Fashion: Boyds Meets Girl

The old boys’ club at luxe men’s clothier Boyds has finally realized that in order to survive, it needs to let the ladies (and their Jimmy Choos) into the treehouse. Can they do it?

But getting there involves baby steps. The owners, Barteluce notes, “were a little nervous about giving up their first floor to women’s,” which required a series of renovations upstairs to reshuffle the men’s offerings. Moving forward, they agreed to have him create the same “residential” feel for the new ground-floor offerings that he gave to Bergdorf’s similarly architecturally rich building. “Women shop better in an environment that feels more like their home,” the architect explains. And so, along with scattered settees and chairs, he opened things up, getting rid of heavy mahogany cases in favor of more discreet glass shelves, and installing those between columns and to the sides of original fireplaces, not right on top of them. In the new design, handbags enjoy a front-and-center position in the rotunda area, but shoes — say, the Bottega Veneta boots that one casual-cool 20-something asked about on a recent visit — have to wait. While the men’s shoe salon, which is being billed as the largest designer shoe store in the Philadelphia area, will be unveiled this month, women’s takes a backseat until Phase Two, this fall.

Hire a “quarterback for the women’s department.”
That’s what Ralph Yaffe calls his new women’s buyer, Michael Hammon, who hails from glam specialty store Stanley Korshak in Dallas (which has a stand-alone Carolina Herrera boutique, among other luxury brands). His mandate: Get more designers. Big designers. Lots of designers. Luckily, along with an eye, the man has patience. Because if you are Boyds, not Bergdorf, in Philadelphia, not New York, for every designer (Jimmy Choo) that jumps at the chance to sell its wares in a beautifully renovated store in a luxury-hungry market, there are others (Manolo Blahnik) who will snub you. Not because you can’t make their minimum-order requirements, or aren’t operating in the black, but simply because you don’t have quite the cachet they want in a retailer associated with their goods.

On a recent buying trip, as we rode the tiny elevator up to Stella McCartney’s cavernous sales loft in Manhattan’s Meatpacking District, Hammon cautioned that Brandon, the sales director we were about to meet, could be tough. In fact, Brandon was so busy with style dignitary/Los Angeles boutique owner Tracey Ross that he didn’t acknowledge Hammon or even really look his way for, oh, about an hour. Which would have been fine if Brandon had been on the other side of the penthouse space, and not a mere industrial-chic chair away (so close I could read the Ralph Lauren underwear label peeking out from his low-rider jeans). No matter. The temporary salesperson was eager to help. And in between pointing out the side zippers at the bottom of some ’80s-inspired tapered cords and the apple-blossom appliqués on the viscose-with-satin tees (Hammon went for the cords but passed on the tees, generally favoring Stella’s suits over the funky stuff), she offered up that she’d “heard a lot of buzz about Boyds” in the market. For instance, she noted, “Jessica from Hogan, who I know originally from Kors, said the store looked amazing.”