Clothes Minded

SUITS ME FINE: Despite its conservative past, the expanded Boyds features hipper labels, a Georges Perrier restaurant and headless salesmen. Photo By: Michael T. Regan

With a $2.5 million renovation and hipper labels, the revamped Boyds tries to outsize the competition.

by A.D. Amorosi

If you're any sort of label whore, you know Boyds on Chestnut Street is a bastion of fashion. Not just for men's clothing, though that was the Gushner brothers sole bread-and-butter when they started in 1938, but for women, too.

Since relocating from Market Street to Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts' Peale House in 1990, Boyds has offered luxury names for both genders with the accoutrements of top-notch tailoring facilities and relaxed cafe settings to boot.

So whereyouat — you, the under-30 fashion victim foaming at the collagen-lined mouth for Stella McCartney, or you, the insistently layering trust-funder looking for Paul Smith pinstripes to toss atop that hoodie? You've avoided the B, thinking it a Tower-of-London-Fog-like clothier for bushy, old barristers. Wrong.

While tony conservatism will always be a component of the Boyds aesthetic, the store is happily lost in transition. Boyds has turned itself into a shopping and hanging destination with scads of fashion-forward designers and two prominent Philly businesses — a Georges Perrier restau-cafe and Govberg Jewelers-- under one newly renovated, historically restored groove. (The grand reopening is Friday.)

"How do we expose more people to our store?" asks Ralph Yaffe, one of Boyds new co-owners. "Incorporate ideas — salons, restaurants — with similar tastes and audiences."

After buying the biz from Mark and Gerald Gushner in 2004, third-generation Kent Gushner, along with partners, in-laws and long-time Boyds execs Yaffe and Jeff Glass, set about making immediate changes.

Yaffe has been with Boyds since the 1980s. He remembers that the Market Street store couldn't contain Boyds' level of sophistication. "We had a lot of European leather-front sweaters on Market," says Yaffe, holding back a chuckle. "When we got to Chestnut, the clothes immediately took on a different brand of edginess." That was the era of Armani, the beginnings of Brioni.

Now, the new owners have turned the third-floor men's department ("the penthouse") into a dark, clubby, musky boutique in league with the second floor's English traditionalism of mahogany bars, bronze greyhounds, cushy leather seating and its infamous million-dollar glass balcony and atrium hanging over the bar.

"We wanted to ratchet it up to the next level; not just as shopping space, but as a destination," says Yaffe. The 70,000 square-foot-space would be reimagined across five floors at a cost of about $2.5 million. They needed someone who understood the highest end of retail, of sophistication.

Architect Daniel J. Barteluce, famed for redesigning New York City boutiques for Chanel and Saks Fifth Avenue as well as Walnut Street's Burberry shop, had just finished outfitting Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan with a classically inspired rotunda when Yaffe called.

"The first thing Barteluce said was that Boyds had the bones. He just needed to refit it," says Yaffe. That meant reinventing without losing historical integrity. Barteluce stripped the casework from columns and walls in the main room and its accompanying double staircase to the higher floors, combining modern elements of bright, theatrical lighting, light mahogany woods, glass and metal casings, and "invisible furniture" for the first floor's Govberg Jewelry for women and men.

"We didn't want heavy cabinetry," says Yaffe. "We wanted you to see the architecture and the merchandise."

At 7,500 square feet, the women's boutique is three times its previous size with black cabaret lampshades and a middle room occupied by shoes and accessories by the likes of Jimmy Choo and Bottega Veneta capped by an opulent rotunda.

Head to the blue mezzanine and DAS Architects enter the picture. Below the staircase, Brasserie Perrier at Boyds is tres sleek and the city's only in-store gourmet cafe run by Perrier and exec chef and partner Chris Scarduzio.

"We did it on a handshake," says Yaffe of bringing in Perrier. "He came in one day to shop. We pitched him. He bit."

Maybe "mood" best describes the psychic change in Boyds' men's clothiers. They've expanded the men's shoe inventory and slipped it into its own center-stage spot on the fourth floor. They've hipped their conservative lines, buying leaner looks from stalwarts like Kiton, Trussini and Boss.

But the biggest change is Boyds' influx of the edgiest of Brit and Italian labels into its stable of high-end suits, shirts and sportswear — Etro's vexing vertical stripes, Paul Smith's lean lines, the overall funky-but-chic Z Zegna and Dolce & Gabbana.

"Carrying these brands, making these changes, it's in league with the city's hotness," says Yaffe. "Philadelphia has the youth, the money and the desire for high-end retail. It's not just the product. It's people to support the product."

Boyds, 1818 Chestnut St.