NEW YORK — CB Sports, the popular outerwear brand of the Eighties, has been revived — and revved up — by new owners and a new, but familiar, creative director and design team.
Stacey Bendet, founder and designer of the Alice + Olivia contemporary collection, has signed on as creative director of CB Sports, which is set to launch for fall 2006. Seventies styling is no stranger to Bendet, and Alice + Olivia brims with Seventies flair. However, her mission with CB Sports is to maintain the integrity of the brand’s heritage and also infuse it with an updated color palette and silhouettes.
“CB will always have an outerwear focus, but now, it’s more après-ski,” said Bendet. The collection consists of about 60 pieces more likely to be worn at the lodge while sipping a cocktail than zipping down the slopes. Sexy leggings come in thick, silky satin and look best worn under oversized, hooded cashmere tops. Fitted cropped bomber jackets are influenced by the original three-striped Apollo jacket. Stylish, more blousy sweaters with puff sleeves have peekaboo slits of colors such as neon green and hot pink.
Elite Group, a division of Authentic Lifestyle Products, bought 52 percent of CB Sports for an undisclosed figure in the second quarter of 2005 from CB Sports Holdings, which owned the trademark. Individual investors purchased the remaining shares.
The wholesale price range of the collection is between $23 for a long racer tank and $200 for a long coat. “It’s fashionable and cool,” Bendet said. “It used to be that, if you wanted to stay warm, you had to get a big, bulky ski jacket. But if you wanted something fashionable, you’d get a shearling coat. The CB lifestyle is a cute, fashionable, ski lifestyle.”
The collection was shown to retailers for the first time at the Fashion Coterie here this week, but celebrities got a sampling at the Sundance Film Festival, where Cameron Diaz and Justin Timberlake walked away with their very own CB Sports bomber jackets.
Nora Caliguri has joined CB Sports as design director. Caliguri, who had been interning with the Elite Group before her stint on the first season of the hit show “Project Runway,” has been working full time for the company since September.
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“I got the archives about halfway through designing the collection, so the process was more creative,” she said. “We weren’t just regurgitating, we were looking back and updating. I was more triggered by the nostalgia of the pieces.”
Like the original design, CB Sports jackets have the logo on the back of the neck and sprinkled on the lining of the jackets, action pleating at the shoulder in contrasting colors and ribbed trimming and color blocking.
Chris Hoffman, executive vice president of CB Sports, said the brand is targeting about 175 to 200 specialty stores, and perhaps “two or three major department stores.”
This year, Hoffman said wholesale volume should reach $2 million. “We see ourselves hanging with the likes of Juicy [Couture],” he noted. “But we’re much more New York.”