It’s a sticky early June afternoon, gross enough that you’re heating up even while you’re sitting down. I’m also experiencing a different kind of heat on a bench outside Madhappy’s just-finished New York City flagship store with cofounder Noah Raf, who is on a red-hot teardown of dudes who think they’re too cool for his label.
“There’s a committee of 50 to 100 people in fashion who say, ‘Yo, do you fuck with this?’ ‘Oh, fuck yeah. You fuck with this?’ ‘Oh, you fuck with it? OK, I fuck with it.’ You know? It’s lame,” he says. “We’re saying, ‘If you’re you, whatever you are, however you look, whatever you’re dressed in, we fuck with that. And we want you fucking with the brand.’”
Like Madhappy itself, Raf speaks from the heart. And he’s feeling particularly indignant. The imprint he created eight years ago with his brother, Peiman Raf, and longtime friends Mason Spector and Joshua Sitt, is riding a never-cresting wave of success. Having partnered with everyone from supermodel Gigi Hadid and blue-chip painter Ed Ruscha to the New York Yankees and Hello Kitty, Madhappy set up a store in America’s most famous city not even two years after opening in its native LA.
Coming soon? Madhappy Tokyo. Just dropped? Collaborative Beats speakers and a Hysteric Glamour jet ski. The brand’s aura is so magnetic that, as we sit outside, a half-dozen people attempt to enter the not-yet-open store, breaching orange traffic cones and taped-off doors in a futile but eager attempt to shop.
Madhappy’s winning streak is obvious, Raf says. So, he asks: why isn’t anyone acknowledging it?
“With the projects we’re doing, the collaborations, all these amazing spaces, and the people we work with, I feel like we do deserve more recognition,” Madhappy art director Shiva Mizani told me a few days prior. “It’s getting there. But I think now is the time.”
Founded in 2017, Madhappy is one of the few casual clothing lines that has not only survived but thrived over the years, buoyed by a 2019 investment from luxury conglomerate LVMH. Colette’s Sarah Andelman remembers placing an order almost a decade ago. “We sold out,” she says. “I guess you can call it immediate love and success. The designs are just right, both simple and creative. Each collab is super relevant.”
Still, to hear Raf tell it, his brand has never been taken seriously as a power player in the industry. He tells tale of various fashion movers and industry shakers declining to work with Madhappy because the aforementioned “committee” convinced them that taking Madhappy seriously would be uncool. Then there are the times when Madhappy got there first but went unacknowledged. When the Mephisto hype began kicking off in late 2024, how many people recognized that Madhappy had already collaborated with the French walking shoe company several months prior?
Raf is self aware. He admits having “a little chip” on his shoulder. “But when the industry is slamming the door in front of you all the time, that’s fucked,” he says. “The only solution, fortunately or unfortunately, is to do your own thing. I hate this expression, but it’s true: If you build it, they will come.”
Lo, they came. Peiman Raf won’t talk specific numbers, but he does tell me that Madhappy has been profitable since 2020 and hasn’t needed to raise any external capital since that initial LVMH infusion. As its coffers have expanded, so has its purview. Madhappy’s world now expands far beyond its trademark sweaters, imminently recognizable with their stylized logos and blanket-stitched hoods. The brand also oversees a quarterly publication called Local Optimist, in-house cafes called PANTRY, no-cost community and speaking events, and even monthly Spotify mixes.
There’s also the nonprofit Madhappy Foundation, which donates 1% of net sales to mental-health-aligned charities and research. “It’s personal for us. I’ve struggled with mental health issues my whole life, came from a broken family, had no direction,” Spector says. “I was very depressed.”
Spector is the one who hit on the brand’s name when he texted “I’m mad happy for you” to a friend. “When I said those words, it gave me permission to be in and learn from that bout of depression,” he says. “Every single person will struggle and feel pain, and for some reason we're taught, ‘Don’t talk about it. Don't tell anyone about it. Don't share it.’ That's so dumb. That's an inevitable part of life. Real bravery is being vulnerable.”
“We want people to come and feel good so we have to show that we aren’t exclusive,” says art director Mizani. “It’s a cool brand, but it’s not too cool for you.”
Madhappy’s product line speaks to the company’s particular cool factor. Head of design Dean DiCriscio loosely describes the label’s signature loungey pajama-ish look as “Disney Channel, Roxy girl, Miley Cyrus, California skate-surf dream.”
The brand is best known for pit-stop-at-Erewhon comfies such as heavyweight hoodies, washed-out dad hats, and matching fleece shorts, often modeled and collaborated on by young muses like Enya Umanzor and Nailea Devora, themselves an encapsulation the Madhappy customer. But Madhappy also has bigger ready-to-wear ambitions. Recent partnerships are proof of future direction, say Raf and DiCriscio, pointing to tiger-stripe jorts and lace-trimmed NEEDLES track sets. Even now, there's plenty going on under the hood. Madhappy’s signature hoodie is made of a special 16-ounce fleece “milled in Canada, trucked to LA, cut, garment-dyed, and finished [locally],” Raf points out. And DiCriscio adds that Madhappy’s sweats are refitted every season to dial in their silhouette.
There’s also an adventurous note to Madhappy’s collections. Raf, clad in an RRL cap when we chat, is a student of menswear history. Yet he’s only as hungry for newness as everyone else on his team. “Mephisto’s obviously amazing and Danner is obviously amazing, but I don’t know if our Gen Z girl is as aware of them as we are,” says Madhappy director of marketing Ravi Shah. “So, there’s an element of the collab strategy that’s like, ‘Let us show you how amazing this is by putting our own little spin on it.’” That Madhappy can offer $440 hiking boots alongside its $175 hoodies and $160 sweatpants speaks to a vision beyond beachy athleisure.
The modern Madhappy is most clearly visible in the brand’s 2024 GAP collaboration, almost certainly an epochal drop for a certain young shopper. Here were the two brands they buy, the two brands they love, worn by effortlessly cool people like Devon Lee Carlson and 070 Shake. And in the campaign, outfits that the Madhappy customer could actually see themselves wearing: GAP hoodie, loose jeans, faded T-shirt, skirt, flip-flops. Aspirational but approachable, West coast but universal.
Throughout June and July, I’d occasionally stroll past Madhappy’s New York store to gauge customer reaction. First, the shop was never not at least modestly busy. Second, although Madhappy’s client base was diverse, it was overwhelmingly made up of young women. “We have a consumer within the 25 to 34 age range, but we also have a demo that’s in college, maybe even high school,” says Alyssa Blackman, Madhappy’s special projects director. “The younger community resonates with the messaging, the positivity, the ethos of the brand, and what we’re doing outside of the product itself.”
Everyone at Madhappy describes the customer as “their girl” or the “Madhappy girl.” It’s certainly not just women buying the brand — Raf estimates shoppers to be around 65% women, 35% men — but there’s a clear divide. “If you go on our Instagram now, it’s primarily all female talent,” Blackman says. “It doesn’t mean the male consumer can’t wear the product. It just means that that’s actually who we’re speaking to.”
“It’s almost like how pop music is not taken as seriously because the fans are young women,” Shah says. “Young women have some of the most buying and spending power of any group. I think everybody would kill for that demo.”
“It’s an underserved area,” Raf says. “People aren’t making cool shit in this space for women. We’re bringing them into our world and saying, ‘You’re the focal point.’”
No one working with or for Madhappy considers the brand to be “streetwear” — “I don’t think it’s a word that fully lands on what we’re trying to build,” Spector says — but the label does land near its periphery. Madhappy is, after all, producing unpretentious garments for a young audience. And even in its diffuse modern form, streetwear remains patriarchal. Yet here you have a brand nakedly positioning itself as by and for young people, especially women, who’ve historically been held at arm’s length by those who comprise what Raf calls the “committee.” As far as those folks are concerned, Madhappy and its soft loungewear are effectively swimming upstream.
From Madhappy’s perspective, however, it’s exactly the opposite.
“The youth always wins,” Spector says in perhaps an inadvertent echo of Virgil Abloh, patron saint of the outsider. “The youth is undefeated.”
“Madhappy is cool in that ‘cool’ is being creative, community-focused, kind,” say Archie Lee Coates IV and Jeff Franklin, founders of creative firm PlayLab, which oversees the design of Madhappy’s flagships. “We take that stuff very seriously because we’re agnostic toward brand. We’re only concerned with people and their potential and possibilities.”
To that end, Madhappy is quite cool, whether or not the culture is ready to accept that. But if the industry ever did face facts, it would not go unappreciated.
“Everybody needs lifting up from their peers, even from people who are on the ‘committee,’ right? Everyone needs that from time to time,” Raf says. “That’s just the human way. We all just want to feel passionate, to be recognized. We’re not trying to change the world. We’re just trying to be normal and nice.”
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