Hats Off To You A.K.A. The Blond Leading the Blond

We were in kind of a silly mood toda

y, writing up a huge ( and we mean HUGE!) man's suit destined for the dry-cleaner when Nora decided to have our Kim

 and Marietta put their slender frames into each of the pant legs and pose with canes, dark glasses and hats for a Chaplinesque moment!

At the same time, we were diving into the hundreds of vintage hats we have for sale and decided to do a hat picture with our other new wonderful intern, Jamie.

After we get out our "inner silly" we will have to gather our decorum in time to give tours to the students of Parsons School of Design and NYU the beginning of October.

There's Noah's flood, and then there is ours.........

Help! We started with a calm, sunny Monday morning, when Masha passed by our 1940’s section and noticed water on the floor. We looked up - water was gushing through a long crack in the ceiling from the upstairs tenant. We rushed to cover everything in plastic but ½ of the women’s suits and many of the dresses were already drenched. Our new intern Kim helped Nora and me (Helen) protect everything. Masha is now writing up the dry-cleaning list, which by the extent of the damage, we will assume will turn out to be just a tad shorter than War & Peace and probably cost more than the price of a modest 1-bedroom NY co-op.

As our hanger & plastic covering supplier said to us today: "You have dust, you have floods...what's next? famine?" We have actors come in tomorrow for fittings. We will tell them to bring umbrellas.

Fashion World's Little Secrets!!!!!

We would never give out trade secrets (!!!) but as a lot of "the industry" knows, a hush-hush part of our business is renting to fashion and accessory designers who use our items for inspiration for their future fashion lines. We have wonderful clients (whose names we NEVER give out!) and have had some amusing experiences:

One of our modest little 1930’s dresses turned out to be copied line-for-line, in the EXACT same fabric by a high-end designer. Its ultimate retail price? $1100.

Some designers actually ended up using OUR garments in their runway shows because they could not finish their own garments in time, and frantically called us to make sure we still had the original garments available so they could quickly re-rent them! Yet another of our garments was used in a news interview show to showcase an up-and-coming couture designer…only it was not his interpretation of our gown - it was actually OUR GOWN! To the designer’s credit, we were told ahead of time…so we just had to laugh. Our staff ( Nora and Allison, above) recently attended the fashion show of one of our favorite clients. We won’t give away the client’s name, but the photos show what a lovely cocktail dress ( in silver) was created after being inspired by renting our original evening gown (albeit now wrinkled in the above photo!).