Opening Ceremony

[Spacemiu]

Interview
Game on at Opening Ceremony
New York

It's a popularly held view that compared to other fashion capitals, New York is an unadventurous shopping town. Luxury is consumed in copious quantities, but it is luxury of mainstream design. Edgy sportswear that thrives in cities such as London and Tokyo lack an audience in the city that shops safe. There are, however a handful of new and established stores conducting a push onto consumers, challenging sensibilities and winning audience while at it — and after two years of business, Opening Ceremony can be said to fall in that category. On a recent visit, we were so struck by the unusual mix of brands (Rachel Comey, Matthew Ames, Indigo People, Mary Ping, 77 Berlin Industries, Wolfen, Tereza Santos, Frank Leder, etc) which triggered our interest to drill down and get to the core of the game at Opening Ceremony. Co-owner Humberto Leon invited Jason Campbell into his closet to discuss how the brands face off, bringing in the clients, and the strict no pretension policy.

JCR: Tell me about the premise of the store. Describe the collections.

HL: The premise of the store is that every year we focus on a different country. We select 15 designers from that country and we compete them against 15 New York designers. One of the most important part of the selection and the merchandising is to make it as unpretentious as possible. The brands do not overwhelm the space. When customers walk in they feel comfortable; whether they're trying on or looking at a $2000 dress or leaving with a $5 magazine, that's really okay.

JCR: It's about having lines that are accessible?

HL: One of the strongest things to date is that we have a very loyal customer base. My partner and I are both avid shoppers; we love shopping. There are times where you want to go and spend $600 on a pair of shoes, and there are times that you want to spend $20 on a t-shirt. And we really try to merchandise and buy for the store with that kind of mentality.

JCR: Do you buy for the customer or do you buy for you and expect them to embrace it?

HL: We buy for us. The men's collection is bought from my point of view and the women's from my partner's. The way we talk about the store, merchandise it and buy for it is like a closet. We're not saying that we own the best of the world. There's so much out there that's great just two blocks from here. What we like to sell is what we like.

JCR: How did the worldview concept come about?

HL: We opened the store just after 9/11. We were ready to leave our corporate jobs and go into this new venture, and once 9/11 happened we wanted to take the concept of the store further. We don't focus on big fashion-push countries; we're not planning to do France or Italy anytime soon. We started off with China, then Brazil, now Germany, and next year it's the UK. The UK is a good example of a country that has a lot of fashion — and fashion is a big part of the UK — but within the last four to five years last four to five years there's been a move away from London. Buyers and editors no longer go...

JCR: So it requires a new look?

HL: We took it upon ourselves to go and explore and find what is interesting in London. Saint Martins is a great school, where are those people going? What are they doing? What are some of the lines you heard about that have dropped off? For us the UK sounds very interesting.

JCR: It's not about the obvious places for seeking out talent, it's about the exploration.

HL: And we're strict about it. For instance, if there's one great designer from Paris that we love and we know would fit perfectly in our store, but we won't carry it because it won't fit into our theme. It's really important for us to be able to tell the story to our customers without confusion.

JCR: In terms of how you choose your brands, that's clear: it's regionally focused. But in terms of collective identity for the brands, can you define that?

HL: One of the things we always try to do is to represent the country away from its stereotypes. Brazil for instance, we really tried to not focus on skimpy, bikini-type clothing; it's too easy and obvious.

JCR: Instead you went for an Alexander Herchovitch, who's more artsy and intellectual.

HL: He's someone who's regarded highly in Brazil and internationally. There are some other designers who may be less regarded in Brazil that we really wanted to represent. There's this really small line, Neon that we have upstairs. If you met them you'd fall in love with them and their clothes are secondary; and then you start to fall in love with their clothes. All of that adds to how we buy.

JCR: A lot of these brands you sell exclusively in New York or in the U.S.; what does exclusivity mean at this point in time in the fashion story?

HL: I think exclusivity should come from the designer's point of view. The designer should be able to say, "I don't want my line over-distributed" because at the end of the day, you as the designer end up losing a point of view because you're in every Tom Dick and Harry store in a region. If you're in five stores in our neighborhood, as a buyer I'm probably going to look at you a little less. I won't necessarily experiment with my buy with you.

JCR: It's interesting that you address it from the designer's perspective.

HL: We never pressure designers to give us exclusives. The exclusives we have are because of the designers' choice.

JCR: Tell me about the buying process to reach the customer in an exciting way.

HL: For us, the most exciting part about Opening Ceremony is that it's not necessarily downtown and cool. That's really important to us. The customer could be the head of an architecture firm, or an 80-year-old fashionable woman, or a 15-year-old rich girl.

JCR: And do you count such a mix as your customer base?

HL: We do. We don't just target the urban point of view or the rich older lady. Again, it's like a closet. If you raid someone's closet you don't love everything but you find those one or two things that you say, "this is great; I would love to have this."

JCR: How are you able to stock so much merchandise?

HL: The store is sort of like a museum with permanent collections and visiting ones.

JCR: Tell us about the Opening Ceremony brand.

HL: We've had the brand since the beginning. We didn't want to spend our money on basics. We decided to do the basics (t-shirts, sweatshirts, etc.) ourselves and offer them at an affordable price. We were seeing so many graphic t-shirts out there, so we thought, "how can we take a look at tees and sweats differently?" So we decided not to apply any graphics and treat them as graphics themselves. Slowly the line evolved into interesting basics, and things are going very well; we're in 25 stores around the country.

JCR: The wholesale part of the business is key to the business plan?

HL: Yes. We also have a showroom representing 10 of the designers that we carry in the store. It was very natural to open a showroom. A lot of buyers were interested in carrying some of these lines and some of them are only carried in our store and the only way to reach them was in another country. Language, etc. was an issue. So we thought about how we could help some of these designers. Also, at the end of the year if we don't carry a designer any longer, how can we continue to work with them and help them expand?

JCR: How do trends figure into this program?

HL: The trend part is very difficult. My partner and I make very specific buys; again, specific to us. If there was a straw trend, for example, but we didn't believe in it, we wouldn't buy it. We buy into it because we like it.

JCR: But you do have an eye on trends in terms of sensibilities on the rise?

HL: Trends are not an obsolete issue. It depends on which designers we carry. We work with the designers first, then we look at their collection. If the designer were pretentious or had a point of view that we didn't believe in, we wouldn't carry them, whether or not the collection was fantastic.

JCR: What about the concept of buying into brand name? Is that a relevant discussion for Opening Ceremony?

HL: The interesting thing about going to these countries is looking for the non-brand names. And we always want to represent the heritage of the country; so along with that usually comes a name or two that are a bit more established. We try to carry one or two established designers to round out the story, the young designers, and other parts of the country whether from flea markets that we find, we carry that as well. Compared to everything else, the brand-name designer factor is really played down.

JCR: Tell me about the climate for this kind of clothes in New York at the moment.

HL: Most of the customers who come here come back because they know that we offer things that other people might not. I think partly it has to do with many of the designers here are young designers who are a lot less inhibited to do random quirky things that may not be that understandable by the average consumer. If you look, we have Bless, which I think may be an un-consumer-friendly label; yet there is a following for it. And there's that customer who likes that kind of fit. The way the store is going and the fact we have these many lines and are able to support it, it's very exciting to see that there are consumers who want to go this route.

Photos: Opening Ceremony interior

JC Report

 

[softgrey]

thanks space...

i think i have officially decided that i don't really lilke this store...
and not really feeling the staff...

 

[CiaoManhattan]

coacd.blogspot.com

 

[kimair]

more on the l.a. store from wwd...

Fashion-forward New York specialty boutique Opening Ceremony will launch its second location on Sunday here with a mission to educate the West Coast on New York style.

"The idea of the shop was to bring everything we love about New York to L.A.," said Humberto Leon, who launched Opening Ceremony in 2002 with partner Carol Lim.

The 5,000-square-foot store on La Cienega Boulevard, which had a soft opening Thursday, stocks 60 to 70 international contemporary and designer brands. The concept for Opening Ceremony was inspired by the internationalism of the Olympic games. The New York location picks a country to feature each year, then chooses designers and manufacturers from that country to merchandise as a package.

"It's always a certain country versus New York," Leon said. "We borrowed the concept from [International Olympic Committee founder] Pierre de Coubertin….We announce a country a year in advance. Labels start calling and anticipation builds."

The Los Angeles launch has inspired the retailers to pit New York designers against West Coast designers, a showdown that will start in September in both stores. Representing the left coast will be brands such as Katy Rodriguez and Jasmin Shokrian, while New York's mascots will include Mayle, United Bamboo and Proenza Schouler.

Leon and Lim, both 32, grew up in the Los Angeles suburbs and said they wanted to open a location on their home turf.

The company doesn't release sales figures, but Leon said he hopes sales from the Los Angeles store will meet, and eventually surpass, those of New York.

In searching for a location here, the retailers picked an historic freestanding building on La Cienega Boulevard, near Melrose Avenue. The strip is home to high-profile restaurants such as Bridge and Koi, but daytime foot traffic is scarce. "We felt like we wanted something special," Leon said. "We wanted the space to dictate the store, not the street."

The white-walled boutique, which was once Charlie Chaplin's dance studio, features 12 separate-but-linked rooms. Merchandise is arranged by geographic location of origin.

A large room features pieces by European labels, including Nakkna, Mario Schwab and Lutz, while an old walk-in safe houses pieces from Brazilian designers. The store is the only distributor in Los Angeles of British fast-fashion label Topshop and dedicates a small room to the brand, next to a pantry-sized enclave stacked with Cheap Monday jeans.

Prices for apparel range from $10 for items such as tank tops to $600 for outerwear, said Lim, who added, "We like to mix the low end with the high end."

The front room features the company's artsy-but-minimal private label collection, which Leon and Lim launched in 2005. The pair has recently grown the line into a full-blown collection, with accessories and shoes. Fashion-forward jewelry and accessories by companies such as Thorn, Want Essentials and Driftwood are displayed inside custom-made glass boxes balanced on top of industrial blue hydraulic carts. A former reception area was transformed into an eye-level glass case cut into the wall, filled with shoes. Two Ping-Pong tables, covered with pink-hued representations of the California state flag, dominate the men's apparel section.

"There are a lot of wacky elements," Leon said.

 

[MissMagAddict]

source | nytimes | march 13th

WEARING WHAT THEY SELL From right, staff members Olivia Kim in Chloë Sevigny;
Lindsey Caldwell in Opening Ceremony and a Stetson; Ian Wilson in Opening Ceremony.

Staff member Morgan Rehbock in
Opening Ceremony suit.

Be a Fashion Insider or Just Look Like One

Three tidbits of recent fashion news that may have escaped your attention:

Jill Sander, the modernistic and exorbitantly priced label designed by Raf Simons, is moving downtown to an unglamorous block of Howard Street, off lower Broadway.

Topshop, the British chain that rivals H & M in reprocessing runway fashion for the masses, plans to open its first New York store in September, near the new Jil Sander.

Over in Sweden, H & M acquired a majority stake in the maker of Cheap Monday jeans last week, for roughly $91 million.

What has one to do with another, you may be wondering.

In fashion, there is often a common denominator, even in seemingly random events, that persuades a designer to take up residence far from the beaten luxury path; a foreign retailer to try to conquer New York; and a multibillion-dollar company to invest in a hot niche brand. In this case, the catalyst happens to be a store: Opening Ceremony, at 35 Howard Street, opened in 2002 by two former luxury retail executives, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim.

The store looks like an old mom-and-pop, inside and out, and retains the vivid imprint of its former life as a distribution center for Pond’s skin-care products. The displays are messy, and the dressing room curtains don’t quite close all the way. But as a destination for fashion insiders and the people who wish to dress like them, this may be the most influential place in retail at the moment.

Opening Ceremony is primarily known for carrying avant-garde pieces from fairly obscure designers and for its house label designed by Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim. But it also embraces experimentation, selling a Target collection by Proenza Schouler one weekend last year; a line by the actress Chloë Sevigny last month; and, since 2005, the fast-fashion Topshop label.

And last year it decided to carry the absurdly skinny Cheap Monday jeans from Sweden, which cost $60 and created such a run that 6,000 pairs were sold in one month. People seemed to appreciate a pair of designer jeans that didn’t cost $300, even if they could more accurately be called denim pantyhose.

"There’s a sense of them running a small store and thinking big and creatively at the same time,” said Julie Gilhart, the fashion director of Barneys New York, which carries some of the Opening Ceremony collection at its stores, including a $365 boxy linen dress and a $500 blazer by Ms. Sevigny. Rather than treating other stores as competitors, Opening Ceremony sells its lines to stores like Colette in Paris and 10 Corso Como in Milan. Oak, a fashion boutique that started in Brooklyn, opened a Manhattan location on Bond Street a month ago with the Opening Ceremony designs in the front of the store.

“There is such a uniqueness and also a noncompetitiveness to what they do that it comes across as being what it is, which is really natural,” Ms. Gilhart said. “It’s a fun store to shop in. It’s an expression of them.”

With clothing racks scattered around a factorylike box with purple walls, a loft in the back for Topshop and a basement accessed by rickety wooden steps, the store is unconventional because it operates on two seemingly incongruous rails. After a decade in which many shoppers became bored with homogenous-looking luxury brands, Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim wanted to create a different kind of store, one that captured the excitement of shopping in a particular moment, as did bygone stores like Paraphernalia in the ’60s, Charivari in the ’70s or Fiorucci into the ’80s.

MR. Leon, 32, and Ms. Lim, 33, met as undergraduates at Berkeley and remained friends as they pursued careers in fashion in New York. Mr. Leon was a visual director at Burberry, and Ms. Lim a merchandise planner for Bally, during years when those houses were reinventing their images for a modern luxury age. On a vacation in Hong Kong, while shopping in independent designer stalls, they began to conceive Opening Ceremony.

Mr. Leon borrowed the name and concept from the Olympic Games. Introduce the most interesting designers of one country in the store every September: Hong Kong the first year, followed by Germany, Brazil, Britain and Sweden. The formula is not precise. A second location that opened in Los Angeles last year is expanding to look more like a Hong Kong minimall, with stalls for Jane Mayle, Nom de Guerre, Acne Jeans and Topshop.

“It’s a new way of looking at a department store,” Ms. Lim said. “We’re not a small specialty store.”

Last Sunday, when the doors were unlocked at noon, the usual pre-brunch crowd began to arrive to see what was new. There’s always something new. Margherita Missoni, the knitwear heiress, walked in, and Mr. Leon reminded her, “I’m the one who saved you from that dress disaster last time.” You can usually spot some random famous person shopping there, like Linda Evangelista or Leonard Nimoy.

Along one wall, two racks contained the remnants of the original 4,000 pieces made for Ms. Sevigny’s collection, which was almost sold out.
The day before, Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim had unpacked a special collection made by the California surf line Maui & Sons, a recreation of its first 100 designs, including fluorescent pink and yellow board shorts and T-shirts with its shark logo rendered in puffy paint. They remember the moment in the mid-1980s, when they were teenagers in Los Angeles and Maui was cool.

They also brought back nostalgic brands like Tretorn shoes and Stetson hats, with new designs made specifically for the store; and in their way, they made Opening Ceremony a reflection of the experience of a generation that grew up as fashion’s currency shifted from shopping mall labels to a mass exposure of luxury brands.

“The style went from ‘Pretty in Pink’ to Prada,” Mr. Leon said. Next to the Maui T-shirts, there are racks of clothes with prices some would find obscene, like a $425 waistcoat from Band of Outsiders, a $795 dress from Alexandre Herchcovitch, a trim men’s suit by Patrik Ervell for $1,200.

Their willingness to combine elements from both ends of the spectrum struck a nerve. When asked why he sells his clothes at the store, Lazaro Hernandez of Proenza Schouler said that Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim were among “the few kids of our specific generation to open their own stores.”

“It’s inevitable,” he added, “that our tastes are very much in line with one another.”

When the store first opened, Howard Street was practically barren. Ms. Lim recalls seeing people driving up after 8 p.m., when the store closed, and dumping trash on the street. Now Jil Sander is moving in, and a luxury hotel is opening down the block. There are rumors of other designers looking at spaces nearby. Mr. Leon and Ms. Lim are thrilled.

“Since we’ve opened, our point of view is that if someone else is doing what we’re doing, we should move on,” he said. “We have a built-in concept that constantly challenges itself to refresh.”

 

[miaou]

Interesting...I plan to check out the NY boutique this weekend. Let's see if they put their money where their mouth is in terms of their openness to different types of customers.

 

[kahlilg]

^ i don't think it's open to different types of customers. i mean it's obvious who they are trying to attract with their salespersons. omg so much hipster assholes i can barely get through it.

also, i'm pretty sure the jonas brothers or their stylist gets everything from OC.

 

[kahlilg]

spring 2009 lookbook
http://content.coutorture.com/2441739

 

[raica]

^ beautiful clothes, thanks!
i love opening ceremony. does anyone know where you can get their clothes online?

 

[HeatherAnne]

^

ronherman.com
oaknyc.com
shopjake.com
refinery29.com
barneys.com
lagarconne.com
saks.com
shopbop.com
tobi.com
eluxury.com
bloomingdales.com

Thanks so much for posting the lookbook!

 

[juliet3353]

and now, Opening Ceremony's website has online shopping!

 

[Aby]

^yep, just checked it! I might order a thing or 2!

 

[Erin]

For you Opening Ceremony fans, there was a very good write up in the September issue of Elle US magazine, scanned by me:

 

[MissMagAddict]

Opening Ceremony to close all retail locations in 2020; brand and collection will continue under the auspices of new owner New Guards Group, the owners of Off-White and others.