It’s lonely being the last retailer on your block. That’s the situation the Joan Vass boutique at 19 E. Chestnut St. found itself in after several high-profile neighbors departed.
The nearby Trattoria Convito store and restaurant closed its doors after a 1993 fire. Then kitchen goods purveyor Williams-Sonoma decamped. The buildings on the block were foreclosed on years ago and now belong to an out-of-town lender. Rumors they will be knocked down for a new development have circulated for a while.
“It used to be a cute little street with a lot of foot traffic. Now, it’s just seedy,” said Emily Fasano, co-owner of Joan Vass.
Fasano has been trying to find a new location for more than a year. But it’s been a tough search, because she can’t afford Michigan Avenue rents, and she doesn’t want her store to be in a mall.
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But a new development right around the corner may solve her problem. JB Realty is converting the Railroad Retirement Board building at 844 N. Rush St. into a retail and restaurant development, and Joan Vass has signed on as a tenant.
The move should happen around May. But there are more changes in store for Fasano’s business, which she co-owns with her mother in New Orleans. The new boutique will still carry Joan Vass, an expensive knitwear line that appeals to older customers, but it is adding others to diversify its risk.
With only one line, “if you have a bad season, you suck air until the delivery comes in,” Fasano said.
New offerings, designed to appeal to a younger audience, include Cinzia Rocca, an Italian designer comparable to MaxMara; and Theory, an offshoot of the Tahari brand, which features pencil skirts, bootleg pants and T-shirts.
And the store will no longer be called Joan Vass. No final decision has been made, but one name under consideration is Emli K., a loose combination of her name and her mother’s, Fasano said.
Call it a new lease on a retail life.
Fashion boost: The designer business on Michigan Avenue and Oak Street is booming, and the people at Chicago magazine want a piece of it.
To that end, they’ve taken the unusual step of hiring a full-time fashion editor–former A-List publisher Stacey Wallace-Albert–to boost coverage. Interest in fashion “is part of the Zeitgeist right now. It didn’t take a genius to figure that out,” said Dick Babcock, the magazine’s editor.
It’s good for business, too, of course. As new designer boutiques such as Ermenegildo Zegna and Salvatore Ferragamo see more fashion coverage, they are likely to invest their advertising dollars with Chicago magazine, said John Carroll, the magazine’s publisher.
Of course, there’s no going back to the good old days in the 1980s, when Marshall Field’s alone placed more than 100 pages of ads yearly in Chicago magazine. That advertising backbone virtually vanished when Field’s was sold to Dayton Hudson Corp. in Minneapolis in 1989.
But Carroll arrived after that, so he was “never used to the luxury of having that many pages.” He has diversified the magazine’s advertising base to include health-care providers, furniture dealers and car companies.
Still, it’s nice to be included in the advertising plans of Ralph Lauren, Prada, Ferragamo and Neiman Marcus, he said. Marshall Field’s is back as an important advertiser, too.
Wallace-Albert, who published her own local fashion magazine for almost three years, says her mission is to track down fashion trends wherever they’re happening–whether it’s Milan or Wicker Park–and interpret them for the Chicago market.
But Wallace-Albert isn’t confining her fashion search to what’s available for sale in the Windy City. Her first fashion spread in the March issue featured a $4,595 buff-colored snakeskin jacket and $595 silk skirt by Richard Tyler Couture that had to be flown in from New York.
As far as native designers go, her assessment is mixed. “It’s a work in progress,” Wallace-Albert said.