This Is What Olivier Rogers Looks Like Beyond the T-Shirt

What happens when French-Caribbean heritage meets New York sensibility? It might look a lot like Olivier Rogers’ Spring/Summer 2027 collection.

Titled “Leaving Marigot,” the collection takes its name from Marigot, Saint Martin, where Rogers was born and spent part of his childhood. There, some of his earliest lessons in style came from home. His father, an electrician, favored popped-collar polos, track jackets, fitted vintage denim, and dress shoes, while his mother treated getting dressed well as a matter of discipline and respect. Rogers didn’t always appreciate it — growing up in New York, he wasn’t even allowed to wear sneakers until around eighth or ninth grade — but those rules stuck.

“Moving here very young, it was a very different experience,” Rogers says of the distance between Saint Martin and New York. “It’s two different vibes.”

Eventually, polos met track jackets, denim met dress shoes, and Marigot met Flatbush. It became a visual vocabulary Rogers would carry into his own wardrobe and his work as a stylist, earning credits with some of the NBA’s most referenced dressers, from Indiana Pacers superstar Tyrese Haliburton to, more recently, New York Knicks guard Tyler Kolek, who just so happened to be present at Rogers’ press preview last week.

When Rogers’ self-titled brand first caught steam after launching in 2017, it was largely through logo-heavy T-shirts, sweatpants, and denim — the kind of pieces you might have seen on everyone from Ye and Future to Shai Gilgeous-Alexander and Alton Mason. Rogers is well aware of that association. “I felt like the world only knows me for T-shirts and sweatpants,” he says. “I wanted to give the world something that I really wanted to put out.”

Spread across 27 looks, “Leaving Marigot” is that something. It’s Rogers taking the foundation he built through casualwear and pushing it into a full cut-and-sew wardrobe. The answer isn’t a wholesale departure from the clothes that built his name, either. Instead, Rogers collapses the distance between getting dressed up and simply getting dressed. Sportswear, school uniforms, tailoring, and the clothes he remembers seeing on the men around him in Saint Martin all get thrown into the same closet.

His memories of school uniforms, for example, surface in buttoned blousons and long-sleeve polos. Sky blue and navy recall the uniforms his mother insisted he wear properly, even as other kids were allowed to dress theirs down. “My mom was like, ‘No, you’re wearing your school uniform,’” Rogers remembers. Elsewhere, a vest references what she made him wear to church, while pinstripe tailoring recalls the suits she dressed him in as a child.

Then there’s his father. One of the collection’s clearest references comes from an old photograph of him at 18 or 19 years old, guitar in hand. Rogers translates the image into a red, white, and blue tracksuit that simultaneously nods to his father, Saint Martin, and the island’s relationship to France. “I wanted to make a tracksuit representing him and the Caribbean,” Rogers explains. For the campaign, he goes a step further, reenacting the original photograph, guitar and all.

But “Leaving Marigot” doesn’t stay in Saint Martin for long. A raw denim set pulls the collection straight back to Brooklyn. “When you think of Flatbush, to me, I think of raw denim,” Rogers says. It’s an especially fitting material for a collection built around two places that have shaped him: Saint Martin supplies much of the memory, while New York supplies the attitude.

That back-and-forth continues throughout the collection. Quarter-zips and athletic tops live next to tailoring. Rogers styles tracksuits with Derbies, his own everyday footwear of choice. Blazers sprout hoods simply because, as Rogers puts it, he hadn’t seen one like it before. “Designing should be something fun and not too serious all the time,” he says. Even his favorite pair of laceless Derbies hides another piece of home inside: a bright blue footbed meant to evoke looking into Saint Martin’s “crispy blue” water.

For all those details, Rogers describes the larger proposition much more simply: “Preppy, simple, chic.” More importantly, he wants the clothes to actually be worn. “The most important tip I can give you when it comes to style is: wear your clothes,” he says. “We wanted everybody to feel like they can wear all this stuff over and over.”

That philosophy gets at what Leaving Marigot represents beyond being Rogers’ most developed collection yet. He talks about clothing less as seasonal product than something closer to an archive — pieces that accumulate memories rather than eventually getting discarded. “When I look at clothes, I look at art pieces,” he says. “I don’t ever want to get rid of clothes. I’m a hoarder. This is how I want people to feel when they buy my clothes.”

“Leaving Marigot” may be Rogers’ love letter to his childhood, but it also reads as a blueprint for where the brand can go next. Marigot and Flatbush. His father’s style and his mother’s discipline. Sportswear and tailoring. Rogers isn’t choosing between any of them. He’s figuring out what happens when he brings all of it with him.