Kamperett Dresses: A Founder-Run San Francisco Label

Dresses are the category Kamperett was built around, and the vintage-leaning romanticism the founders describe, Santillo's word is nostalgia, comes through in silhouettes that feel pulled from an earlier decade without costume-y literalness. It tracks for a co-founder who has said she is drawn to the history and memory embedded in old garments as much as their construction.

The skirts carry the same California-inflected, slightly bohemian sensibility that Chiu has described as her side of the design partnership, softened by Santillo's more art-deco eye. Small details tend to do the work here rather than loud prints, in keeping with a brand that still designs and produces its pieces in San Francisco.

Kamperett is a genuinely small, founder-run label rather than a manufactured heritage story, built by two women who met at a home goods company and decided to bet on their combined aesthetic. That size is the honest tradeoff: fewer archive references to draw on than a house with decades behind it, but a design point of view that has stayed consistent since a 2015 launch. When Kamperett’s considered silhouettes have me thinking about getting dressed, I’d carry on with the dress edit and the skirts edit for more ideas in the same thoughtful spirit.