By MIKE ALBOPublished: May 8, 2008
LAST Friday I walked down to the Bowery to visit the new John Varvatos store. As you probably know, Mr. Varvatos took over the legendary and recently defunct music site CBGB and turned it into a stylish space to sell his superior and expensive clothing.
I had a hard time finding it because suddenly the Bowery has all these obnoxiously fabulous luxury condos, hotels, drink spots and throngs of Heidi and Spencer types I swear weren’t there four months ago. The street is starting to look like Epcot with a drinking problem, and the John Varvatos store, beautifully styled and reverently decorated, is its high-end Hard Rock Cafe. It’s a beautiful museum of the area’s grittier, more artsy past — a time when New Yorkers lived within their means, wore incongruous garments they plucked from trash bins in SoHo, and came to this space to play loud, visceral music.
The Varvatos company took pains to preserve and cultivate the energy of this hallowed birthplace of American punk rock. It “zhuzhed” it up with dramatic lighting, velvet-curtained dressing rooms and four antique stained glass windows behind the cash register to give the room a sense of reverence. Most of the original scrawled and stickered walls remain intact. Near the entrance a gorgeous tattered palimpsest of fliers and decals is encased behind glass, as if it were stonework from the great temple to Jupiter in the Capitoline Museum in Rome.
Also near the entrance, classic mint-condition albums in clear plastic sleeves are for sale from artists like the Del Fuegos and Joan Jett. Adorning the walls are colorful gig posters for D Generation and Built to Spill, a framed copy of Blondie’s “Eat to the Beat” album. Nearby, vintage stereo equipment is also for sale, like a gleaming Pioneer SX-1250 ($895) or a black scuffed-up McIntosh MC2100 amplifier ($895).
The clerks are mostly male and all model-beautiful. Many have ornate tattoos that peek out of the cuffs and collars of their lovely Varvatos shirts. An adorably gangly salesman with stalky black hair and a cough (“I’m giving up smoking, and it’s all coming up”) set up a dressing room for me, and I tried on a black tux shirt with a subtly embroidered bib ($185), a soft ivory-colored jersey ($135) and an olive-green button-front shirt ($165).
A pair of suit pants in a black and white plaid had a faint sheen ($425), and a brownish-gray linen sweater with big wooden toggle buttons fit perfectly ($298). In fact, it all fit perfectly, and I wished I could afford the garments or was punk rock enough to shoplift.
The Varvatos shoes, in particular, are always desirable, free of the gaudy overdesign and tacky stitching that seem to plague men’s footwear. I picked up a strikingly simple black boot with a side zipper ($498) as a statuesque female clerk walked up and explained that it was called the Mercer. “John’s been making it ever since he started the company,” she said. The shoes are displayed on a small stage in the middle of the space, where acts like the slithery Perry Farrell performed at the opening night gala last month.
It’s often said that Mr. Varvatos has a rocker aesthetic (the band Cheap Trick appears in the label’s ad campaign), but a lot of the styles here evoke the mellow ’70s singer-songwriter rather than the sweaty drug-fueled rock star. A caramel-colored blazer in lamb’s leather with gold studs along the lapel ($995) is something Kris Kristofferson might have worn while he canoodled with Carly; and an airy long-sleeved henley in a bluish off-white ($198) was something Cat Stevens might have worn while he canoodled with Carly.
REGARDLESS of their reference, the clothes here are unanimously amazing, even when they cost more than Joey Ramone spent on hair care in his entire life. Unfortunately, along with Mr. Varvatos’s fresh offerings, selections from “What Comes Around Goes Around,” the vintage apparel company in New York, appear in the store for prices that are downright offensive. A rack of WCAGA’s worn-in tops included a yellow Doobie Brothers shirt for $200, a beat-up Wrangler denim button-front with a frayed cut-off collar for $100, and a plain crew-neck T-shirt yellowed with age for, no joke, $75. Anarchy!
Back in the day, guys came here to be a part of a dynamic scene — they moshed, smoked, maybe got konked on the head with a beer can. But now we live in a city of aspirations and replicated cool. N.Y.U. students come in and imagine how great they will look when they get their six-figure jobs, and six-figure-salary guys come in to buy clothes so they can look as if they moshed.
Baffled by the hallucinatory expense of New New York, I gazed at the old, intact walls of CBGB, slashed and scrawled with layers of noise and history. If Mr. Varvatos and his team are smart, they will reproduce it and sell it as wallpaper for $5,000 a yard.
And why not — looks like there’s a market for it. Everyone who came through the doors seemed to be starved for authenticity, including me. I walked around transferring my rock nostalgia directly onto the deliciously displayed clothes. I would have bought something, too, but at the time my bank balance was so low I couldn’t even spring for a $69 white short-sleeved henley from Mr. Varvatos’s collaborative line with Converse, the cheapest thing I could find in the store.
Am I punky, or just poor?
JOHN VARVATOS
315 Bowery (between First and Second Streets); (212) 358-0315.
Post-Punk The old CBGB space has become a high-end clothing store full of desirable garments, vintage jackets and worn-in concert tees, all at ear-splitting prices.
FASHION HUNKS Friendly, perfectly styled and drop-dead gorgeous, the staff is about as D.I.Y. as a photo spread in Men’s Vogue.
WHO’D A’ THUNK Old show posters carefully framed, sections of the site’s original walls preserved behind glass, no photographs allowed — the downtown New York music scene has an official museum.
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