Five years after launching High Sport with a pair of $860 cropped kick-flare pants that became one of fashion’s most unlikely cult items, Alissa Zachary is ready for a bigger stage.
For spring 2027, the Los Angeles-based brand will join New York Fashion Week for the first time, releasing a digital lookbook that’s a prelude to what comes next—the runway. It’s a significant milestone for a label that has grown largely through word of mouth, without ever staging a party or press day, let alone a fashion show. And it comes as Zachary is preparing for High Sport’s next phase of growth, including category and retail expansion, creating a physical home for the brand in LA, and eventually, perhaps, taking on outside investment.
“We’re excited to bring the brand to life and bring the community together,” Zachary says. “We have not even scratched the surface, which is exciting, because we have so much potential.”
Just days before going to New York, Zachary is sitting in High Sport’s showroom in Almont Yard in West Hollywood, a discreet creative compound with a leafy courtyard. She leased the space about a year ago, and it still feels more like a working studio than the debut store it will become, with a moodboard full of clippings behind her desk and an impressive collection of research books scattered about, from Anna Thommesen: Weavings surveying the work of the Danish artist, to Kevin O’Sullivan’s Goin’ Big: Gotcha and the Evolution of Modern Surf Style about the pioneering 1980s Southern California surfwear brand.
Photo: Sam Penn/ High Sport
Two rails on either side of the central room hold samples from recent seasons, including checkerboard versions of the dense compact-knit pants that made High Sport famous, and molded strapless knit tops in punchy orange, purple and red.
Seen together, the body-conscious graphic simplicity of the collection recalls the work of the late great 1960s-era LA designer Rudi Gernreich, who built a global business around body-liberating stretch knits, freedom of movement and a certain disregard for how dressed-up clothes should look, not to mention the revolutionary monokini. Zachary says she’s not been directly inspired by his work yet, but was intrigued to see it in a book about California fashion she recently picked up.
Her Spring 2027 collection, styled by Vanessa Reid and shot by Sam Penn in New York, deliberately captures something of the process of High Sport entering Fashion Week, with a backstage, behind-the-scenes vibe. It also broadens the vocabulary of the brand.
