I wrote about Popomomo in May 2011, in a post that was mostly about the fact that I refused to let summer slip by again and had tentative plans for the Vineyard in June. The post was me in a good mood, looking at clothes that matched my mood.
Popomomo was that kind of brand. Colorful, relaxed, slightly irreverent. The kind of thing that made you feel like whoever designed it was having a good time. Which is not as common as it sounds.
The person having the good time was Lizz Wasserman, who founded the label in Los Angeles in 2007 after designing for Urban Outfitters and Free People. She cut everything in organic or sustainable fabrics and said the clothes were idea-based rather than trend-based, which was a quietly radical position in 2011. You can still wander the old collections on the Wayback Machine, and Refinery29 covered the Spring 2012 lookbook if you want to see what I mean about the mood.
The joy was real
Most fashion is serious about itself. Even the brands that market fun are serious about marketing fun. There's a strategic intentionality to the joy that you can feel through the seams. Popomomo didn't have that quality. The playfulness seemed unconstructed. Genuine.
The brands that survived the last fifteen years tend to fall into two categories. The ones that built systems: documented supply chains, legal infrastructure, consistent brand identity that could survive the founder's bad week. And the ones that had a point of view so specific and so genuine that it became a kind of protection.
Popomomo was in the second category, or trying to be. The problem with that model is it's very hard to scale and very easy to lose. When the person behind it moves on, or burns out, or runs out of funding, the voice goes with them.
That is, as far as I can tell, what happened here. The label went quiet somewhere in the mid-2010s, and Wasserman moved on to bigger design jobs, ModCloth and then the corporate creative world. The voice went with her. I don't say that as a criticism. It's just how the second category ends, most of the time.
The brands that combined both, genuine point of view AND operational infrastructure, are the ones that are still here.
The 2026 part
In 2026, the legal requirements for small fashion brands are significant. FTC disclosure rules, state-level rules on AI imagery and digital replicas, supply chain documentation requirements arriving in the EU under the Ecodesign Regulation. Fun doesn't protect you from any of that. But fun with a foundation does.
The summer clothes were good though. I remember that clearly.