![]() They were, unusually, almost entirely made in the United States, despite the expense. The Row’s pieces weren’t flashy or revealing and were kind to a range of ages and body types, provided you could afford them. $30,000 in crewnecks.” She realized then that “if you’re a super-wealthy woman in New York? The way we go to Uniqlo - they go to The Row.”įor most of the past 15 years, that has been a solid business model and, in its way, something of a revelation. She bought everything we had in the company in her size so she would never run out of them. Then one day “a client walked in,” she told me, “and bought 30 Row sweaters - three-zero. She had come from the world of fashion magazines there, The Row was considered cool, but she didn’t know a lot of women who wore it. 1–selling ready-to-wear brand - better than Prada, better than Gucci, better than Alaïa, better than Saint Laurent - told me a story about her time there. Marina Larroudé, for years the fashion director at Barneys New York, where The Row was the No. “They’re thinking about the client because they’ve been the client,” says Rachel Tashjian, a GQ writer whose email newsletter about her obsessions, Opulent Tips, frequently covers The Row. The Row knows what its customer thinks she needs. As such, it has found its people: not the women (mostly women, though it does sell menswear) who want to make it but those who have already made it. In this, it’s a lot like its once screamingly famous mass-marketed owners, who have retreated into a kind of genteel moguldum in their 30s. It is chic in the excellent, unfaultably appropriate way that reminds you that true chic may be the apotheosis of boring. It is not original and doesn’t pretend to originality. It speaks in the hushed tones of perfect propriety, of connoisseurship. Nor does The Row flaunt sex or youth or the body. It purses its lips at logos and that’s-from-last-season trend obsolescence. The Row is fashion for those for whom money is no object but who don’t need to look obviously rich, not in the way a Versace blouse looks rich - which is to say, aggressively, literally. ![]() Then they gave up acting to dress the women they hoped to grow up to become. Now 34, they were, 20 years ago, the most hyperbranded tweens on the planet. It has long since transcended its beginnings as a celebrity-fashion-label lark founded by the entrepreneurial fraternal-twin former child stars Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen. The Row makes sweaters, thousand-dollar sweaters, that grip the mallet. When is a sweater more than a sweater? When is a sweater even a sweater? The difference between a pullover and a few skeins of yarn isn’t much more than two needles and a dry-cleaning tag but for that cymbal crash of desire. Art: Katelyn Kopenhaver Source Image: NINA WESTERVELT/The New York Times/Redux
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