Juicy Couture Saturates Manhattan: There Goes the Neighborhood

Juicy Couture is starting to remind us of Megg, that contestant on the last season of America's Next Top Model. For those few of you who don't watch the show, she was a striking brunette who was saddled with unfortunate, voluminous hair extensions that got rattier looking as the season wore on. Good natured Megg had a habit of breaking into a crooked smile and shouting "Rock and roll!" whenever anything made her happy. She was endearing, and a little odd, but you knew she would never make it to the end. Eventually the show broke her down, forcing her to pose as a bearded lady in one of their contrived photo shoots.  Juicy Couture started as a  niche T-shirt and denim collection, then morphed into a velour tracksuit phenomenon, and now thanks to Liz Claiborne Inc. has evolve into a major Contemporary "lifestyle" brand that is poised to go huge, screaming "Rock and roll" all the way. They have opened three high-profile stores in Manhattan in a scant eight months including the one that opened today on Bleecker Street in the former home of the nightclub Hue. This third and final branch in the brand's New York strategy is the largest of the three, and the first one to carry the company's complete product assortment including menswear and a new children's line.

The 3,500 square foot shop has a relatively big street level for Bleecker, where they focus on accessories and the big-ticket Couture Couture collection, but it's the spacious, skylit lower level that sets it apart from its neighbors, easily making it the biggest store on the chic end of the street. Having seen the other two stores leading up to this one, Juicy's California Rock Chic aesthetic is starting to look more than a little pre-fab. The mostly bright and preppy spring collection collection is housed in yet another darkly painted store decorated with chola-girl Gothic graffiti, as if to say, "We are really rock and roll even if you're looking at one of our frilly pink tops." We must admit that the men's collection continues to look better, but isn't it time to say goodbye to gothic printed t-shirts? And is naming your new low and narrow jeans model "Mick" just a little heavy handed? ("Mick? You mean like Jagger? They must be coooool.") Our world-weary little mind reels. It is also the first really large, corporately run store to have opened on the formerly charming shopping row. Even Ralph Lauren's series of cramped shops are too small to pull major traffic, and Abercrombie's Ruehl accessories store is barely bigger than a closet. Juicy is bigger than anything else there including both Marc Jacobs stores combined, and while Hue added little to the street except for a brief period of velvet rope snobbery, we can't help lamenting that the balance has tipped, and Bleecker is finally finished. We can illustrate this with a snippet we overheard of one of the store's neighbors visiting the new staff and discussing the sort of traffic they can expect. "It's pretty quiet on weekdays," she said, "but on weekends it gets really busy when 'The Sex and the City' tour comes through." Now we can sit and watch as the Meatpacking District gets run into the ground next.