Justin Alexander Brand Guidelines: The Warshaw Family Bridal Group Founded in Brooklyn in 1946

From veils in Brooklyn to a name of its own.

Justin Alexander is a bridal company whose name is much younger than its history. The company says it “debuted on the bridal fashion scene as T&G Bridal in Brooklyn, New York in 1946.” Bridal Guide, reporting the 80th anniversary in 2026, gives the same year and the same first name, and the company spells out the letters as Thanks and Goodluck, a name it still uses for a line of accessories.

The founders were Shirley and Ted Warshaw. Their grandson, Justin Warshaw, told The Bridal Council in February 2018 that they were the first of the family to enter the bridal business and that T&G specialised in headpieces and veils. It was not yet a dress company. His father and his father’s brothers joined “a couple decades later,” he said, and saw an opportunity to expand into wedding dresses. In a BELLA interview published in November 2024 he dated the shift from accessories to wedding dresses to the early 1980s. By the time he was growing up, he told MunaLuchi Bride, the business was on 36th Street in Manhattan’s Garment District, and he spent summers working in its warehouse.

The next chapter was European. Warshaw said his father took the business to Europe, built the Sincerity Bridal and Sweetheart Gowns brands there, and returned to New York in 2001. A February 2021 feature on PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com says the company began operating under the Justin Alexander name on that return to New York, and that Justin Warshaw joined full time in 2008. The company’s own awards list begins in the same period, with a US DEBI award, “Rising Star – Designer,” in 2001.

The name itself is personal rather than historic. “My first name is Justin. My middle name is Alexander. And my last name’s Warshaw,” he told MunaLuchi Bride, explaining that brides and customers know him as Justin Alexander. When he joined, he said, about 90 percent of the business was in Europe; he described the years since as a period of growth in the United States. The Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week profile of 2026 calls him CEO and creative director and the third generation to lead the house.

Five core brands and two licensed names.

Justin Alexander is now a group more than a single label. In the BELLA interview Warshaw listed five core brands. Justin Alexander is the classic line, and Justin Alexander Signature the luxury line for fashion-led brides. Adore by Justin Alexander targets the “chic and trendy” bride, Lillian West is bohemian in style, and Sincerity Bridal, the brand his father built in Europe, is pitched at the fairy-tale wedding. Thanks + Goodluck accessories, from veils to detachable sleeves, sit alongside them.

The group has also taken on other designers’ names. The company says its Luxury Group was established in 2011 and today holds Justin Alexander Signature, Savannah Miller and Viktor&Rolf Mariage. In July 2016 FashionUnited reported that the Dutch fashion house Viktor&Rolf would launch its first official bridalwear collection in partnership with Justin Alexander, built on the pillars of “unexpected elegance, conceptual glamour, and provocative couture.” Warshaw said in 2018 that the collaboration had taught the company new techniques and brought advances in dress construction. In September 2018 The Bridal Council reported that the British designer Savannah Miller had teamed up with the Luxury Group for a collection called “Wild Horses.” Warshaw told the same publication that year that he oversaw five owned collections and “licensed partnerships,” and FashionUnited in 2026 listed the two as “luxury partners.”

Recent collections show how the house talks about its dresses. Fashion Mannuscript reported in May 2024 that the Signature campaign “Verses in Contrast” paired Warshaw with the Milan graffiti artist Sexsdreams. The Fall/Winter 2025 Signature collection, “Nocturne Symphony,” was described in BELLA through structured corsets, exaggerated Basque waists, corded Alençon lace and laser-cut appliqués. Warshaw told the magazine that all its dresses can be customised with either a corset or a zipper.

The anniversary year brought more names. In April 2026 FashionUnited reported the launch of Poeza, a bridal brand built on sculpted silhouettes and described as “quiet luxury,” and of Fable by Justin Alexander, an 18-piece debut collection of flower girl dresses for spring/summer 2027. Fable’s distribution, the report said, would include e-commerce as well as boutiques, which FashionUnited called an expansion beyond traditional bridal channels. Bridal Guide reported that the group marked its 80 years at Barcelona Bridal Week with a 650-person runway show, “Forever in Bloom,” built around an oak tree that grew through the presentation, under the campaign line “Eighty Years of Love — In Love Since 1946.”

How bridal houses present themselves.

Bridal houses sell a single garment that most customers will wear once, and their images tend to reflect that. The dress usually comes first, shown whole on a stand or a model, with the room, the light and the type kept quiet around it. Pages often stay pale and uncluttered, so that white, ivory and blush can be told apart.

Close-ups do much of the remaining work. Lace, tulle, beading and hand finishing are hard to read at full length, so lookbooks and websites move in on a sleeve, a hem or a bodice seam. These details carry the claims about workmanship, and they give a designer’s pattern or a house’s lace a recognisable surface.

The runway calendar sets the rhythm. New York Bridal Fashion Week and Barcelona Bridal Fashion Week give houses a fixed moment to show a season, and many present a named collection with its own theme, set and printed material. The show then feeds the photography, film and social posts that follow it through the year. Backstage pictures, fittings and the walk down the runway all give a house more ways to show how a gown moves.

The shop is the other stage. Showroom mirrors, fitting platforms, soft seating and rails of samples are all part of how a label appears to a bride, and a garment bag or printed lookbook may be the piece of the brand that she takes home. For a designer, that makes the category a useful study in restraint: a small set of tones, a quiet typeface and careful photography, repeated from the catalogue to the fitting room.

Sold through authorised retailers.

Justin Alexander says it maintains a North American headquarters in New Jersey and a European headquarters at Alblasserdam in the Netherlands, with regional offices in London and Hong Kong. Press reports of 2016 and 2018 listed New York and Rotterdam among its offices. Bridal Guide describes it in 2026 as family-owned. The retail count has climbed in published reports: more than 1,000 authorised retailers in FashionUnited in 2016, more than 1,500 in The Bridal Council in 2018, and more than 2,200 on the company’s website today.

Those shops are central to how the brand protects itself. Its Certified Products page says authentic dresses are “sketched and perfected by our designers, created in our sample rooms, and produced in our manufacturing facilities,” and that they are delivered to authorised retailers only. The same page warns that counterfeit websites may use the company’s photographs and name. On location, the February 2021 PreOwnedWeddingDresses.com feature said the gowns were made and distributed from China and Myanmar, with a quality control team visiting at every shipment; the company’s Certified Products page speaks only of “our manufacturing facilities.”

The awards are mostly trade honours, listed by the company itself. They include DEBI awards in the United States in 2001, 2002, 2006 and 2015, the last for Bridal Designer Collection of the Year; Best Manufacturer at the Harrogate Bridal Show in 2011, selected by UK bridal retailers; and Bridal Buyer honours in 2016, 2023 and 2025. The same list records a Lifetime Achievement Award for Larry Warshaw in 2024.

For a design guide, Justin Alexander shows how a family business can turn a person’s first and middle names into a house brand while keeping its founding date as the older story. The 1946 date runs through its campaigns, and its original initials survive on an accessories line. Compare Pronovias, another bridal name seen at Barcelona, and Maggie Sottero, a family bridal group built around a chosen name. For this guide we use a deep oak green, ivory and an antique gold with a serif, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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