New York Times: “A Consignment Store Run As If By Museum Curators”
Fantastic Article and Review from the New York Times.
It is not that locals have never heard of Tom Ford, said Miguel Lopez, whose Sui Generis on Market Street is the default outfitter to the Castro tribe. A consignment store run as if by museum curators, Sui Generis sells a selection of vintage clothing (Frankie Goes to Hollywood T-shirts alongside John Lobb shoes and suits from Comme des Garçons) so smartly merchandised that a consumer quickly forgets that the stuff on display is used goods. “It’s that people here don’t want to show what they have in their closets,” said Mr. Lopez, a native of Guadalajara, Mexico, who opened Sui Generis three years ago with a partner to offer a style alternative to a population whose last important contribution to fashion amounted to the sanded crotch jeans and white T-shirt uniform of so-called gay clones.
“It’s a very difficult city to read,” Mr. Lopez said, owing largely to the local distaste for ostentation and hype, a suspicion of anything that requires a high-degree of difficulty to pull off and that people spend a lot of their lives in cars.
“San Francisco is definitely about quiet style,” he said. “People care. They have the clothes, but they wear them in private. They bring in the most amazing stuff for consignment and I’m always thinking, ‘Where did you wear this thing?’ ”
