JON CARAMANICA GOES SHOPPING: Franco-Williamsburg Edition

In today's Critical Shopper column, Jon Caramanica eschews the obvious Holiday shopping, and instead heads for the sales at Sandro, but not at one of its several Manhattan locations. Instead he checks out the French chain's new Willliamsburg outpost. He makes the odd observation that France has the least imaginative clothes of the "fashion-minded" countries (Jean-Paul Gaultier might beg to differ, just for starters, but whatever). He seems to be referring to more prosaic, day-to-day clothes which, as presented at Sandro, are black, black, skinny and skinnier —which actually makes them perfect for Williamsburg, but perhaps not so promising for our Shopper.

And so Sandro presents a challenge of rigor: limited color palette, limited silhouette palette, limited attitude palette. There’s a type of character who would look effortlessly phenomenal in these clothes: Pete Doherty, Jenny Shimizu in her prime, vintage Bryan Ferry, Wiz Khalifa. Call them dismissive ectomorphs. The clean lines serve only to spiff up a bad attitude.

Yet what seems like disenchantment turns to some kind of begrudging admiration, especially at 30% off, and he walks away with shoes and a sweater. Even so, he recognized that the arrival of tony stores like Sandro are further transforming Williamsburg into something apart from the edgy bohemian neighborhood that attracted attention in the first place.

Critical Shopper: The New Skinny on Brooklyn By Jon Caramanica (NYTimes)
Sandro 65 North Sixth Street between Wythe & Kent Avenues, Brooklyn