MEMENTO MULTIBRAND

Before fashion was flattened into e-comm-first luxury supersites, monobrand flagships from megabrands (themselves sometimes subsidiaries of megaconglomerates), and algorithmic sameness, there was the designer-centric boutique. Usually the brainchild of one or two forceful personalities, the most influential multibrand stores introduced designers and shaped neighborhoods. They defined a scene, a city, and sometimes even an epoch. The nine defunct stores featured in this far-from-complete overview offer a particular and idiosyncratic view of fashion retail. They also offer windows onto the broader evolution of retail architecture, social life, city real estate, technological change, and fashion itself. Some were loud, clubby, and myth-making; others were cerebral, austere, or deliberately obscure. What they shared was a belief that retail could be a very personal point of view. They were also, perhaps, forces of their own undoing, popularizing neighborhoods, aesthetics, and labels before buckling under the weight of gentrification, luxury conglomeration, DTC e-commerce, and the rise of the brand as its own all-consuming universe. And yet, just as the multibrand boutique seemed to belong to a vanished fashion past, the idea has started to twitch back to life. Jeffrey Kalinsky reopened Jeffrey in Atlanta’s Buckhead Village in 2026 and there are rumors of an Opening Ceremony comeback. Meanwhile, newer and smaller stores like Café Forgot and Ven.Space in New York, or ITEMS Paris in Paris, suggest a renewed appetite for edited, personality-driven retail at a smaller, stranger, more local scale. The time feels right to look back at the stores that defined, distorted, and occasionally exploded the multibrand format, not as nostalgia, but as a way of asking what might still be recovered from its curatorial scene-making promise.

Susanne Bartsch
New York, NY, USA
1981–88

Susanne Bartsch’s résumé reads like a sequined roadmap to 40 years of New York nightlife, kicking off in the mid-80s with parties at milestone clubs like the Copacabana. She co-founded the 1989 AIDS benefit Love Ball and has romped through the ensuing decades at 130 bpm with regular events to this day. Few people know that, before becoming New York’s preeminent party maker, Bartsch owned one of downtown’s most innovative fashion boutiques, the eponymous Susanne Bartsch. The boutique opened in 1981 at 72 Thompson Street in SoHo, shortly after Swiss-born Bartsch arrived in New York via London. What she brought in her luggage were pieces from some of the British capital’s most experimental designers and club-world figures, including Eric and David Holah, Stephen Jones, Mr. Pearl, Leigh Bowery, and later Casely-Hayford, John Richmond, Rachel Auburn, Vivienne Westwood, and John Galliano, to name but a few. New York’s novelty-obsessed 80s fashion crowd couldn’t get enough, and in 1985, Bartsch moved the operation around the corner to West Broadway. The new space was outfitted entirely by her London club-scene pal, the legendary filmmaker turned occasional interior designer Michael Costiff. Conceptually, it merged flashy PoMo sensibilities — square pastel tiles and abstract historicized arches — with more whimsical touches like a Gothic entryway, mosaics, pagoda-shaped vitrines, Moravian star lights, and display cases lined with sparkling aquarium crystals. The New York Times described the two-story space as “a cross between a fairy tale castle and a medieval church,” with tile work that “recalls both Watts Towers in Los Angeles and the colorful exuberance of Antoni Gaudí.” It all seemed unstoppable until the late-80s economic slowdown made edgy fashion a harder sell. Bartsch turned to the more lucrative art of party making, and the rest is history.

SEX
London, United Kingdom
1974–76

Few stores are as shrouded in legend, or as lasting in cultural impact, as SEX, the London boutique run by Malcolm McLaren and his then-partner Vivienne Westwood. The couple opened Let It Rock at 430 King’s Road in Chelsea in 1971, selling Teddy Boy clothing and 50s secondhand finds; by 1974, after incarnations including Too Fast to Live, Too Young to Die, the shop had become SEX. Out with the early punk rockabilly and 50s secondhand clothing, in with bondage gear and anarchist “troll-fashion” slogan shirts emblazoned with Karl Marx and serial rapists. These are but two examples of SEX’s provocative signatures that continue reverberating through fashion. (Given its lasting impact, it may come as a surprise that the store was operational as SEX for only two years.) In theory, SEX was a multibrand boutique. In reality, much of what was sold under its giant three-letter sign of foam and pink latex was initiated by Westwood herself. The womb-like boutique at 430 King’s Road became the nexus of London’s small but highly influential punk scene: Chrissie Hynde, Steve Severin, Adam Ant, and Siouxsie Sioux were regulars, while the Sex Pistols were assembled from SEX customers and former shop assistants, whom McLaren stylized into punk’s first boy band. Catapulted by punk’s commercial success, SEX evolved again in 1976, becoming Seditionaries: Clothes for Heroes, with a brutalist car-crash interior by David Connor and Ben Kelly, who later designed Manchester’s Haçienda. SEX underwent its final incarnation in 1980: rechristened World’s End, with a more romantic, ship-like interior, slanted floor, and façade featuring a backward-ticking 13-hour clock. World’s End has remained operational as part of Vivienne Westwood’s network of namesake boutiques, a testament to the late designer’s unwavering vision.

Colette
Paris, France
1997–2017

When Colette opened its doors at 213 rue Saint-Honoré in 1997, it didn’t take long to make an indelible mark on the Paris retail scene, if not the fashion industry at large. “Colette was Paris’s real first stab at modernity,” recalls Interview editor-in-chief Mel Ottenberg, who remembers shopping there not for clothes, but for books, CDs, and other cultural ephemera. Whether it was Japanese robots, American cosmetics, jewelry, posters, specialty sneakers, music, or novelty water at the “water bar,” Colette founder Colette Roussaux and her daughter Sarah Andelman were known for their “stunts,” sourced from all four corners of the world to fulfill the store’s original concept: showing things that had “never been seen in France.” They also benefited from a public with little accessible internet and social media still far away in the future.The store filled racks with collections by Dior Homme (Hedi!), Yves Saint Laurent (Tom!), and Chloé (Stella!), and shelves with it-bags like the Fendi Baguette. Colette also presented early collaborations with the likes of Pharrell Williams, Karl Lagerfeld, and KAWS, and no other store better reflected the accelerating pace at which fashion was merging with popular culture. “Colette’s windows were meant to function like magazine covers,” recalls Patrick Scallon, Maison Margiela’s former communications director. “I used to cycle by at night, and Milan [Vukmirovic] was always in the window changing it, every night.” Many of the things now taken for granted in the industry, collaborations, capsules, crossovers into streetwear and hip-hop, were test-driven at Colette, and soon brands from Chanel and Hermès to Carhartt were beelining for its cosigned approval. In the changing retail landscape of the aughts and early 2010s, Colette fared far better than most competitors, braving the challenges of e-commerce and luxury brands’ growing in-house marketing savviness. When Colette closed on its 20th anniversary, it was on a high note, celebrating with an installation at Paris’s Musée des Arts Décoratifs and a subsequent documentary, Colette Mon Amour (2020), featuring famous fans like Pharrell and Ye. Virgil Abloh custom-designed a bag for the film’s premiere, bearing final testimony to Colette’s lasting impact on a new generation of fashion makers.

Maria Luisa Paris
Paris, France
1988–2010

“Outspoken, exuberant, maternal” are the three words Patrick Scallon uses to describe Maria Luisa Poumaillou, one of the first retailers to support many young brands. Born in Venezuela as Maria Luisa Ybarra Parés, she moved to Paris to study political science before opening her eponymous multibrand boutique in 1988 with her husband, Daniel. The 2 rue Cambon location was a mere stone’s throw from Chanel’s famous Paris headquarters. But while born bourgeoise herself, Maria Luisa’s vision for the store was more idiosyncratic, a far cry from Chanel’s “ladies who lunch.” Instead, she favored the 80s and later 90s avant-garde, having been among the first to carry Jean Paul Gaultier, Helmut Lang, John Galliano, Bernhard Willhelm, Alexander McQueen, and Sophia Kokosalaki, to name but a few. “She was of the generation of women shop owners who, when they fell in love with a designer, would put in an order that would be enough to bankroll an entire business,” says Scallon. He fondly remembers her visits to Margiela’s studio: “She would come with cake, and she was there for the day, always as critical as she was supportive.” The designers paid her back with loyalty, with many giving her long-standing exclusives, including Manolo Blahnik. Maria Luisa was more of a picker than a marketer, and as a result, the simple, wall-to-wall carpeted store on rue Cambon was “always a bit of a mess,” Scallon recalls. “But for the designers, just being there was an honor.” In 2010, the original physical boutiques, for there were two, closed after 22 years, and Maria Luisa started a lucrative shop-in-shop partnership with Printemps, for which she also designed her own in-house “white label” collection. But just as she was coming into her own as a designer, her health gave way: Maria Luisa succumbed to cancer in 2015 at 65. Printemps tried to keep the magic alive after her death, but in the end, the potency of the brand had always been Maria Luisa herself.

Jeffrey
New York, NY, USA
1999–2020

If the 2010s were to become the age of inclusivity, the late 90s and early aughts were about exclusivity, and few stores epitomized this better than Jeffrey in New York. “We don’t have a sweater for your boyfriend unless he’s dating you as some sort of art performance project,” is one of the memorable lines uttered by a fictional Jeffrey salesperson in a Saturday Night Live skit aired in February 2001. Initially founded by Jeffrey Kalinsky in Atlanta, the eponymous Jeffrey opened its New York doors in 1999 and quickly became the reference for a new kind of store representing a moneyed, cutthroat New York cool. And while it bore some resemblance to Colette, the Parisian mother of modern concept stores, Jeffrey’s overall vibe was more exacting than quirky, with clothing presented in a gallery-like white space. “My best friend Mark was one of the jewelry cashier girls there, a 6-foot-5 bitch with a 24-inch waist and an asymmetrical, angular haircut like the one on SNL,” recalls Mel Ottenberg. “He’d always give me a 90% discount on all the latest Jil Sander and Raf Simons. This was when I went out six nights a week, and I’d go to raves in head-to-toe runway pieces.” The choice of location, 449 West 14th Street, added to Jeffrey’s mystique, presenting brands like Gucci, Prada, Dries Van Noten, and Dolce & Gabbana in a Meatpacking District still known for packing meat. There was no other reason to go there during the day than Jeffrey. But in the age of luxury conglomeration, social media, and DTC e-commerce, Jeffrey’s model no longer seemed as desirable as it once was. The pandemic proved to be the final nail in Jeffrey’s coffin, at least for a while. In 2020, all three locations closed, adding a dark, ironic twist to another line from the 2001 SNL skit: “This store was so much better when there was no entrance.” In August 2026, however, Kalinsky reopened Jeffrey in Atlanta’s Buckhead Village, turning the epitaph into an unlikely second act.

Project No. 8
New York, NY, USA
2007–18

Unlike Colette, Jeffrey, or Opening Ceremony, Project No. 8 never experienced widespread commercial notoriety but developed a cult following. No flashy branding, no big-name brands, no nods to popular culture. Instead, it was art where Project No. 8’s founders were looking for inspiration and where they ultimately got their recognition. Nestled in a tiny storefront on Division Street on New York’s Lower East Side, Project No. 8 was the eighth project of the couple Elizabeth Beer and Brian Janusiak; their two children counted among the others. “We were thinking of new channels for design and art to co-exist, and we wanted to make it feel accessible in a way that a gallery can’t, but a store can,” recounts Janusiak. Famous artists’ side projects, like Gordon Matta-Clark’s Food restaurant, served as loose inspiration. “We were interested in creative digressions, so we wanted to create a place where people’s side projects could live together.” In 2006, the little triangular slice of Manhattan now widely known as Dimes Square had barely started its gentrification process. Project No. 8’s clean, fluorescent-lit storefront stood out between beef jerky vendors and Chinese liquor stores. The interior of the space was quietly state-of-the-art, incorporating energy-saving radiant and passive solar technology, as well as a permanent lighting installation by Berlin-based architect Chris Wagner, technologies then unusual in New York retail. If fashion at first was more of an afterthought (“We were interested in the material and the forms, and ultimately we found ourselves truly inspired by the designers,” says Beer), it quickly became the primary driver for business. “Brian and Elizabeth were drawn to avant-garde designers, but at the same time, it was very understated; it was never ostentatious,” says Lydia Rodrigues, who worked in the store from 2006 until 2011, and credits Beer and Janusiak as an inspiration for her fashion project LRC. Key designers that could be found at Project No. 8 were BLESS, Boudicca, Susan Cianciolo, Kostas Murkudis, Stephan Schneider, Tom Scott, Walter Van Beirendonck, Siki Im, Arielle de Pinto, Jean Colonna, as well as key pieces by Maison Martin Margiela. There were also several U.S. firsts, like the men’s lines for Aspesi, Marni, and Maria Cornejo. “A lot of people would come to the store for inspiration,” recalls Rodrigues, counting among the highlights a men’s capsule collection the Belgian designer Christian Wijnants created especially for Project No. 8. Their influential selection of designers was always based on “an ethical component,” says Beer. “We liked working with people investigating fashion/design critically.” After two years on Division Street, the operation expanded to a second corner location on Orchard and Hester Streets and a third, travel-focused outpost at Ace Hotel New York, with less clothing and more objects, books, and collaborative souvenirs. “With time, we realized the fashion landscape was changing,” explains Janusiak. He and Beer considered heavily investing in fashion e-commerce but ultimately decided against it. “What we loved was creating the physical shopping experience and creating an environment.” After closing all of Project No. 8’s physical locations in 2019, the two founders now run their latest project space, Various Projects, Inc., from studios on Bond Street in Manhattan and Gowanus in Brooklyn. They develop design projects, create custom novelty key tags through Various Keytags, and spearhead political action campaigns. “It’s what’s most interesting to us at the moment,” says Janusiak.

Charivari
New York, NY, USA
1967–98

For at least three generations of New Yorkers, Charivari was and remains the number-one reference for a modern multibrand with international acclaim and a solid curatorial point of view, an “irrepressible mini fashion empire,” as Vanity Fair once described it. In the 60s, when the Upper West Side was hip, chicks got their belted minis at Charivari; in the 70s, the disco crowd snapped up flowy lurex frocks in its boutiques and discovered a new wave of European designers, including Thierry Mugler, Gianni Versace, and Jean Paul Gaultier; and in the 80s, it was Charivari that introduced New Yorkers to the likes of Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake, not to mention other staples of the decade like Romeo Gigli and Claude Montana. Charivari was founded in 1967 by Selma Weiser, a 42-year-old, recently divorced former department-store buyer and mother of two teenage kids. With no savings but blessed with a keen eye and a determination of steel, Weiser quickly turned Charivari into one of the most cutting-edge boutiques in the city. “In the 60s, 70s, the Upper West Side was not gentrified; it was ‘downtown’ before downtown became a thing,” explains architect Rafael de Cárdenas, who grew up in New York and remembers pressing his nose against the windows of Charivari in the mid-80s. Fun fact: Marc Jacobs also worked at Charivari for years after starting as an intern stock boy. At its peak, Charivari operated six locations, most of them on the Upper West Side, with a later Midtown flagship on West 57th Street. Each had its own specialization: men’s, women’s, sportswear, classic, experimental. And each was designed by a different architect, including Alan Buchsbaum, Toshiko Mori, and Shigeru Uchida. “Each of our stores was an extension and a reaction to the other,” Barbara Weiser once said. Her mother roped her and her brother Jon into working at Charivari as soon as they were old enough to join the workforce. From 1990 onward, after Selma suffered a stroke, the brother-and-sister team ran the business alone.Many elements played into Charivari’s eventual demise. Designers they had championed for years, like Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Prada, Yamamoto, and Matsuda, opened their own boutiques in Manhattan, eclipsing the need for Charivari as an in-between. And in 1990, the Weiser siblings gave in to their mother’s lifelong dream of opening a Madison Avenue location, even though they already had another store nearby, Charivari 57, on West 57th Street. “If I had a magic wand, I would make the Madison Avenue store disappear,” Jon Weiser confessed to the New York Times in 1997. Only a year later, it did disappear, along with all their other stores, marking the end of an era.

Knobkerry
New York, NY, USA
1965–98

Strictly speaking, Knobkerry was not a multibrand; it was a multiverse. Its eclectic selection included West African dashikis, kaftans, Chinese tangzhuang jackets, Indian kurta shirts, and Mexican blusas, not to mention accessories and jewelry sourced across Africa, Latin America, and West, South, and East Asia. At the heart of Knobkerry was Sara Penn (1927–2020), a descendant of a well-to-do family from Pittsburgh. She arrived in New York in the early 60s after traveling through Europe. Originally trained as a silversmith, Penn was part of the 60s downtown scene, counting artists like Franz Kline, Willem de Kooning, and Joan Mitchell among her friends. In 1965, she opened her first store on East 7th Street in the East Village. “It is difficult to overstate the groundbreaking significance of a Black woman’s ownership and operation of a business on New York’s Lower East Side in the mid-1960s,” writes Svetlana Kitto, whose oral-history project on Penn and Knobkerry resulted in a 2021 exhibition at SculptureCenter in New York. And what a legacy it was. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, and Don Cherry were just a few of the musician regulars who came to the store not just to shop but to hang out. Knobkerry’s style, which included both originally sourced garments and unique pieces created by Penn herself, overlapped with 1960s hippie aesthetics, which also incorporated elements of non-Western dress. But Penn’s pursuits were broader and longer-lasting than those of the predominantly white U.S. hippie counterculture of the late 60s. “The world is not white. Certainly, if anyone understood that, it was Sara,” says Penn’s longtime friend, the former Joyce Theater education director Joanne Robinson Hill. There was a strong pro-Black dimension to Penn’s practice, reflected in the name she chose for the store: knobkerries are Southern and Eastern African fighting sticks that carry cultural significance as both weapons and symbols of protest. And despite the reverence Knobkerry garnered in circles of high fashion and the intelligentsia, the store was a “decidedly political site, an emancipatory portal into worlds and ways of seeing beyond the cultural arrogance, racism, and myopia of the United States,” writes Kitto. Throughout its roughly three-decade run, moving from the East Village to SoHo to TriBeCa, Knobkerry remained steadfast in its multicultural mission, which later, in addition to clothing, also included objects like Moroccan kilim rugs, West African masks and chairs, and wooden Buddhas. Penn’s customers and fans paid her lifelong loyalty, among them the artist David Hammons, who staged a memorable exhibition in the store in 1995. In 2020, the year of Penn’s death, Hammons told Kitto that going to Knobkerry was to him like going to “the Metropolitan Museum of Art. So many vibrations. So much energy. It was like going to another world.”

Opening Ceremony
New York, NY, USA
2002–20

When Opening Ceremony opened in 2002, it marked a new era in American fashion. The brainchild of Humberto Leon and Carol Lim, two college buddies who grew up in California, the multibrand boutique was conceived as a fashion Olympics of sorts, where each year young American brands would “compete” with young international designers. The idea of friendly competition started with Hong Kong in the first year, the city where Leon and Lim originally conceived the idea, followed by Brazil, Germany, England, Sweden, Japan, and France. Throughout the years, OC, as it was known to its fans, never lost that playful team spirit, evident in both the way it championed newcomers and its exploding business of brand collabs, which included everyone from apparel brands like Birkenstock, Esprit, and Havaianas to less expected partners like Coca-Cola, Disney, and even Yoko Ono. In a 2010 meta move, they even teamed up with fellow concept store Colette for a capsule collection. Located at 35 Howard Street, on the cusp between SoHo and New York’s Chinatown, Opening Ceremony’s most vital asset was the exciting tension it created between a more expected European designer sensibility and a new wave of New York-based designers like Adam Selman, Alexander Wang, Band of Outsiders, Eckhaus Latta, Hood By Air, Patrik Ervell, Proenza Schouler, and Telfar, for many of whom OC was their first proper retailer. When, in 2012, OC celebrated its 10th anniversary, it rented out Webster Hall, transforming it into separate rooms representing iconic New York parties of the previous decade, including Club Luxx, Misshapes, Ghe20 Goth1k, Sway, Clubber Down Disco, and 1992, and even a performance by Lil’ Kim. The allure of “cool” celebrities like Kim Gordon, Jonah Hill, Spike Jonze, and Chloë Sevigny added another layer to OC’s identity, particularly for those who cherished the L.A.-meets-Downtown New York fusion that resonated with indie-spirited, digitally native millennials, OC’s core clientele. “I would go to Opening Ceremony to discover cool clothes,” remembers Mel Ottenberg, who was working as an independent stylist at the time. “I’d put entire outfits together for Rihanna with their lookbooks.”So completely did OC capture the zeitgeist that, in 2011, Leon and Lim were tapped by LVMH to take over Kenzo, giving the storied brand, founded in 1970 by the late Kenzo Takada, a breath of fresh 21st-century air and beginning an eight-year reign at the house. The 2010s saw Leon and Lim’s responsibilities multiplying yearly, with New York locations, a 10,000-square-foot “mini-mall” in Los Angeles, and an eight-story department store in Tokyo. Perhaps it was overextension, or the ever-mutating pressures placed on brick-and-mortar retail, that led Leon and Lim to sell the company to Farfetch in 2020, marking the sudden end of a New York retail era.