Aimé Leon Dore and Teddy Santis, From Queens to Mulberry Street

Before the café there was a curtain. In 2016 Aimé Leon Dore opened its first shop on Mott Street in Nolita, and the door and windows were covered so nobody could see in from the sidewalk. The interior changed with every season. If you knew, you went in. If you did not, you walked past a draped storefront and never gave it a second thought.

Three years later the curtain came down. One block over on Mulberry Street, Teddy Santis opened a bigger flagship with a Greek coffee counter attached, and the label he had started in 2014 suddenly had a front porch.

A name built in Queens

Santis grew up in Queens, the son of Greek immigrants, and spent the 1990s moving between New York and Greece. What he soaked up in those years is still the brand's raw material. Graffiti, breakdancing, house music, hip-hop and a lot of basketball, run through a taste for good knitwear and old-school sportswear.

The name took some work. Santis first wanted to call the label Aimé, the French word for loved. It turned out to be too broad to trademark, so he and his wife built a longer one. Leon came from his father's nickname. Dore came from Theodore, Santis's own first name. The company launched in March 2014, and its headquarters are in Queens.

The early hits were exactly what a borough kid would make. Varsity jackets that pointed back to the New York Mets in their best years sold out fast, and open-knit leisure shirts gave the line its summer uniform. A 2015 project with Puma reworked the State sneaker. A 2017 capsule with Kith went full Mykonos, with anchors, boat paddles and evil-eye graphics. The Greek thread was there from the start. It just had not found its building.

Coffee on Mulberry

The new flagship opened in 2019 on Mulberry Street, with Café Leon Dore attached, a Greek-inspired counter serving coffee and pastries with seating out front. The shop itself was dressed like an apartment, a living room modeled on classic Parisian homes, with wood paneling, a hi-fi system and an installation by the New York artist Tyrrell Winston. That year, Jon Caramanica reviewed the store for his Critical Shopper column in The New York Times and filed ALD as a heritage brand that came after streetwear, which is still the most useful one-line description of the label.

The café is the part people remember. A clothing store gets your visit on release day. A coffee counter with outdoor seating gets you on an ordinary Saturday, and a full sidewalk is better advertising than any lookbook. Kith ran the same play with a cereal bar, as told in our history of Kith and Ronnie Fieg. Santis has named Nom De Guerre, the early-2000s basement shop at Broadway and Bleecker, as one of his biggest influences, and it sat minutes from where his flagship went in. Mulberry Street reads like a reply to it, a downtown shop that wanted to be found and gave you a reason to linger. It anchors the Nolita end of our SoHo streetwear guide.

The 550 and the grey shoes

The New Balance partnership began in April 2019 with the 997. That November brought the 990v2 and 990v5, and in March 2020 ALD revived the 827, a model that had been out of sight for more than two decades.

Then came the 550. New Balance first sold it in 1989 as the P550, a $45 low-top basketball shoe that went nowhere. When ALD brought it back in 2020, the model was so obscure that New Balance had to track down used pairs and old sketches to rebuild it. The reissue sold well enough that the 550 became a general release. An archive flop the company barely knew it had was suddenly a catalog staple.

On April 5, 2021, New Balance named Santis creative director of its MADE in USA line, a role the company called the first of its kind. The job covers design and marketing for shoes built in New Balance's American factories, which by the brand's own standard carry 70 percent or more domestic value. His first product landed in 2022. The muted, menswear-minded colorways he brought to the line did a lot to turn the 990 into an expensive-looking object, a shift we cover in our New Balance 990 history. The official announcement is in New Balance's press archive.

Porsches, powerboats and LVMH

ALD makes its collaborations look like hobbies. In February 2020 it revealed a one-off restoration of a 1990 Porsche 964 911 Carrera 4, the first time Porsche officially backed a vintage 911 restoration, with a capsule collection and an installation at Deitch Gallery on Wooster Street. In July 2023 came the ALD Technohull 38 Grand Sport, a powerboat built with the Greek rib maker Technohull and fitted with twin 450 horsepower Mercury engines. Woolrich, Drake's, Paraboot, Timberland, Suicoke and Rimowa have all appeared on the partner list.

The money followed the taste. In January 2022, Hypebeast reported that LVMH had taken a minority stake through LVMH Luxury Ventures, its fund for emerging labels. Neither the size of the stake nor the price was disclosed, and the company stayed in New York. The same coverage pointed to a London store on the way.

The store count has stayed small. Beyond New York there is a London shop, and in April 2026 MR Magazine reported a first Los Angeles flagship on Melrose Avenue as coming soon, with no opening date announced. In June 2026, Hypebeast reported the label's first dedicated women's capsule, sold online and in its flagships. Compare that with the store maps of Kith or Stüssy and the gap is obvious. For a label this talked about, a handful of doors is a small number, and the scarcity is part of the appeal.

More on the shops and founders behind this world lives in our culture section and the streetwear and collaborations hubs.

The Mott Street shop hid behind a curtain. Its replacement put chairs on the sidewalk and a coffee in your hand.