeting with his family’s attorneys. She had to leave the cycling class early because she started vomiting into her water bottle during the interval climbs set to a remix of Beyonce’s “If I Were a Boy.” With her mouth and rose-gold water bottle caked in hangover vomit, Ms. Lanyard ventured down the street in search of a bodega or pharmacy, anywhere to buy a bottle of water. “I hope no one judges my purchase of single-use plastic,” she recalls worrying.
Raised outside of San Diego, Ms. Lanyard was a “cold” child, always bunching blankets on top of her to sleep, even in the Southern Californian summers of her youth. That all changed in high school when a friend gifted her a pink sweatshirt as a birthday present. “It was actually a mistake,” Nancy Peterman, her childhood friend, recounted. “I forgot it was Allison’s birthday, so I wrapped up a touristy sweatshirt I bought at Big Bear when on vacation with my parents. I hadn’t worn it yet, so the tags were still on.”
Ms. Lanyard had never previously worn a sweatshirt, though she had seen them occasionally in the media. “I finally felt warmth,” she said about that birthday gift. “I probably didn’t take that sweatshirt off for two years straight.”
Ms. Lanyard attended design school in New York and subsequently worked as a receptionist before the 2008 recession. Her hopes of running a fashion empire seemed too grand and her interest began to wane when Ms. Stanner approached her with the idea of starting a clothing line. It was an intimidating proposition: starting a fashion line in the middle of the worst economic crisis recent history. Ms. Lanyard had on condition: they would build the line around sweatshirts.
By early 2009, Ms. Lanyard and Ms. Stanner had toured Vietnam factories to identify the best fits for their burgeoning empire. They had not yet set-up a company or designed their products on sketchbooks, but they had a combined $2.5 million of initial investments from a combination of family and select friends as well as access to a private plane courtesy of Ms. Stanner’s grandfather. They settled on LoveUSA, a factory in southeastern Vietnam that contracted with several large American retailers, including illegal-Fit and and Two Tayght.
As they were on route back home to the States, news broke that LoveUSA was under investigation for a building collapse that killed an estimated 3,500 workers. (LoveUSA has refused multiple interview requests, citing legal constraints.) Ms. Lanyard and Ms. Stanner were devastated as LoveUSA would not be able to take on the contract due to their extensive workforce losses. “Obviously, it’s sad what happened to those women,” Ms. Lanyard told me from her loveseat, “but they are not the only women who lost that day. We had signed a contract for 10,000 units. All that work was down the drain.”
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