NEW YORK — Like much of what she does, designer Nili Lotan’s decision to open her first store next month in TriBeCa stemmed from her own intuition.
Lotan, a TriBeCa resident, spotted the vacant 2,400-square-foot store at 188 Duane Street while walking her daughter to school one morning in February. She had never thought about opening a store, but saw the space and knew immediately she had to have it.
By March, she and her staff, which has increased to nine from two a year ago, started using the lower floor of the two-floor space as an office, showroom and atelier. Lotan expects to open the store during the second week of September but an exact date has not yet been set.
The store is only one new venture for Lotan, however. The others include an exclusive men’s shirt collection for Fred Segal, an exclusive dress collection for Scoop, a girls’ outerwear collection to be sold at the new store and e-commerce through her Web site, nililotan.com, that will include more affordable items that will be available solely online. Her spring collection is more defined, due in part to embroidery and other artistic touches provided by craftswomen in southern Israel. Combined, Lotan hopes these elements will lead to a “breakthrough season” that helps her land in more high-end stores.
“The beauty of being on your own is evolving with your own intuition and aesthetic,” Lotan said.
During a visit to the boutique last week, carpenters were busy installing Plexiglas planks to provide shoppers with a bird’s-eye view of Lotan and her employees at work. The low-key neighborhood calls for a more approachable environment — something Lotan plans to embrace from Day One. Rather than hire a store manager right off the bat, she plans to greet and assist customers herself to make them feel comfortable and to better understand their needs.
“The one thing I don’t like about high-end stores is you can feel so intimidated and sometimes so poor. I want my store to be welcoming and very personal,” Lotan said.
The ultracurious will be allowed to walk downstairs to ask questions and check out the work in progress.
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“We make everything domestically. I’m not trying to be this unreachable designer,” she said. “I want to design some things that most working women can afford.”
Jackets made up the bulk of her collection when she started her business in 2003, but she has since broadened her range to include everything from bikinis to evening gowns. Dresses account for 60 percent of the 48 fall offerings, which wholesale from $85 for cotton shorts to $650 for a coat with silver buttons handmade in Santa Fe.
“I just do things intuitively — not because I was reading something somewhere or because someone told me that’s what I should be doing,” Lotan said.
To that end, another nontraditional element to her store will be an antique motorized dry cleaners’ rack that will hang in the window, displaying a few items from her collection, a couple of books and CDs. In the rear of the store, two billowy columns made of white parachute silk will look more like an art installation than the dressing rooms they are. Handblown white glass light fixtures will hang from the ceiling, and video art will be projected onto the walls. The emphasis of the ambience will be on art and music, not fashion.
Her unusual aesthetic is something she developed while working at Adrienne Vittadini, Liz Claiborne, Ralph Lauren and Nautica before going out on her own.
“I’ve been doing this for 26 years. I have got to have a reason to do what I do. It is very challenging to have your own business and do it,” she said. “The thing that gets me going is to have all the freedom to do what I want to.”
Part of that creative freedom involves using a group of Bedouin craftswomen in southern Israel to incorporate their embroidery into her work. Ruth Dayan, the wife of one of Israel’s founders, helped Lotan, a native of Israel, to find the women who live in Segeu Shalom. In the Fifties, Dayan established Maskit, a movement that encouraged immigrants to try to preserve their cultures through jewelry, weaving and embroidery. By the Sixties, Maskit had hundreds of women in Jordan and Gaza working side by side with Israeli workers, an ideology Lotan relishes. Lotan visits the craftswomen in Segeu Shalom every two months or so, bringing them pieces to embellish.
She noted that she sold 200 units of a black-and-white printed dress they embroidered in two weeks. But immediate reorders are not an option, since their work is so labor-intensive.
“Most of the profit is theirs. These women do not have an opportunity to do anything else,” she said. “This gives them impact on an international level.”
Lotan, who once served in the Israeli army, has addressed her urge to have some sort of political expression in her spring 2007 collection by designing soft silk blouses and scarves in an oil rig motif and a machine gun one. “I guess it’s the cause of things and the result of things,” she said. “It can just be a reason for people to think. I don’t want to say anything. I just want people to be aware.”