For a few seasons Nanushka was the name that made vegan leather feel like a material argument rather than a compromise. The Budapest label built its reputation on a padded jacket that looked soft enough to sleep in, and on a palette that ran from bone to bitter chocolate.
The lesson is not that small labels should stay small. It is that the middle of the market has no shock absorber, and the clothes were never the part that failed.
The retail footprint was the second problem. Units in China and Europe were signed at a moment when foot traffic looked permanent, and each one converted a variable cost into a fixed one.
Sandra Sandor founded the label in 2005, shortly after finishing at the London College of Fashion, and went home to Hungary to make clothes in a city with a deep garment-making history and a shallow pool of capital.
What remains now is a studio-scale operation. Twenty people can still make a collection. They cannot simultaneously service wholesale accounts, run cross-border e-commerce and keep a store network breathing.
