I was shooting a video piece for Inc. magazine on entrepreneurship. After answering questions from the producer, he said: “It sounds like you have a lot of meetings at your company.” I was surprised. The way he said meetings, it conjured up thoughts of bureaucracy, business books on how to run them effectively, of nodding heads slumbering, feet numbing and the general drone of business. I realized I had not articulated clearly what we spend a lot of our time doing at our design studio. We build products together in teams. We collaborate. We construct ideas, paths, and conduits that end up being clothes, and collections and wardrobes. Into this process comes many disciplines – the planning of inventory, the voice of the customer, the designer’s vision, the production person’s knowledge of the clothes and construction, and the merchant’s understanding of what we all want to buy six months from now. In meetings, or collaborations, these processes mix. This alchemy is the design process – constant testing, questioning and innovation.

I finally watched La Jetée by Chris Marker. The image of the woman on the airport roof and a man falling is a pivotal image that crops up in many art theory books. A post-apocryphal series of images follow a group of scientists conducting experiments underground. They are capturing the memory of dreams of patients to escape into the future. While one can dismiss the contemporary relevance of this cold war dichotomic plot (good/evil, future/past, annihilation/life) the image of the rooftop evokes pleasure and a conventional set up of fore and aft. While shooting our winter photo shoot in Jacob Riis’ parking lot, our models circle each other. I wanted to evoke a large empty public space similar to the scene on the roof in La Jetée. The parking lot was deserted; it was pouring rain. The models were wet and slightly cold. The airplanes droned overhead in their approach to JFK – a perfect setting for a slice of narrative arc.

The MTA approached us to open a store in Grand Central Terminal. I spent three hours there looking before we decided to take the store. I shopped, I ate, and I stood in the main hall looking at tourists, commuters and traffic patterns. I did have a train to catch, but I went several hours early to do market research. Grand Central is a blend of transportation hub, historical New York lore, architectural wonder and Europeans lost and searching for the bus to Woodbury Commons. (That afternoon, a couple asked the man at the ticket booth this question.) Personally, my father spoke nostalgically about visiting the station in the 1960s, of the “whisper chamber” next to the Oyster Bar. Speak on one side of the room cattycorner and someone on the other side of the room can hear you. The main hall is truly magnificent – hectic crisscrossing, a splendor that reaches up and out. Transportation hubs have lost their stigma. Travel through Heathrow or Gatwick in the UK and every great UK retailer is there. This should be the same on this side of the Atlantic. Travel is about experience, about expectation, about pleasure and yes, about great shopping. We are excited to be part of this historical place.

[Last week, Lexy chronicled her trip to our Portland store location.]

As I walk to a gate in the airport, there is a moment of hesitation. Next to my flight to Portland is a Delta flight to London. Imagine if, like a path in the woods, one could just decide to take the other gangplank. In the same six hours to the West Coast one would be in another country. However, this is a personal reference as I grew up in London. I am going to Portland on business, to our second store outside of New York; Portland is culturally different yet similar to the birthplace of Brooklyn Industries. References in new cities are filtered through personal memory. The small dormitory style rooms at the Ace Hotel bring me back to hostels and the year I spent at art school. Powell’s Books was where I bought Heidegger’s Being and Time in 1992 when visiting Portland in my twenties. Our store on NW 23rd Avenue brings it current – to our manager’s great enthusiasm for our brand, new customers who are learning about us for the first time, and a female customer who buys an entire work wardrobe for her new job in Portland the night I am there. Our Portland store is beautiful, clean and modern. Our rhizome network is growing. The root structure is in the air, and the new store is more of a graphed being, a hybrid of our older stores and our imagined future. This idea of stores as siblings, as distinct plants within the same genealogical tree is more modern and progressive than the replication approach. It enables us to collaborate with the neighborhood, and to make new geographic reference. Perhaps stores will enable us to metaphorically walk down two different gangplanks at the same time.