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eCommerce website:  www.lesgazelles.com

(Text excerpted from ELLE Magazine, May 6, 2006 pp142-144; Julia Chaplin)

…The youngest of nine siblings, Nathalie, Laurence, and Marie Jose, now in their thirties grew up traveling and touching down for short spells, setting up clothing boutiques in places like Key West, Ils Saint-Louis, and Bora-Bora. For the past decade they’ve been crossing oceans on an old wooden sailboat helmed by their family collecting textiles and vintage clothes along the way. Luckily for me, they had recently come ashore in Sayulita and tossed together an earthy, bohemian lair above their shop, where they live with their rotating cast of relatives and wayward city souls like me.

…The sisters were all tall, sun-kissed, and seemed perfectly capable of spearing fish, surfing barrels, and then dabbing on lip gloss and dancing all night. Like Loulou de la Falaise, who inspired Yves Saint Laurent with her jet-set flower child style in the 1970’s, the organically cool sisters could have been muses for the wanderlust-themed spring collections by Michael Kors, Missono, and Tory Burch.

…Most of their creations were straight off the racks in their boutique. A reworked ruffled men’s tuxedo shirt picked up on a trip to Bali, for example, wouldn’t have seemed out of place on a spring’s YSL runway. My favorite piece however, was a traditional Mexican embroidered dress revamped with billowing butterfly-wing sleeves thanks to a family of handcrafters from the hills of Chiapas. It had a Tomas Maier for Bottega Veneta luxe0hippie vibe, without the Via Veneto veneer.

And soon I realized Nathalie, Laurence, and Marie Jose’s self-designed living compound was like an extension of their handcrafted wares, as rustically refined as a boutique hotel one might find in Santorini or Ibiza.

..Soon I began to notice that a good number of the eccentric-looking artists and modelesque [Sayulita] society refugees sported the trademark Tahitian pearl jewels (pictured left) around their tan limbs, as if members of some secret joie de vivre society.