My City: New York | Ruffian Designers

By Eva Medoff, May 26th, 2010

You might imagine that the designers behind Ruffian, a line of elegant, French-influenced womenswear with an edge, would know a thing or two about the New York scene. Ruffian’s clothes can go from uptown to downtown, and Brian Wolk and Claude Morais’ picks for the best spots in the city will take you along a similar path.

To read more about Ruffian, click here.

Big Bang

Ruffian’s Claude Morais and Brian Wolk bring Parisian style to New York, and vice versa

Story by Tiffany Yannetta / Photography by Tommaso Mei

Each season, Claude Morais and Brian Wolk, the duo behind womenswear line Ruffian, design beautiful clothes for a very particular girl. Collection after collection consistently offering necessities like tailored blouses, sophisticated yet exciting short little dresses, and immaculately structured pants and jackets that always lead to complete cohesiveness. Whether she’s the bad boarding school girl of Fall 2008, les demoiselles de Ruffian of Spring 2010, or the girl caught in the cosmos at Fall 2010’s Big Bang show, she is always “subtly elegant,” as Wolk puts it. The women they design for, he explains, “are really educated and sophisticated. They’re worldly, they’re traveled, they’re usually from nice families.” But, just before that all starts to sound too perfect, he adds, “And sometimes they’re not. We have naughty girls that we hang out with, too.”