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Discount Fashion Retailer Hits Broadway

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The New York Times

The Tampa Tribune

Published: May 2, 2008

If rock purists were unsettled last month by the opening of a designer boutique on the site of what once was CBGB, the hard-core Bowery nightclub, imagine how they will feel reading the next sentence: The old Tower Records space a few blocks away on Broadway, for two decades the spot for adolescent reveries of dance, pop and punk, has been leased by Steve & Barry's, a clothing chain where everything costs less than $10.

Steve & Barry's, for the uninitiated, is to fashion what Tower once was to music. Steve & Barry's is manna, a store that sells stylish celebrity-branded clothes at prices that are absurdly inexpensive, lower than those at Old Navy, H & M or Forever 21, undercutting even Wal-Mart by as much as half.

At its 264 barnlike stores in malls across the country, including a store at University Mall in Tampa, Steve & Barry's offers an assortment of flowery sundresses designed by Sarah Jessica Parker, heart-printed hoodies by Nickelodeon alumna Amanda Bynes and basketball shoes by New York Knicks point guard Stephon Marbury - at $8.98 apiece.

The question on everyone's lips: How do they make a decent dress or a jacket, with sleeves, or a pair of functioning shoes for $8.98?

The answer is complicated, but for those who can remember what it was like to wile away an evening browsing the exhilaratingly chaotic downtown Tower store, its coming transformation into a temple of cheap denim short-shorts, cargo pants and walls of novelty T-shirts makes some sort of sense in the arc of cultural evolution.

Fashion, as it has become more accessible to a generation that is obsessed with the mass emulation of celebrity style, has surpassed music (and the increasingly archaic concept of the record store) as the retail touchstone of youth. And cheap fashion has become infinitely more respectable, even cool, given the current economic climate.

"It seems like there is some justice in that, doesn't it?" said Parker, who last week attended a movie premiere wearing a bitty blue sundress with a print of hothouse foliage, $8.98, from Bitten, her year-old Steve & Barry's collection. "For a lot of people - young women, middle-age women, regular women - there is this idea about wanting fashion in an affordable way. They are living in a less rarefied world."

The significance of planning a store on Broadway - by the time it opens this fall, it will be around the 300th Steve & Barry's in the country and the largest in New York - is not lost on Steve Shore and Barry Prevor, childhood friends from Long Island who founded the company in 1985.

During an interview last month at their headquarters in Port Washington, N.Y., Shore and Prevor, both 44, said the location was a logical choice, given its proximity to New York University and their target demographic. It is also intended to send a message to the fashion industry, which has largely underestimated the chain despite sales last year, according to business-research company Hoover's, of $1.1 billion.

"There's been a revolution, a full-blown revolution," Shore said, sounding, at times, just a bit like Crazy Eddie. "We just haven't told anyone yet. If the Gap or Abercrombie & Fitch or J. Crew said that everything in the store is going to be $8.98 or less, it would be front-page news. But while no one was noticing, we opened stores across the country that have identical clothes for much lower prices."

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