Ale by Alessandra

Ale by Alessandra is a fashion and lifestyle label created by the Brazilian model Alessandra Ambrosio and launched in spring 2014 through a licensing partnership with the American brand company Cherokee. It was aimed at women aged roughly 18 to 35 and covered clothing from casual pieces to formal wear, with its first collection shown at the Southern California retailer Planet Blue. The museum holds 12 products under the name. The brand's own website now returns a server error, and nothing confirms that the line is still in active production.

A Victoria's Secret Angel's own line

Alessandra Ambrosio was born in 1981 in Erechim, in the southern Brazilian state of Rio Grande do Sul. She was a Victoria's Secret Angel from 2004 to 2017, thirteen years in the role, and was the first spokesmodel for the company's PINK line. Lingerie made her famous, so it is no surprise that her name kept turning up on products of her own.

Ale by Alessandra was not her first attempt. In 2004 she put her name on a swimwear line, Alessandra Ambrosio by Sais, which is reported to have sold 10,000 units in its first month. That number shows what a model's name could do for a swim range at the height of the Angels' fame, and it explains why a licensing company would later want her as a partner.

How the Cherokee license worked

The structure of Ale by Alessandra is the most interesting thing about it. Cherokee, the American company behind it, had by then stopped being a clothing maker in the usual sense. It owned and licensed brand names, and let retailers and manufacturers produce goods under them in return for royalties. In this deal, Ambrosio's own intellectual property company, Silver Sunrise LLC, held the brand, and Cherokee acted as its global licensing agent.

That arrangement explains a good deal about how the line looked. A licensed celebrity label has no factory of its own. Design direction comes from the name on the tag and a licensing team. Production comes from whichever partner signs the license in each market. The result can be a broad range covering dresses, tops, swim and accessories in one season, because each category can be farmed out separately.

Planet Blue and the first collection

The apparel was first shown by Planet Blue, a Southern California boutique chain with a following in beach and bohemian dressing. A boutique launch gave the line a fashion setting before any wider rollout, and it matched the stated customer: women from their late teens to their mid-thirties, buying everything from day clothes to evening dresses.

What happened to the Ale by Alessandra name

Cherokee later listed Ale by Alessandra among the brands it owned. The company itself changed shape: it became known as Apex Global Brands, and in 2021 Apex Global Brands was acquired by Galaxy Universal. What became of the Ale by Alessandra license in that change is not recorded in the sources checked for this entry, and the label's official site no longer loads.

Ambrosio, meanwhile, moved on to a project of her own. In March 2019 she launched GAL Floripa, a beachwear brand created with her sister Aline and a childhood friend, Gisele Coria, its name drawn from Floripa, the everyday nickname of Florianopolis, the island city in southern Brazil. GAL Floripa is a separate company and should not be confused with Ale by Alessandra, though both draw on the same idea of relaxed Brazilian beach dressing.

The products in the archive

The 12 Ale by Alessandra products in the museum's database are held privately for research and are not shown on this page. For a label that sold casual and formal clothing rather than underwear, the pieces that end up in a lingerie archive are the ones that sit closest to the body: swim separates such as the bikini bottom, slip dresses, bodysuits and soft tops cut like a bralette. The museum files them under the name on the tag, whatever the category.

For an encyclopedia of lingerie, Ale by Alessandra is a footnote to a much larger career, and a clean example of how the celebrity licensing model of the 2010s worked: a famous name, a holding company to own it, a licensing agent to sell it, and a launch at a single well-chosen boutique.

Last updated October 7, 2026