When I was younger, I remember walking through the J.Crew store with a curious eye. The rows of neatly organized clothes boasted a preppy lifestyle, reserved for the more mature and affluent. But taking a closer look at each individual piece made me question if anyone actually liked such styles. Was I too young to understand it, or perhaps too poor? Either or, I got the sensation that every piece was almost perfect, but somehow always missing that umph, or key style point, to make it actually desirable. An awkward placement of a tacky button, a strangely cut hem length, or overdoing it with frills. J.Crew was not for me, I deemed.

Enter 2022, and I visit J.Crew for the first time (in possibly a decade) because the mannequin watching guard of the window was wearing a nice sweater I thought would make a nice Christmas gift for my boyfriend. The intention was to bee-line straight to the men’s section, but from the corners of my eye, pretty dresses, well-tailored blouses, and snuggly sweaters kept twinkling at me in the women’s department. So I stop and look around and am hit with a weird sensation. It was like seeing that awkward high school classmate ten years later, and they had completely turned their life around for the better (and maybe got a facelift), making them kind of unrecognizable at this point.

Since then, I’ve spotted more and more people on the streets in crisp J.Crew attire. In my job as a fashion writer, I’ve started to spend more time drooling over their e-commerce site to the point where I finally had to say: Okay. J.Crew must have gotten a new creative director because what is this. I WANT EVERYTHING. (Either that, or I am simply no longer too young, too poor).

Sure enough, after some research, the answer was as expected. In 2020, Olympia Gayot became the new women’s Creative Director at J.Crew, completely reviving the brand.

Gayot is everything J.Crew needed. Not only is she is the embodiments of the J.Crew woman herself (who amassed over 130k followers on Instagram with her effortless mirror selfies), but as a designer for the brand back in 2010, she already knew the blueprints of the label. Now as the director, she has significantly more control in creating and executing the image of J.Crew. She took a semi-tired, struggling-to-stay-on-top brand and gave it the life it so desperately needed. While maintaining true to the label’s branding, she brings sophistication and feminine strength to life through aspirational designs.

She revived and unlocked J.Crew’s full potential, and then some.

You need to see the stunning pieces for yourself, really. Because if bad-ass-working-woman-who-vacations-in-Sicily-and-juggles-two-kids-like-it’s-nothing is the look you’re going for, then you need to shop at J.Crew. Here are some of my favorite pieces: