Hamish Bowles: The 2000s bore witness to an unprecedented phenomenon. Fashion lovers began filling their closets with rainbows of velour tracksuits. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: It was the modern day uniform of the streets. I mean, athleisure. Who wouldn't want to feel sexy, comfortable dressed in casual luxury. Comfort is king. 

Hamish Bowles: This it's Pamela Skaist-Levy, who, alongside her business and design partner, Gela Nash-Taylor, founded Juicy Couture. Couture in name only, Juicy left an indelible mark on the first decade of the new millennium as it took the fashion world by storm. For as much success as Juicy enjoyed commercially, they'd become the targets of criticism from some in the world of high fashion for that popularization of such casual apparel.

Gela Nash-Taylor: Most people in the fashion world thought we, we killed fashion. We were the killers of fashion. 

Hamish Bowles: Despite the naysayers, Sally Singer, who at the time was the Director of Fashion News and Features at Vogue, saw an opportunity for the April 2003 issue of the magazine. Take Juicy Couture to see real couture in Paris, and document any antics that may transpire.

Sally Singer: Everywhere they went people would say, "Oh my God, the Juices are here. The Juices are here." Oh God, it was insane. It was like this crazy circus.

Hamish Bowles: It soon became an iconic fashion moment, in the ranks of other legendary guests that Vogue had brought to Paris. 

Sally Singer: They'd taken Puff Daddy to the couture. They'd taken him to couture with Kate Moss and had done those kinds of stories. Taking a celebrity to the couture had been done. Taking two women who work in mass fashion to the couture, and mass fashion being, you know, the extreme opposite end of the earth, I guess that was kind of radical back then. 

Hamish Bowles: The radical decision to bring fashion week outsiders into the fold turned heads and stirred conversations about how Juicy's influence had grown so immensely that they've become impossible for the fashion world to ignore. They had Couture creators asking how did two young friends from Pacoima, California become "The Juices."

Welcome to In Vogue: the 2000s, a podcast about the decade that ushered in a new millennium and redefined boundaries in fashion and society. Alongside fashion leaders, cultural icons, and Vogue's editorial team, we'll dissect the decade's most impactful style moments and how they've shaped our culture today.

Anna Wintour: I'm Anna Wintour. 

Hamish Bowles: And I'm your host Hamish Bowles.

The casual luxury look that became ubiquitous in Los Angeles and made waves well beyond California, was the brainchild of Juicy's founders, Pamela Skaist-Levy and Gela Nash-Taylor. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: I always wanted to be a fashion designer. I used to cut up my clothes and redesigned them at a very early age.

Gela Nash-Taylor: I think my very early influences as a child where my very first pair of Barbie heels that were lucite with gold flecks and elastic bands. And the sound of the click clack of the high heel just never has left me, I still love that sound. 

Hamish Bowles: Pam and Gela met in 1988 and soon began working together and Pacoima, a neighborhood of San Fernando Valley in Los Angeles. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: We met covering for a girlfriend at a boutique in west LA. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: So we worked on different days and then one day we were there together and it was very weird because we were, you know, kind of the same person, really. It was like, "Oh my God, I found my, I found my soul mate." 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: And what's more fun than to BFF creating an empire. 

Hamish Bowles: The designer duo began their professional design career working together on maternity clothes, but the line didn't find much long-term success. The pair made the innovative decision to switch to a new focal point luxury t-shirts.

Pamela Skaist-Levy: We designed the gamut of t-shirts from the Jackie O boat neck to a seventies, cool tank top. And the fashion world was becoming more casual and women were wearing t-shirts a lot more under their suits to work. And we came out with a huge line of t-shirts. That got the ball rolling, and they sold so well that the buyers were like, give us more, give us more, give us more. And a full collection came out of that. 

Hamish Bowles: In 1995, after a series of tests sourcing fabrics, perfecting the fit, and identifying a need to help women feel confident, capable, and comfortable, the t-shirts were released in 26 colors. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: It was all about color and it was a time when, if a store bought t-shirts, they bought black, white, and maybe heather gray. And we were like, uh-uh we've 26 amazing colors with crazy names. Like they name lipsticks and nail polish now and all our colors had names like that. And that was the fun of it. 

Hamish Bowles: The naming conventions of the t-shirts with some of Pam and Gela's earliest forays into defining the spirit of the brand as playful, irreverent, and unlike anything else in stores. That attitude was fully encapsulated in their brand name, Juicy Couture. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: Our rep was like, "oh my God, no one's going to even be able to pronounce that. I mean, how do you even say that? What is that like Cooter? Like, what is that?" But we did it. 

Hamish Bowles: The double-take that the imprecise name attracted meant that it's stuck in people's minds. Here's Sally Singer. 

Sally Singer: I mean, the fact that Pam and Gela named their company, Juicy Couture is just evidence of how clever they were to draw that line for themselves from Pacoima to Paris. They're, they're smart. They're smart women that's for sure. 

Hamish Bowles: The name was a clever strategic move, even if real haute couture and the mass production of garments that were the mainstay of the Juicy brand were worlds apart.

Sally Singer: The haute couture is a realm in which a set of samples are made for a show. Usually one set, possibly two, if they can do it. Those samples are then shown to clients, and those clients can order those specific looks or derivations of those looks that better match their bodies. How many clients order from the couture is one of the great mysteries of our time. And no house will reveal its numbers, none ever, will reveal the numbers. The clothes are you know, fantastically expensive. You know, in the tens of hundreds of thousands of dollars and they're made on the body. So if there's 56 looks in a couture show, there were 56 items made. These are pieces that might have three to 600 hours of handwork on them alone. They're made in a very specific way. So mass industrial production versus the couture, there's no correlation. They're completely different worlds. They were girls with big dreams and really, really, uh, in a clever use of language, there is very smart on their parts. 

Hamish Bowles: The t-shirts under the Juicy Couture brand were a commercial success. And paved the way for Pam and Gela to drum up their next set of game-changing garments. In 2001 Juicy release their iconic terry tracksuits.

Gela Nash-Taylor: Everything about our t-shirts, and ultimately the tracksuits changed that concept of how you could go out of the house. And how we could be dressed. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: I mean, athleisure was fashion. I mean, we sort of made athleisure fashion. The tracksuits really made your body look insanely great. And that was very important. We cheated seams forward. The pants were a little low. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: I mean, they were just not low. They were so low. 

Kate Young: At that point in time, all we wanted were the lowest rise pants known to humankind. 

Hamish Bowles: Celebrity stylist, Kate Young.

Kate Young: I remember the first time I got a Juicy Couture track suit, the rise was like two inches and they made jeans too, which they're not famous for, but those jeans were the best. The rise, like the zipper was like the length of the zipper pool. They were so low, your whole butt was out the top and then they were tight, tight, tight on the thigh and knee. And then boot-cut, which was like everything we wanted. It was like your imagination jean come to life. If you wore sweat pants, that was like disgusting. And they were like, what Rocky Balboa wore, you know? They weren't like cool sweatpants. And this was like a track suit that was like hot and glamorous. 

Hamish Bowles: As popular as the track pants were, the look was not complete without the matching jacket. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: It was the zipper pull that you had on your jacket. And it was in the form of a J and that J, you know, morphed into a diamonte J or a gold J or a pearl J. It was all about that. J pull and if it didn't have the J pull it wasn't Juicy. I mean, the J pull became such a crazy thing. People were dry cleaning their Juicy. So they made these little J pull bags at the dry cleaners to put the J pulls in so they wouldn't fall off. I mean, it was, it was crazy. 

Hamish Bowles: The Juicy track suit quickly became the official uniform of 20 something women in the know. What previously might only have been worn to the gym, was now acceptable for brunch shopping or heading to the airport. 

Sally Singer: Juicy felt like it was dressed up. Mostly because it did something that actually, Valentina under Mr. Valentino did, it acknowledged that the waist is where waist would be. The hips were where the hips should be. They just looked lovely and elegant and perfect. And Juicy in that way, they understood proportions and they understood how women at that moment wanted, basically, I was gonna say their bottoms to look. So it was literally a bottom up trend. And I like bottom-up trends. I like style wherever it exists. And then I like to understand how it can move through the culture in different ways. Again, it's an interesting time, silhouettes change. That's not the silhouette now, but the time of the Juicy track suit you were coming off of the dominancy, absolute dominance of 7 For All Mankind, low cut, boot cut jeans. Jeans that now wouldn't have the same resonance. It was a moment. And then you got to do it in like velour, cashmere, or terry cloth.

Hamish Bowles: With the success of the tracksuit, there was no stopping Juicy. The line quickly expanded to include knit tops, accessories, and a successful Juicy jean line. The quintessential Juicy look was a complete head to toe ensemble. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: Well it was pink. It was velour, it had a charm bracelet wrapped around its finger. It had a Chihuahua and a matching Juicy Couture dog bag. It had, you know, matching everything. Everything had something attached to it that was fun. Dogs were part of our culture. Charms and charm bracelets were part of our culture. 

Hamish Bowles: Velour was the go-to fabric choice for the Juicy brand. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: Well that pile fabric took color amazingly well, and it was so soft and buttery. Garment dye was a really big part of our brand and that's the way we could offer 26 colors. And it just took dye incredibly well and looks so luxurious and buttery. It just was an incredible fabric to work with. And comfort, I mean, casual luxury and comfort is everything. 

Hamish Bowles: Their signature pieces were emblazoned with the Juicy logo. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: We were obsessed with old English and English and crests. So we came up with this crest with our dogs and had these two Scotties and it was our crest. Everything had the fairy tale of 'once upon a time, there were two girls in Pacoima who set out to create the perfect girly connection. And they did, and they lived happily after.' It was like a Star Wars scroll, and everything was in old English and everything had the little crests and dogs and it was fun. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: It definitely was playful and fanciful and irreverent. It was just authentically us. 

Hamish Bowles: Famed 2000 celebrity stylist, Rachel Zoe, took note of Pam and Gela's authenticity. 

Rachel Zoe: They started a movement, and you know, people have tried to follow it. They've tried to recreate it. They were the brand. They are so true to who they are. They are still those girls. Like they are, they're as cool as it gets. 

Hamish Bowles: More than bringing their own authenticity to their designs, Pam and Gela were able to hit on a cultural moment that was resonant in the 2000s. 

Sally Singer: Yoga culture was growing, sort of apre gym culture was growing. Like where do you go after you've gone to the gym? You want to put on something which makes you feel polished as you, you know, before you go home change. They, they caught a moment and they caught a moment that was a very west coast moment. And it was clever. It was very, very clever. I think the tracksuit before was the thing you put on when you'd give it up on yourself in fashion. And they actually made the tracks with the thing you put on because you are that hot and you are interested in fashion. That was a big change, really big change. 

Hamish Bowles: American consumers, flocked to the idea of creating a wardrobe for themselves that was Couture in name, but not in price. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: It was affordable, but it was, it was also a little expensive because it was made in LA. And so that made it even more desirable because it was definitely within your reach, but it was like a little bit outside. It came to probably about $300 or $350 to buy the whole thing. It was a little bit out of reach, so if the mom was buying it for herself, if she was buying it for her daughter, she had to wait for her birthday. 

Hamish Bowles: With the tracksuit in particular, Juicy embodied the spirit of the LA lifestyle. Their designs captured "Cali couture." 

Gela Nash-Taylor: The LA style was very much part of a car culture. So you could put on our velour track pants, a pair of Manolo kitten heels, because you're not clumping around New York or London, you're in a car, so it doesn't matter. And then a little Chanel jacket or something. And it's that high, low dressing that we always talk about. That's LA style. And if you would walk into a hotel, the Mercer, London, anywhere people would look at you like you came from a different planet because people did not dress like that. 

Hamish Bowles: As Sally observed, Juicy's emergence from Los Angeles, rather than from other fashion capitals of the world, meant that it was coming from a distinct point of view. 

Sally Singer: LA style in the 2000s was it was sexier. It was more colorful. It was unabashedly about color and bodies and, and a kind of unapologetic sexiness that New York just never wanted to engage in. When you think of LA style in the early 2000s, you know, you think of what I was called summer girls. You think Cameron Diaz at the height of her powers and Kate Hudson and, you know, tousled beachy waves and clothes that are, you know, barely hanging on the bodies. And jeans that are really, really low cut. And, but, you know, there are a lot of bare midriffs back then, which in New York, that just really wasn't the thing. It was never the thing. New York was always a bit more drawer. I mean, back then, I would probably say the stereotype was in New York, people wore black and in LA people wore color. And those buttery yellows and whites and pinks and all the things that Juicy reveled in with the sparkly, you know, sequins, I mean, that just looked, it looked right for the streets and right for the trees and right for the swimming pools and all of that. 

Hamish Bowles: Gela and Pam expertly harnessed the cultural moment of the 2000s when ease of where it was becoming as important to setting trends. But Juicy's success was about more than timing. It was largely due to Pam and Gela's marketing finesse. Predating product placement relationships we see today, they hosted celebrities at LA's famed Chateau Marmont for champagne, pampering, and plenty of their cozy chromatic clothing. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: We were natural marketers, every little detail was really our way of marketing and that kind of culture. We had, of course, the celebrity suite at the Chateau Marmont. That was our marketing moment that, you know, was just the most incredible fun ever. We had manicures and pedicures and champagne at the Chateau and racks of clothes and everybody got something monogrammed on it. Everybody had fun and it was Sharon Stone, and, you know, even the Olsens, everybody under the sun was, was there and wanted to be a part of it. And it was, uh, just an amazing, fun, crazy moment in time that morphed into that definite culture of celebrity product placement. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: It was really fun getting the product out and seeing how all the "It Girls" really wanted to wear it. And they were obsessed with it. And we knew we had something. 

Hamish Bowles: Getting celebrities interested in their designs came naturally to Pam and Gela. As their form fitting velour ensemble became increasingly popular it signaled the emergence of a new line of communication between designers and consumers. Celebrity tabloids.

Pamela Skaist-Levy: Seeing Juicy Couture in "Us," "People," in every magazine. That really helped put it on the map. I remember every "It Girl" was wearing Juicy in the magazines. Now you have to pay people to wear anything. But it really, it wasn't like that. It wasn't, it wasn't like that. We really were the first ones to do that. 

Hamish Bowles: Here's celebrity stylist. Kate Young. 

Kate Young: Juicy was like one of the first brands that, now this is a common thing, but when Juicy started, what those women did was send it to everyone. They sent it free. Like you would get a box, not of like one track suit, it was like 30 different things in that box. Like you would get a crazy like rouched baby doll terry dress to put over your bikini and a pair of jeans and like two track suits. And it was the smartest marketing thing. Now brands do that. I mean, there are whole PR gifting suites in LA where celebrities can go and just like go to a shopping mall with no bill. But people didn't do that at the time. It was a brilliant marketing scheme. 

Hamish Bowles: During a decade synonymous with "tabloid terror," members of the paparazzi whipped celebrity gossip into a frenzy. When we return, we'll learn how celebrity mania and the rise of Juicy Couture went hand in hand, stay tuned.

Consumer's devoured celebrity centric behind the scenes moments with stars like Gisele, Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and Jennifer Lopez all photographed in Juicy Couture. Britney Spears' bridal party wore Juicy track suits on her wedding day. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: I remember the first time seeing Madonna in one of the tabloids wearing a track suit and I was blown away.

Gela Nash-Taylor: Every time we would see an idol like that of ours we would just scream, cry, yell, had a little bit of candy and go crazy. We were innocent like that. It really was exciting for us to see that. It was amazing. When I think that we started it before social media, it's crazy. 

Hamish Bowles: Celebrity stylist, Rachel Zoe remembers the A-listers who had Juicy looks in regular rotation thanks to the trailblazing machinations of Pam and Gela. 

Rachel Zoe: They were like, "Hey, like velvet tracksuits are the thing. And guess what J-Lo and Madonna say that that's true." When J-Lo and Madonna start to wear it proudly, like you're good, you've got this. 

Hamish Bowles: Juicy leapt from the tabloids to television, where hotel heiress Paris Hilton embraced the brand and quickly became its most iconic ambassador.

Pamela Skaist-Levy: She represented popular culture. She represented LA, she represented being the "It Girl" and she wore it so well. Accessorized it perfectly, had the dog. I mean, she understood the brand. She lived it. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: And then they were on "The Simple Life." Nicole Richie and Paris Hilton on "The Simple Life" wearing Juicy every day was genius. It was amazing. 

Hamish Bowles: Throughout its five seasons, Juicy became the unofficial uniform for the reality shows celebrity duo. Juicy capitalized on the media attention and rode this wave to exclusive deals with upscale department stores like Bergdorf Goodman, Saks Fifth Avenue, and Harvey Nichols in London.

Gela Nash-Taylor: We sent the buyer at Harvey Nichols a box, and we said, "Hey, you know, if you like it and it sells, we're in business. And if you don't, you can keep it and have fun." That is what we were like. And of course it was a huge success and it was like the start of a giant business with Harvey Nichols. But it was as, as ridiculously low fi is that. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: Because we didn't know the rules, we didn't know the fashion rules. We just made it up as we went along. 

Hamish Bowles: The prevalence of Juicy and the culture of the 2000s was aided by the decades over the top consumerism. It was a time of prosperity than the average shopper could imagine that a luxurious lifestyle was in reach. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: It's not like looking at an actress like that and they're wearing Schiaparelli couture, and you're like, "oh, I would die for that." But there's no way you could get close to it. This was so accessible. 

Hamish Bowles: It was so accessible that Pam and Gela had to quickly expand production to keep up with the growing demand for their styles. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: Well, it began at unit G and the Branford business park with one tiny, tiny little office with a warehouse in the back that we thought was just brilliant. And then as we grew, we just kept taking other little spaces in this business park until we ended up with about five of them. And then we eventually moved into a bigger warehouse, a block over. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: Same neighborhood because we wanted Pacoima. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: Our big contractor was like a block away. We could walk in there and see what was going. Everything was LA. Everything we did was based in LA. So it wasn't like searching for something in a global way like it is today. You were just going downtown LA to find fabric and to find the right dye house and to find the right cutter and to find the right sewers. And that's, that's how we did it. It was all LA based.

Pamela Skaist-Levy: Yeah, we kept it very local. I mean, that was very important to us making it in the glamorous USA. That was something that was very, very important to our brand. 

Hamish Bowles: Keeping the line LA-made was part of the brand's ethos, but of course, once they reached a certain level of production, they sometimes had issues keeping pace with demand.

Gela Nash-Taylor: We were growing too fast. Our growth was astronomical. Keeping up with that on what people ask me now all the time. "How did you do that?" Because we didn't have LVMH behind us or Liz Claiborne at the time. We were working off a revolving line of credit, which is crazy. That took us to almost $60 million and it became very stressful because it's all on your shoulders. The growth was just crazy. It was very different than having, you know, then being a designer and having a big house back you. It was like learning everything on your own, how to ship, how to do this, how to do that. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: We were mass producing clothes. 300,000 tracksuits a week.

Hamish Bowles: Sally Singer was watching Juicy takeover Los Angeles and spread across the country where it was beginning to reach her peers in New York.

Sally Singer: I wanted to do a story about Juicy and the phenomenon of Juicy, because it, it was, it was reshaping the fashion business, and it was kind of reshaping women's relationships to their lower halves. And we were gearing up for the January Couture shows in Paris and what are we going to do this year? Like who are we going to take shopping? What celebrity am I going to take? What is he? You know, there's all these ways you can cover the couture, which is an extraordinary moment in fashion twice a year. But a kind of unrelatable moment, unless you bring something with you, you find a bridge between a public who will never probably wear these clothes and a celebrity or a person or client or somebody who could possibly wear these clothes and do those kinds of stories. And I was like, I want to bring Juicy to the couture and essentially take the story, I want to put it in the center of the magazine and I want to take Juicy Couture to the couture and do a really big story. And Anna was like, okay. Got it. Okay. I just knew be really fun to be in Paris with them, whatever happened, it would be fun. So I called them to say, "Hey, would you want to come to Paris for the Couture?" And I mean, they are a, it's like being in a romcom with them at all times where you're falling in love with them and they're falling in love with you. They freaked out. I think they freaked out and Gela doesn't freak out as much as Pam freaks out, like Pam is a shrieker and Gela is quite serious kind of person in her own way. And these are grown ass women with children and very fancy lives. So it was very sweet actually.

Hamish Bowles: For Pam and Gela, Sally's phone call seemed to have divine timing. It happened when they were in the middle of talking to press about their brand.

Gela Nash-Taylor: We're doing an interview with CNN, a reporter from CNN and his snarky question was, "well, what do real designers think of you?" And then we were here over our loud speaker, "Ooh, Vogue is on the phone." So we'd go running in the office. We go pick up the phone as Vogue going, "Anna has a brilliant idea. She wants to take Juicy Couture to meet the real Couture." And we are literally screaming. We run back into the warehouse and we were like, what do real designers think of us? Well, we're going to the Couture. So we were like, "See ya." That was the highlight of our lives. It was insane. We were like Willy Wonka and- 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: We won the golden ticket.

Hamish Bowles: At the Couture shows, Pam and Gela stood out from the crowd of fashion followers who attended season after season. 

Sally Singer: They were characters. I mean, to bring them to the Couture, these two women who dressed identically and had these like super long manes of hair. They were a double act. They called each other fluffy and fluffy. Yes they did. And every where they went people would say, "oh my God, the Juices are here. The Juices are here." I don't know what it's like to have people say that too, but they liked it. They liked being characters. They didn't mind being characters. In fact, they did not only mind if they actually courted it in a very, in a certain sort of way, but at the time there weren't that many characters in fashion. They were extremely exotic. 

Hamish Bowles: Wherever they went, Pam and Gela drew the eyes of the couture world. 

Sally Singer: We went to all the major couture shows. From Chanel to Valentino, to the Lacroix, which was spectacular and they loved it. We went to so many shows and then we went shopping, did a lot of shopping. We went to Valentino where they bought matching outfits. We went to Hermes, we went to Chanel, we went out for dinners. I took them to the Valentino party, uh, Giancarlo Giametti's apartment and everywhere they went it just caused a scene. It was really, it was fun. It was very, very fun. I mean, most people, when you take them to something like the couture or through the collections, they'll do a few things with you and they'll meet you at an appointed time and you'll get, you're scene as a writer. If you're writing one of these stories you need scenes. And so it was very, it was, it was very fortunate and very generous of Pam and Gela to basically pitch up every single day and just to hang out all day and all night. Just be completely open and there were just, it was beyond scenes. It was just lots and lots of time. 

Hamish Bowles: Pam and Gela sheer joy in Paris was palpable. And perhaps it's one of the things that rubbed off on the high fashion crowd around them because their presence there was magnetic. 

Sally Singer: They were so happy all the time and people in fashion are almost never happy. They were so smiley. They were so like present. Everybody sort of paid attention to them. And everybody wanted a track suit, everybody.

Gela Nash-Taylor: It was amazing. We made track suits for everybody. We made a tracksuit for Valentina, with Viva and Karl Lagerfeld said slim and everybody got, you know, we had McQueen of the fucking universe. We had to like everybody. It was over the top crazy. 

Sally Singer: My interest Juicy Couture was much more around why John Galliano wanted to wear them or why Karl Lagerfeld wanted to wear them. Why all the people who could have anything in that just wanted a tracksuit? 

Hamish Bowles: When it came down to it, it seemed, the answer to that question was as simple as the fact that Juicy Couture knew how to make clothes that anyone would want to wear. 

Sally Singer: One, it was insanely comfortable and two it made them look thin. Juicy cut a pant in a way that was terribly flattering and they're also, everyone's, everyone's workout wear at the time was really baggy. You know, people had essentially, you know, baggy sweats and baggy things and, or skin tight spandexy no one wants that, but to have something that feels good on the body. And also it had it, it had a bit of bedazzling, they were always sending bedazzled track suits to these guys and it's so funny. People who live in a world of diamonds and real arts suddenly love a bedazzled thing when it's put in front of them. Just a little bit of sparkle. It's wild. I mean, everyone's a teenage girl at heart, I guess, somewhere.

Pamela Skaist-Levy: I think we were afraid that the fashion world would not embrace us, but secretly it was their guilty pleasure. 

Hamish Bowles: A faction of fashion rule followers let their voices be heard. When the Paris story was published in Vogue, readers wrote in to express their opinions on seeing the two so-called fashion destroyers, splashed across the pages of high fashions preeminent publication.

Sally Singer: Remember this is the era really before social media and internet. 

Hamish Bowles: Sally remembers that by and large, the reactions were positive.

Sally Singer: People love that story. We've got a lot of great letters and I'd imagine we got some that were negative too. Probably saying that, you know, Vogue shouldn't be doing stories about basic clothes. It was all with the letters from people who liked Vogue to stay in very, very fancy. I don't mind those letters. I thought it was the right story at the right time. I think the story on Juicy tour at that time was an acknowledgement by Vogue that the industry was changing and the definitions of what constituted a brand that could have real impact was changing. The landscape of fashion was changing. The characters that were in fashion were changing, the expectations of what ready to wear it could be we're changing. And so I, I think that the Juicy story, it sort of made the point more than ever that personal style and fashion come from a lot of places. And that's not a crisis that's a joy. Maybe before that people were a little more protective of fashion and thought fashion had to be in this rarefied space for fancy people. And it sort of made the point, no fashion is all around you. 

Hamish Bowles: In reflecting on the astronomical success they achieved in the pivotal decade of the 2000s, Pam and Gela considered the importance of being an inclusive brand from the start.

Gela Nash-Taylor: Inclusivity, which is what you see everywhere today. I mean, we had old ladies, we had a tattooed boy in a tulle ballerina skirt in that campaign. We had that inclusivity before, you know, I was talking to somebody who was doing it like a line with 10 sizes. And she was like, well, you know, Juicy, I said, are you kidding? We had that too. And it went all the way up to that. She was like, really? I said, yeah. 

Pamela Skaist-Levy: But it wasn't, it wasn't like we were trying to make a statement. Juicy was for everyone, whatever kind of body type. And that, that really was our message and our campaign and what we were trying to say and girl power and be happy. 

Hamish Bowles: The lasting impact of Juicy on the fashion of the 2000s is still palpable, as their influence on sweatsuits and atleisure can be identified in everyday fashion today. 

Gela Nash-Taylor: It was sort of like American girls first brand. It had to have the J pull and it had to be real. It was their first designer kind of brand. But today, I cannot tell you how many people have come up to me saying, "oh, my daughter's obsessed with Juicy. I'm obsessed with Juicy. I'm getting it on Etsy." It's just a phenomenon right now is having this nostalgic moment.

Sally Singer: They were the first, they really were. In this generation, in this moment and, you know, they really were. And I think it's probably because Pam and Gela are exceptional, exceptional people. Driven in ways that few, few that I've met are. Gela's like, like the hardest working person ever and Pam is just, she's just punk. She's just like, give her a rule, she'll just break it. Non-stop, anywhere really anywhere at any time she can't help, but defy authority all day, every day. They're really interesting team.

Hamish Bowles: The Juicy duo joined the ranks of other American designers who were making a scene in the 2000s. It was the decade when the world was being reminded that high fashion didn't necessarily have to mean European. And designers from the US were poised to take the global stage by storm. In the next episode of In Vogue: the 2000s, we'll take an inside look at how the CFDA Vogue Fashion Fund grew to help establish the next generation of American fashion designers.

In Vogue: the 2000s is presented by Anna Wintour, produced by Vogue in partnership with Pod People. Production support by Jacquelyn Jamjoom, Tony Mantia, Rachael King, Matt Sav, Aimee Machado, Madison Lusby, Fredia Lucas, Marie McCoy Thompson, Morgane Fouse, Mariah Dennis, Daniel Brunnelle, Gordon Bramli, Sam Mbatha, Nicki Stein, Percia Verlin, and Stefanie Bichara. Theme music composed by DJ Ghostdad. Vogue's editorial team is Laird Borelli-Persson, Mark Holgate, Nicole Phelps and myself, Hamish Bowles. Special thanks to Vogue's Creative Editorial Director, Mark, Guiducci, VP of Digital Video Programming and Development, Robert Semmer, VP of Audio Julie Shen, and Director of Podcasts, Nico Steele. Please do subscribe to the podcast. It helps new listeners find the show. You can find additional information, incredible imagery, and episode references in the show notes or at Vogue.com/podcast. I'm your host Hamish Bowles. Until next week, in Vogue.