Explore the Lower East Side With Szeki Chan and Kuna the Dog
The best places for treats—for people and puppies—in the ‘hood.
Szeki Chan may have some Lower East Side cred—she lives in the nabe and has a rad shop there, too—but Kuna, her three-year-old Shiba Inu is a local celebrity who has ins with cupcake bakers and burly bouncers alike. These are the places where the designer behind the elegantly unfussy apparel line 7115 and her pal head when they make their LES rounds. —carly pifer
“I always stop into the boutique Honey in the Rough. It has an unique point of view and such a wide and well-edited selection of designers from around the world. The owner Ashley is the most helpful person, which makes popping in such a treat—for me, not necessarily for Kuna.”
“Kuna and I pick up flowers weekly at Union Market. I love the way that they have them set up—just so pleasing to the eyes, and always so fresh! Each bouquet has its own name card and description. For a person who doesn’t have much knowledge about flowers—like myself—it’s quite nice to know what I am buying.”
“My favorite cafe, Caffe Vita, hails from Seattle but earns its place in the Lower East Side. My usual is a cappuccino, and I enjoy watching them roast the beans—so I always know it’s fresh.”
Szeki’s shop, at 157 Rivington Street in NYC!
“Minca Ramen is my go-to dining spot near home. I adore the spicy miso ramen but will eat anything here. Everyone who works there has been there forever, and they always have on the biggest smiles.”
“Kuna makes friends anywhere he goes. He loves to drag us to places that give him treats, like the bakery Sugar Sweet Sunshine and the Hotel Rivington and Rockwood Music Hall—both great nightlife destinations.”
Szeki’s edition is a total wardrobe-changer. Get this dress, and hit the LES.
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Chiyome
One of the most difficult kinds of chic to achieve is that Japanese-style minimalism that’s beautiful in its pure functionality. But Anna Lynett Moss has it in her blood. Her bag line, Chiyome, is named for her Japanese great-grandmother. “My mother tried to find an anglicized name that began with ‘Chi’ for me, to continue that heritage among women in my family, but couldn’t,” she explains. “I’m resurrecting that tradition through Chiyome for my generation.”
After enrolling at RISD at 18, Anna spent some time in Rome and Los Angeles before moving to NYC (an inevitability, in her mind). In L.A., she started experimenting making clothes and bags for pals and decided to audition for Project Runway on a whim. Her takeaway from participating in season 7? “Developing a whole apparel collection every season is madness.”
Bags, it turns out, are more her scene. “Bags are fascinating because they need to function so specifically in order to fit seamlessly into one’s life,” she explains of the appeal. “It’s an intriguing challenge to hone in on the particular set of elements that make a bag work really well.” Challenge, schmallenge: Anna’s insanely sleek, hard-working line totally nails it. She makes the anti-It bag—the everything, always bag. —carly pifer
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Five Tirana-Approved NYC Mexican Joints
Graciela Fuentes helps you fill your belly.
The storied guac from La Superior.
Newsflash: Mexicans don’t eat chimichangas. In fact, Graciela Fuentes, of the nostalgically industrial line Tirana Jewelry, had never even heard of one until she moved to the U.S. for college. And since then, she’s done a stellar job avoiding them, instead unearthing the best, most legit Mexican food NYC has to offer. —jackie varriano
La Superior
“One of the owners Felipe (a.k.a. Sonido Discoayacan) and I used to DJ at the same parties many years ago. He has an amazing selection of Mexican music, and the food and décor are super authentic—I really feel at-home when I go. Whenever someone visits from Mexico and is feeling homesick, I’ll take them there. I love their guacamole. I think is one of the best in town!”
Santos Anne
“Ok, this place is not fully Mexican, but that’s what makes is great. This super-cute restaurant-bar serves French-slash-Mexican food. I was a bit skeptical the first time I went, but after my first bite of the Mexican steak tartare—hand-cut beef, shallots, cornichons, cilantro, and pico de gallo—I had no more doubts.”
Mally’s
“Bushwick has a big Mexican population, so there are a lot of taquerias and restaurants to choose from in the neighborhood. I’ve tried a lot of them, and I always go back to Mally’s, which is actually a deli and grocery store with a tiny kitchen in the back. In Northern Mexico where I’m from, we eat a lot of carne asada, and one of my favorite carna asada dishes is alambre, which typically involves beef, bacon, onions, and bell peppers on a skewer with melted cheese on top. At Mally’s you can get it with either bacon or chorizo! Yeah!”
Pulqueria
“It’s definitely unexpected to find this Mexican lounge in the middle of Chinatown among Vietnamese and Chinese restaurants. This place is better known for their pulque-based drinks, but my favorite things here are the enchiladas suizas. The super-rich tomatillo sauce gives them a delicious, citrusy taste.”
El Paso
“Whenever I find myself in Spanish Harlem, I always make my way to El Paso. They have delicious elote—corn on the cob covered in mayo, cotija cheese, lime, and chile piquin. Mexicans will find a way to add chile to everything. I like to sneak a travel-size container of chile powder in when I go to the movies so I can pour it over my popcorn.”
Come back tomorrow to get your hands on Graciela’s edition! Pairs well with ANYTHING.
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Unearthen
Before taking the entrepreneurial plunge and founding Unearthen—her line of raw, sophisticated gems—in 2007, Gia Bahm was living in New York and working as a wardrobe stylist. “I realized I was happiest when I was just messing around on set and improvising little accessories out of scraps,” explains the designer, who spent childhood weekends in her native Seattle shuttling between various arts-and-crafts classes. “I just knew I wanted to try doing my own thing for a while and see what came of it.”
When Gia got down to experimenting, she whipped up pendants that paired gemstones with bullet casings, and they got so much love that she then needed to determine a name for this undertaking. “I agonized over what to call it,” Gia, now an L.A.-dweller, admits. “I wanted something that sounded natural and mysterious, and ‘Unearthen’ just felt right. I like that it’s not a real word. It kind of allows you to interpret it however you want.” And although the line has expanded well beyond its inaugural necklacse into a range that now includes rings, bracelets, lockets, and even pocketknives (why not?), Gia is still all about the making. “I’m obsessively hands-on,” she says. “It sounds insane, but I love finding the perfect setting, the perfect little home for each crystal.” Sounds like, in the process, she’s made a pretty fine home for herself as well. —mattie kahn
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The 3 NYC Spots In God We Trust Calls Home
Find yourself an excuse to visit all of them.
Shana Tabor has come a long way: “When I first started, I had a tiny corner of my bedroom where I would sit for 12 hours every day and make jewelry,” she explains of the roots of her line In God We Trust, which now tackles apparel, too. But in 2005, about two years after she started working on her line full-time, Shana decided it was time to set up shop—an interest she had from the very beginning. She now has a trifecta of super-influential, crazy-cool locations in Greenpoint, Soho, and Williamsburg that carry the likes of D.S. & Durga, Billy Kirk, and The Hill-Side, beyond her own creations. Here’s how each shop came to be. —alisha prakash
“The Greenpoint store is where all the magic happens. Our design studio is here, and it’s where all the manufacturing takes place. I found this location in search of a bigger studio space. I loved the idea of our studio being attached to a retail space—it’s the best of both worlds. This space is by far our largest location, allowing freedoms not available in our smaller locations. The brick walls were already here. We added one large-scale piece of furniture, and it was done. Greenpoint has a real sense of community that is lacking in most New York neighborhoods, especially in North Brooklyn.” (70 Greenpoint Ave., Brooklyn)
“This store is our first Manhattan location. I was prompted to look in that neighborhood by a fellow shop owner, and when I saw the space was available, I left a note under the gate and waited for a call. Thankfully it happened. This stretch of Lafayette is a place that I used to shop in during the nineties. It’s also an interesting location in the city because we are not quite in Soho and also not really in Nolita. That makes for an interesting mix of people and lifestyles. The space is long and narrow, so there’s not much you can do. The main concern was removing the glass walls and six layers of X-Girl wallpaper (even on the ceilings!).” (265 Lafayette St.)
“This Bedford Avenue store is our newest location, which opened last summer. It is home to our perfect customers—this includes tourists and locals. Can’t help it, haters: This is my home. I have lived in Williamsburg since 2000. I love working in the same ‘hood that I live in—even though I sometimes hate it, too.” (129 Bedford Ave., Brooklyn)
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Tour the Shipley & Halmos Studio
Are you ready to meet the line’s mascot? Oh, good.
When Sam Shipley and Jeff Halmos launched Shipley & Halmos, their every-guy line that girls go nuts for too, they started working out of Sam’s apartment in Long Beach, California. “At that time, Sam played music, so he had a whole recording studio set up in his kitchen. There was equipment everywhere, plus clothes,” says Jeff. But a couple of months later, the twosome moved to NYC, taking over a baller studio in Soho. We’ll let them show you around. —alisha prakash
Score the (unisex!) silk scarves the guys made for us from this rad space.
Jeff: “The neon light installation, which drops down from the showroom into our studio, was installed a few years ago. Sitting in the studio and looking up almost 40 feet to the ceiling always reminds us how fortunate we are to work in such a beautiful environment!”
Sam: “This is our company mascot and an international sensation, Ampy the Ampersand. He’s out on the road promoting the S&H brand but occasionally stops by the office to cheer us on in person.”
Jeff: “Meet Sean, our friend and fit model.”
Sam: “This is part of last season’s inspiration board. Typically, it’s more about mood and feeling than it is about fashion. It also heavily influences our color palette. Our boards are just a grouping of random images saved up since the previous collection. It’s incredible how they tend to match up and create a narrative. It’s like a map to the random points of interest of our brand for that time period. There’s never a Great Gatsby theme or anything like that.”
Jeff: “They might look sweet in the picture—but Roscoe loves to dig in the garbage, and Pilot tends to get a little ornery with visitors.”
Sam: “Kate, Sam, and Jeff are gathered around Kylan’s desk to watch the first edit of a film we shot. Yes, Sam is drinking a beer. Nothing wrong with a happy hour!”
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Jade Lai Whips Up Her Fave Comfort Food
The Creatures of Comfort designer adds a little bit o’ this and a little bit o’ that to make her signature ochazuke.
As if running two stores and designing a line of cool-girl clothing isn’t enough, Jade Lai is considering a side-career as a restaurateur. But her tastes in that realm are a little more contained: “I eat the same thing for lunch every day—Hampton Chutney,” she says. Her brand of eatery would be equally straightforward. “I think it would be cool to serve only five dishes. Comfort food that people want to eat,” she explains. “One of my favorite is ochazuke, a rice and tea broth dish. It’s great for warm weather, and I can usually whip it up with ingredients that are already in my fridge.” Here, she shares the recipe for what could someday be a menu staple. —olivia seely
Ingredients:
1 1/3 cups of sweet brown rice, dry
1 genmaicha green tea bag
1 dashi pouch
8 umbeboshi (Japanese pickles)
8 radish pickles
4 handful spinach
A dozen slices raw salmon (optional)
4 handfuls crushed nori
Salt, to taste
Wasabi, to taste
Directions:
Cook the sweet brown rice—you can use rice you have left over from the day before, too. You want four cups cooked rice. In a pot, combine 6 cups of water, the genmaicha green tea bag, and a dashi pouch and bring to boil. In each of four deep bowls, add 1 cup of brown rice, 2 umeboshi, 2 radish pickles, a handful of spinach, a handful of crushed nori, and a few slices of raw salmon. Pour 1 ½ cups of the tea broth over the rice bowl. Add salt and wasabi to taste. Serves 4.
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Creatures of Comfort
When Jade Lai graduated with a degree in environmental art from Otis College of Art and Design, she wasn’t sure what the future held for her, so she decided to dabble in a bit of everything. And we mean everything. From furniture design, to graphics and branding, to fashion-show production, Jade followed one creative path to another, and, after leaving L.A. to work a ten-month stint at Esprit in Hong Kong, Jade realized the corporate world was never going to be her thing. So she came home and set up shop: Creatures of Comfort, the super-cool, ahead-of-the-curve store, arrived on Melrose in August of 2005, and a clothing line that goes by the same name came 5 years after. “When I opened the store I wanted it to be a lifestyle space,” says Jade. “We designed these modular boxes that kept on moving around according to the needs of the store. I have a lot of interesting friends who I wanted to work with, so the design of the store was built in a way that we could do that.”
In 2009, Jade packed her bags for NYC to open the second location on Mulberry Street in Nolita, attracting quite the fan-girl following along the way. But Jade pretends not to notice, diving headfirst into her next sophisticated and unassuming collection, working on a line of sweaters, and squeezing in travel (everywhere from Mexico City to Nantucket to Chiang Mai) when she can. “I didn’t expect much out of it,” she says of opening her first store. “It’s fun to be able to envision something and make it come true.” —olivia seely
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The Insider: Leslie Price
After tackling NYC—Leslie Price was the founding editor of Racked and worked her editorial magic at Lucky and Time Inc.—the shopping powerhouse and girl of the perfect hair headed to L.A. to prove that she could take on both coasts and to helm Racked’s West Coast editorial team. Here, she shares some bi-coastal boutique findings and the issue with leather pants. —jiayi
Q: How did you get started with Racked?
A: I moved to New York right after college, and worked at Time Out New York as a food writer for a while. I loved writing about food, but I had a real love of fashion, even though I didn’t have access to that world. I knew Lockhart Steele from Curbed, and Ben Leventhal—who, with Lockhart, founded Eater—socially. They were interested in doing a shopping site and asked me if I was interested—of course I was, so I started writing for the site. There really weren’t any fashion blogs around then, so it was a really good time to be getting into that space.
Q: How did you approach shaping the editorial voice? Has it changed?
A: It’s definitely evolved. The biggest thing at the beginning was that I was really interested in sample sales. For me, they were just emblematic of the way the industry was closed off to normal people. Things weren’t out there like they are now. Lookbooks weren’t online, and fashion week wasn’t instantly live. You wouldn’t see that side of things—you’d only see what magazines showed you. It was all so secret, and I wanted in.
Q: L.A. and New York are opposites in so many ways. Do you think that applies to the retail scenes, too?
A: I still have to figure out how brick-and-mortar really works in L.A., because there just isn’t really a lot of foot traffic. Unless you’re talking about Abbott Kinney in Venice—then I get it. In New York, I’d constantly discover places by just walking by and going in because they looked interesting. Here, I feel like stores really have to market themselves more. The discovery factor is hard out here.
Q: What’s your favorite place to shop in L.A.?
A: I’ve blogged a lot about Shareen. The woman who owns it used to be a stylist and has a warehouse in downtown L.A.—it’s enormous and full with amazing vintage. It was one of those places that I knew I wanted to go to when I came out here. When I was at Lucky, all the girls were talking about it. Whenever they traveled to L.A., they’d be at Shareen.
Q: Is there anything about fashion that you really hate?
A: I know it’s kind of the nature of the industry, but I wish that I could have a uniform. I’ll be looking at things, and I’ll be like, “Oh, I really need a pair of oxblood, leather trousers this fall.” And I really wish I didn’t want that! I dream of being that person who can find that one great-looking thing, and just wear it over and over again. Carolina Herrera always wears a white button-down, and it looks amazing—and it won’t look silly five years after, either.
