Late in 2020, Jean-Marc Bellaiche, chief executive of France’s Printemps department stores, found himself being led by an investor towards a once-grand Art Deco building in New York City’s then-forlorn financial district. Printemps’s owner, the Qatari-backed investment fund Divine Investments SA, hoped Bellaiche would open a store in the building, which it was redeveloping with 560 luxury residences.
“I’m thinking, it’s a tough market. The likelihood of doing it is low,” Bellaiche recalls. New York was saturated with luxury retail. “Some would say over-stored.” Then, he stepped from Wall Street into the building’s historic landmarked Red Room, named for the roughly 2.5 million deep red and gold mosaic tiles that cover its walls and ceiling.
“Wow,” Bellaiche thought.
Thus began the latest chapter of New York retail, in which the French department store chain on 21 March will open a relatively tiny offshoot that aims to beat luxury at its own game. This new Printemps store isn’t merely an opportunity for a European retailer to plumb the lucrative US market, which mints billionaires by the day. It’s also the latest example of what I’m thinking of as the ‘New Retail’, in which multi-brand stores shrink, boost the opulence of service and décor, and wrest back control of their stores’ square footage from brands.
This new Printemps store is a cup runneth over of Art Nouveau frescoes, sweeping pink marble stairs, two-story mirrored walls inspired by Coco Chanel and intimate eateries such as the 25-seat Salon Vert raw bar. Designed by architect Laura Gonzalez, who did the Cartier mansion redo on Fifth Avenue in 2023, it’s a fever dream of a Belle Époch Parisian apartment whose owner chose the décor with a bottomless checkbook in one hand and a bottle of hallucinogenic absinthe in the other. The landmark Red Room has been transformed into a shoe salon with a forest of ‘trees’ that light up the Dior, Aquazurra, Bottega Veneta and other wares, many in exclusive red colours as an homage to the space.
An equally noteworthy aspect that may be drowned out by this noise is that this store is a tiny merchandising revolution in 54,000 square feet (Printemps’s Paris flagship is 550,000 square feet). There will be no shop-in-shops where the goods and sales associates belong to the brands. No branded beauty counters. Printemps will own the products that are sold there. Printemps will employ the people who work there. Printemps will decide what goes where, and there won’t be the equivalent of the floors at Bergdorf Goodman or at Saks Fifth Avenue where labels are quarantined according to price categories.
Since the 2008 financial crisis, as luxury conglomerates sought total control of their distribution and merchandising, most multi-brand stores have been slowly taken over by brands, leaving the retailers without flexibility to move merchandise around, mix labels on a mannequin, or even control what’s being sold in their own real estate. Printemps has experienced that at its large stores — New York is a move to regain control. It’s both an experiment and a gauntlet thrown.
Silvano Vangi, Printemps creative and merchandising director and a previous veteran of Italian luxury retailer Luisaviaroma, says it’s “amazing” to place products in ways that make the most sense for the store and its customers. Rather than a Lanvin shop-in-shop, for instance, Lanvin will be found throughout — gowns in the Boudoir and quirky items in the Playroom, a space devoted to gifts and the unexpected from brands like Nike and JW Anderson.
“It’s based on our point of view,” Vangi says.
Printemps is by no means the first department store looking to behave more like small, independent multi-brand boutiques, some of which have been thriving and expanding locations as they cater to clients they know personally, including the Mitchell Stores, Kirna Zabête and Elyse Walker. Years ago, Nordstrom launched small neighbourhood stores to fanfare, but in a sign that their less opulent approach may have faltered, one in Los Angeles is being recreated as a luxury boutique for Catherine Bloom, a doyenne of shopping for billionaires whom Nordstrom poached from Neiman Marcus in Beverly Hills last month.
Printemps’s calculations in the New York store, which encompasses the landmark-registered One Wall Street building as well as a 1960s modern addition, include an eye-opening analysis of the neighbourhood’s demographics. Once a daytime hub of Wall Streeters who disappeared by 6pm, leaving streets deserted, the city’s Financial District has blossomed with restaurants, apartments and an art centre.
Printemps expects 150,000 people to pass the building each day, representing a spending power of $9.4 billion. The community’s median household income is a comfortable $170,000. Nearly all the luxury retail is far uptown, leaving Printemps the place to go for some shopping and a duck confit with Vietnamese flavours at the store’s fine dining restaurant Maison Passerelle (it means “gateway house” in French, get it?) where the group is aiming for a Michelin star.
The Chinese may spend a higher percentage of their incomes on luxury goods, but Americans are statistically richer and are learning to spend more on high-end offerings. At Printemps’s Paris flagship, revenue from American clients tripled between 2019 and 2024, says Bellaiche, who began his career as a management consultant at Boston Consulting Group. “In Paris, we have been focusing on Americans,” he says. “If you look at the number of ultra-rich in the world, Americans dominate."
Printemps executives are also keenly aware that New Yorkers continue to grieve the loss of stores like Barneys New York and Jeffreys, which were discovery zones for the fashion obsessed. “Barneys (and) Jeffreys have not been really fully replaced,” Bellaiche says. “So not that we copy-paste what they did — far from that — but we know there is a position to be taken after those departures.”
It isn’t the easy path. European luxury conglomerates continue to shrink their wholesale accounts to further their control of brands. Bellaiche and Vangi speak more about the LVMH and Kering brands they will carry — Dior and Manolo Blahnik shoes, some Valentino and Margiela, Bottega Veneta in many categories, and even Jean Paul Gaultier haute couture — than about those they won’t. Instead, there will be many small, artisanal and French fashion and décor brands that aren’t widely available in the US, such as Brigitte Tanaka, Capulette, or Apis Cera. There will be vintage offerings curated by Marie Blanchet — a vintage icon in France — including an archival Yves Saint Laurent Le Smoking tuxedo by the original YSL.
And that Red Room will be “the world’s most beautiful shoe salon”, Bellaiche boasts. “We can reinvent retail. We’ve been reinventing retail for 100 years.”
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