The phrase "luxury pet brand" has, for most of the last decade, been a marketing claim and rarely much more. A nylon harness in a glossy box. A printed logo on a polyester coat. A price tag set high enough to imply quality without ever proving it. That era is, slowly, ending.
What replaces it is harder to define and more interesting to wear. It begins with fibre, not finish. It is built by hand, not branded by committee. It is measured in fittings on real dogs, in years of use, in artisans who learned their craft from their grandmothers.
This is the standard we work to at Colette et Gastón. It is also the standard, we believe, that the words luxury pet brandsshould mean. In five parts, here is what we mean by it.
I. The fibre comes first.
A garment is the material it's made from, multiplied by everything done to that material afterwards. Get the first part wrong and nothing else recovers. This is the reason most so-called luxury pet clothing is, on inspection, expensive sportswear in better packaging.
Our knitwear is made from alpaca and baby alpaca fibre, sourced and spun in Peru, where alpaca have grazed the highlands at four thousand metres for thousands of years. Alpaca is warmer than wool by weight, lighter, softer against the skin, and — for dogs especially — meaningfully less itchy. It does not need to be chemically softened. It does not pill the way merino does. A baby alpaca sweater is one of the few garments a dog will actively lean into.
Our outerwear, designed and made in France, works in the same way. Raincoats are cut from softshell technical fabrics chosen for hand, not marketing. Warm coats use traditional French cloths — pied-de-poule, herringbone — from mills that have been weaving them since long before pet apparel existed.
II. The hand is the work.
Every sweater we sell is hand-knit, by a person, in Huancayo, in the central Peruvian highlands. Not finished by hand. Not "made by hand" with caveats. Knit, stitch by stitch, by female artisans whose knowledge of alpaca fibre has been passed down through three and four generations.
There is no machine in that chain. There is no automation that approximates it. There is a woman, a pair of needles, a yarn she has known since girlhood, and several days of careful work per piece.
We mention this not for sentiment but for accuracy. When a brand uses the word "handmade," the word should mean what it says. The mission of the house, from the beginning, has been to widen that circle of artisans — to build livelihoods, slowly, through the art of knitting.
III. The cut is engineered for a body that isn't ours.
The hardest problem in dog apparel — the one almost everyone in the category gets wrong — is that dogs are not small humans. A scaled-down men's coat does not fit a whippet. A child's silhouette does not move correctly on a dachshund.
Every Colette et Gastón piece begins with moulage on a real dog mannequin, in the atelier, in three dimensions. It is then tested on a real dog — moving, sitting, sprinting, lying down — before any production run begins. A shoulder seam that pulls in a still photo will pull harder in a sprint. We find it before you do.
This is, plainly, slower and more expensive than the alternative. It is also the only honest way to make clothing for an animal who cannot tell you when something is wrong.
IV. Origin is not a marketing line.
Luxury pet brands tend, in our experience, to obscure where their goods are made. We do the opposite, because the answer is the point.
Our knitwear is made in Peru, by Peruvian artisans, with Peruvian fibre, for the simple reason that no one in the world makes alpaca knitwear better than they do. Our outerwear and essentials are designed and made in France, because the French weaving and tailoring tradition is the right home for what those pieces need to be.
The house was founded in Lima in 2020 by Fiorella Requejo, working directly with the artisans of Huancayo. In 2022 the design and production of outerwear and essentials moved to France. In 2023 Colette et Gastón was incorporated as a French company, with Paris as its creative and operative headquarters. Both halves of that origin are visible in every piece. Neither is decorative.
V. The restraint is the luxury.
"Quiet luxury" is, by now, a phrase used to sell more or less anything. Inside this house, we mean something specific by it.
We do not put logos on the outside of garments. We do not print, embroider, or emboss. We do not use hardware as decoration. Our colours are the colours of the natural fibres, plus a small palette of dyes chosen to age well over years. The finishing details — horn buttons, ribbon trims, bound seams — are the kind a person notices when they take the piece off, not when they put it on.
The result is clothing that a dog can wear in the country, in the city, and in the back of a car, for years. The decoration is the construction. The luxury is that there is, deliberately, very little.
in closing
A pet brand is luxury when it begins with the fibre, when the hand is real, when the cut is engineered for the animal who has to wear it, when the origin is told plainly, and when the finished piece holds itself back rather than performing.
That is, at any rate, the standard we work to. It is harder than the alternative and considerably more interesting. We will be writing about all five of these points, in greater depth, through the rest of the year.
