You Want to Wear a Suit This Holiday Season—This Suit, Specifically
The year is winding down and we’re inundated with stuff. Friends and family are sending wish lists, brands are hacking prices in end-of-year sales, Instagram is flooding with cool new things to buy. Your closet, too, is likely brimming with sweaters and beanies and scarves just liberated from storage. Not to give Marie Kondo too much credit, but sometimes all of the things can be so debilitatingly overwhelming.
At Wardrobe NYC, Christine Centenera and Josh Goot have created a simplified fashion proposition: One box of either four or eight pieces that solves a particular hole in the average closet. They launched with suiting, evolved into sport, street, and denim, and now are back at square one with a most luxurious capsule of men’s and women’s tailoring, just in time for the holidays. Made of merino wool, the Wardrobe tailoring offering spans outerwear, suiting, shirting, skirts, dresses, and leggings.
“We’ve been itching to get back to tailoring actually,” says Centenera, with Goot quickly adding, “It is a return to our roots and we do feel like it’s the right message for this time of year. We feel like the tailored capsules are a strength of ours and something that our customer responds really well to.”
What sets Wardrobe apart is not just its high-quality materials or its delivery model, but the fact that the cuts are at once of the moment and timeless. (Plus, they already have a fashion world stamp of approval. The zip-front leggings Centenera was spotted in at Paris Fashion Week are from this upcoming release.) “We’re interested in consistency but also evolution. With our first tailoring release, we made quite an androgynous statement. This time around we wanted to elevate,” says Goot. “We wanted to evolve the silhouette. It is more sculptural and it is more for evening.
The new, more cinched shapes for women and elegant cuts for men come in sets that allow for styling options. In addition to a blazer and shirt, the four-piece box set will include a T-shirt and the aforementioned leggings for women and a tee for men while the eight-piece adds a coat, hoodie, wrap skirt, turtleneck, or dress. The expanded offering is a result of customer feedback, something both Centenera and Goot take to heart. “I’m in the shop a little bit and we do trunk shows where I’m on my hands and knees trying on these clothes with women,” Centenera says. “I find that their feedback has gone into the pieces that I felt were missing in our offering, especially in the last few collections.”
“One in three customers comes back,” Goot adds, a rate that other big retailers and brands could only wish for. “I think it’s a testament to the value proposition that we offer and also to the clothes themselves: the cut, the make, the fabrication.” It’s also a testament to the idea of simplifying it all. With eight great pieces like this, you will no longer be a victim of your stuff. Your things will work for you.
Photo: Courtesy of Wardrobe NYC1/13
Photo: Courtesy of Wardrobe NYC2/13
