Laurie Haspel Runs Two Family Empires and Still Makes Room for Art
By Stephen Cyrus Sepher
A Confident Man Who Likes What He’s Wearing
Laurie Haspel does not begin with fashion. She begins with psychology. A man may insist he does not care about clothes, but she has spent decades watching the opposite unfold. Men want to look good. Not for vanity, but for alignment. When what you are wearing matches who you believe you are, your posture shifts. Your decisions land differently. You walk into rooms with less internal negotiation.
Confidence, in her world, is not abstract. It is practical. It is engineered. Clothing becomes a tool that closes the distance between self perception and public presence. There is nothing more powerful, she says, than a confident man who likes what he is wearing, because when that alignment is off, the day rarely recovers. The discomfort lingers. The doubt leaks into everything else.
Her work, at its core, is about eliminating that friction.
Haspel and the Fabric That Became Culture
The company she runs on her mother’s side began in New Orleans in 1909. Haspel is not just a brand. It is an artifact of American design evolution. Her great grandfather did not invent seersucker, but he transformed its purpose. What had been workwear fabric became gentleman’s tailoring, a solution to Southern heat that preserved dignity without sacrificing comfort.
In the era before air conditioning, men were still expected to dress formally, even in Louisiana humidity. Seersucker became the bridge between climate and culture. The suit moved from regional necessity into Ivy League adoption and eventually into the national fashion vocabulary.
Laurie carries that history with precision. She speaks about it not as nostalgia, but as innovation that solved a real world problem and then scaled into identity.
Modernizing Tradition Without Breaking It
What defines her leadership is not preservation alone, but translation. She has evolved the brand toward suit separates, reflecting how modern men actually live. A jacket is no longer bound to a matching trouser. It moves between denim, sport shirts, and layered casual wear.
She reframes seersucker as process rather than pattern. Beyond the classic stripes, the brand produces tonal fabrics, navy on navy, charcoal, olive, textured solids that hold visual depth without seasonal limitation. Even the manufacturing reflects hybrid thinking. Their proprietary seersucker is milled in Italy, blending cotton with stretch for comfort.
Her approach is architectural. Maintain the heritage spine, but engineer adaptability around it so the product survives contemporary lifestyle shifts.
Running Two Family Empires Without Losing the Thread
On her father’s side sits an entirely different enterprise, Lipsey’s, a national wholesale sporting goods distributor supplying firearms to thousands of federally licensed retailers. The scale, regulation, and operational complexity of that business stand in sharp contrast to fashion.
And yet she runs both.
What allows it to function is structure. Teams built to execute, administrative systems that support multiple verticals, and a leadership style rooted in accountability. She speaks openly about feeling responsible for every employee who walks into the building each morning.
Family business, in her framing, never turns off. Phones remain on. Decisions carry generational weight. Growth becomes mandatory, because stagnation erodes not only revenue but morale.
She does not romanticize the pressure. She operationalizes it.
Broadway, Wine, and the Story Her Father Carried
Despite the scale of her responsibilities, Laurie never abandoned her creative instincts. She once imagined life as a professional dancer, and that artistic pull still finds outlets. She has invested in Broadway productions, including Cabaret and Gypsy, drawn to the emotional electricity of live performance.
She has also stepped into winemaking, launching a label alongside a close family friend, blending Pinot Noir in Napa while building a lifestyle extension that sits somewhere between passion and business.
But the most intimate project she is working on is a book about her father. A businessman whose life intersected history when he served in the Kennedy White House, later tasked with guarding the president’s body from its return to Washington through burial.
He avoided publicity for decades, rejecting conspiracy culture and sensational interviews. Now, with age pressing, Laurie is preserving his story through writing. Not as spectacle, but as legacy documentation. A daughter capturing memory before time dissolves its edges.
It mirrors everything else she does.
Protect the structure. Preserve the narrative. Pass it forward intact.
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