NEW YORK — When Sally Hershberger walks into a room, it is like a storm hit.
She has arrived late and, not surprisingly, has discovered that things don’t measure up to her standards.
At a photo shoot held Tuesday for her newly revamped contemporary T-shirt line, Shagg Downtown, the most pressing concern was the hair, which had been done by an underling from her namesake West Village salon.
“Wait a minute,” Hershberger told her. “Stop. It’s just too pretty. We need to mess it up a little.”
The stylist on duty emptied out her bag on a table for Hershberger, but this only made her more incensed.
“Is this it? You don’t have anything else? I don’t like these products you have here,” she said. “You should put in your bag what I put in mine. When you hit the big time, you can do whatever you want.”
After a challenging start on the clothing front, Hershberger is relaunching her collection with the help of Solange Pollack, a former model-turned-designer who worked with contemporary knitwear designer Mark Eisen. Together, Hershberger and Pollack have codesigned a collection of supersoft vintage-inspired T-shirts with a few key bottoms mixed in.
“I’m not looking to compete with the denim lines already out there,” Hershberger said. “I am really obsessed with finding the perfect T-shirt, so I wanted to concentrate on that.”
Hershberger, who charges upward of $600 for a haircut and claims Meg Ryan, Hillary Clinton, Jane Fonda and Courtney Love as clients, said her first love has always been clothing. She said her quest for the perfect T-shirt has led her to a tailor, who recuts and sizes the shirts she purchases.
“This whole thing started because my celebrity clients asked me where I got my shirts,” she said. “And really, they were always reworked.”
To help her focus and organize, Hershberger hired Pollack.
“I needed someone with experience and someone who could be focused on just this,” Hershberger said. “I’m just not that focused and not that organized.”
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Pollack said her focus is to create the perfect shirts, whether they are graphic-printed or solid or striped, material- or silicon-washed.
“If the fabric doesn’t have a good hand, then we don’t want to see it in our line,” Pollack said. “We want this to be the T-shirt she takes out of the closet and wears all the time because it’s comfortable. It feels like pajamas.”
Wholesaling for $26 to $45, the Shagg Downtown line is being targeted at better specialty stores. Hershberger said in the near future she plans to add sweats and cashmere sweaters to the mix. Hershberger said she hopes to reach $1 million in sales by the end of the year.
“I’m not going to sit here and tell you that I want to keep this line small and focused,” she said. “I want this company to be huge and focused.”