Fashion: Boyds Meets Girl

But the biggest hope for climate change may be the new women’s department manager, Ana Rosa, most recently of Kenneth Cole on Walnut Street. Of the female customer in particular, she says, “I want her to be comfortable. I don’t care how much she’s spending. I don’t want a customer greeted 10 times or approached by five people here.” Perhaps most important, she plans to design, with Hammon, a department that makes scanning by price range easier than did the former merchandising mishmash of Armani and Seven and piqué and sequins: “You don’t want to be looking at a $400 suit and have the next one jump to $1,600. We’ll have a room of designer collections, and a room of great but smaller designers and vendors.”

Stay just a little bit old-school.
As Bakker Lee pointed out, men have long been used to having fine stores custom-fit a suit for them on the spot. Women, she says, should expect the same treatment. And so in becoming “hip” and “unique” and “wow” and all that, we hope the guys at Boyds don’t do away with at least one old-school touch, as another regular shopper worried aloud they soon would: the free tailoring.

As in, 50 on-site tailors and fitters working out of the store’s top level, the stuttered purr of their Singers and the endless rows of suits they are altering being perhaps the best available proof that the family’s business model is strong enough to support an even bigger expansion. (They own buildings and have leases up and down the block.) Of course, it’s when the fitters, tailors and seamstresses hustle down to the sales floor, pincushions Velcro’d to their wrists, that their true artistry become apparent. Snipping a side pocket on a Marc Jacobs trouser to ease the contour over a hip, or raising the waist instead of a hem to fix a proportion, they can make fashion follow form, helping clothes complement women’s bodies “whether or not it’s the way the designer intended,” notes Rosa. Plus, they never charge — and here’s where you might want to pay attention — not even when items are on sale. Hurry up with the champagne and the big new home for shoes, and we might just start coming around: Click click click click click.