There is something undeniably charming about a small dog in a sweater. There is something next-level about a small dog in a sweater whose human is wearing the matching one, especially when both pieces come off the same chic knitwear label. That’s the Giu Giu image in a sentence, and behind it is a story that starts with a grandmother’s design and gets hijacked, happily, by a Brussels Griffon.
The turtleneck that started a company
Before the dog, there was the knit. Giuliana Leila Raggiani studied knitwear at Central Saint Martins in London and put in time at Tess Giberson, Alexander Wang, and Calvin Klein before launching Giu Giu in 2013. Her first piece under the new name was almost defiantly simple: a body-con, ribbed turtleneck she called the NONNA, inspired by something her grandmother had designed back in the 1960s. It caught on, and a real business grew up around it.
Enter Yoko
The pivot to dogs came the way the best pivots do, by accident, and out of frustration. Raggiani had spent more than three years trying to bring home a dog, cycling through adoption agencies, shelters, and breeders, with every near-miss falling through. Then, in October 2019, while she was in Kyoto celebrating her thirtieth birthday, a breeder she’d contacted months earlier messaged about a runt from a final litter who needed a home. One photo of those enormous, watery eyes, “ocean eyes,” as she describes them, and the search was over. The Brussels Griffon became Yoko Luna, and Raggiani’s whole world reorganized around her.
Yoko is also, in a sense, a co-founder. Struggling to find dog clothes that were both high quality and actually stylish, Raggiani did the obvious thing for a knitwear designer: she started making them herself. Those pieces now sell online and through select high-end retailers, and the range keeps expanding across both dog and human lines, all developed under Yoko’s famously discerning supervision.
The dog runs the studio
That supervision is not entirely a joke. By Raggiani’s telling, Yoko comes to work and treats it as her domain, making the rounds to check that everyone is on task, a habit that earned her the nickname “the manager.” During Fashion Week she works the showroom, greeting buyers and, in her owner’s affectionate framing, helping them make their selections. She is, in other words, the brand’s mascot, muse, and quality-control department rolled into one very small, very opinionated body.
She has opinions about the clothes, too. Her signature look is a celery-green NONNA turtleneck paired with a hand-beaded charm necklace. She is game for almost any garment, with pointed exceptions: a baby-blue puffer with a hood sends her into full theatrical collapse, flat on the floor, head down, radiating despair. She’s no fan of her snow boots either, though since she flatly refuses to walk in cold rain or snow, they’ve become a necessary compromise, one Raggiani hopes to solve with cozier waterproof knits down the line.
A very particular little dog
The Yoko anecdotes have the specificity of a real relationship rather than a marketing bio. She’s a superb traveler, calm on planes, unbothered by new places, and enough of a germaphobe that on one grueling fourteen-hour journey she flatly declined to use an airport’s animal relief area, tilting her head at the very suggestion and simply holding it until they arrived. She has a strange, endearing habit of parking herself on the feet of strange men in public, a train platform, a ski instructor mid-book, entirely unfazed. And she is, in the truest sense of the breed’s reputation, a velcro dog, the kind of companion who leaves her person feeling a little incomplete when they’re apart.
What’s next
Raggiani’s ambitions point outward and forward. High on the list is an experiential Giu Giu shop in Japan, ideally Kyoto, where the brand has a devoted following and where an in-person space would let her host customers properly. She’s also set on expanding beyond knits with an emphasis on sustainability, drawn to the newer, lower-impact technologies emerging across the industry, and, she’s quick to add, on more designs for dogs, pending, of course, Yoko’s approval.
It’s a small story that sits inside a much larger one. Premium pet apparel has grown from novelty into a genuine category as more people treat their animals as full members of the household and spend accordingly. Giu Giu’s particular charm is that it didn’t chase that trend so much as stumble into it, one designer, one impossible-to-shop-for Griffon, and a matching sweater neither of them can resist.
