Rachel Ashwell Living Room
Rachel Ashwell Living Room
Making Shabby Chic, Again
IT was a look — and a phrase — that defined a generation of living rooms, and spawned an industry of knock-offs. And it enjoyed a long and fruitful run. So when Shabby Chic filed for bankruptcy last January after nearly 20 years in business, its creator, Rachel Ashwell, felt both anguish and humiliation, not to mention flat-out exhaustion.
Ms. Ashwell, who had just turned 50 and had already been blown sideways by the recent death of her mother, was soon presiding over the liquidation of 15 stores and the dismissal of her hand-picked teams of upholsterers and sewers, designers and salespeople. Afterward, she imagined she would be taking a well-deserved, if not exactly planned-for, rest. But it was not to be.
The woman who had made unlikely stars out of a giant squashy sofa and a baggy white slipcover — the decorating equivalent of a peasant blouse and worn jeans, a sartorial style that the very English Ms. Ashwell almost exclusively favors — was courted by a new partnership. And so it was that last month she found herself hurtling between New York, her home in Santa Monica and London, stocking three new stores with the chipped white furniture and blowsy upholstered pieces that had long been her trademark. So little time had elapsed between the liquidation and this ramping up that Ms. Ashwell's Santa Monica storefront was still available, so technically only two of the three "new" stores would be housed in new real estate.
All of which prompts the question: what are the chances that a new business whose product and gestalt are based on a rather old — that is to say, two decades old — idea might find success in a still-punishing retail environment? To put it another way, does the big white couch still have legs?
In fact, late 2009 may be the prime moment for products that derive their energy from comfort, sensuality and the idea of hunkering down. For in many ways, 2009 is shaping up to look a lot like 1989.
Back then, when Ms. Ashwell, a newly divorced film stylist with two young children, opened her first store in Santa Monica, she filled it with flea-market furniture and reacquainted Americans with a particularly English idea, the slipcover. She certainly didn't invent the look, but by exaggerating it — making the sofas bigger and the covers baggier — and branding it with the phrase "Shabby Chic," Ms. Ashwell intuitively positioned herself in opposition to the buttoned-up decorating styles associated with the financial excesses of the 1980s and the subsequent recession, which was soon to be in full bloom.
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With a style she likes to describe as "my mush" or "the beauty of imperfection," she was marketing the sort of at-home comfort that would form the backdrop to what the futurist Faith Popcorn had called "cocooning" years earlier, the widespread response to those excesses.
Not that a Shabby Chic sofa came cheap, by any means, but it was an anti-decorating statement; it showed that you were culturally in touch enough to assume a laid-back style.
"She taught people that it was O.K. to be slightly messy," said Marian McEvoy, a former editor in chief of Elle Décor and House Beautiful. "That you can have wrinkles and puckers and your cabbage roses can be tea-stained, and it's O.K. because it's your house, your family, your kids."
In Ms. Ashwell's own child-centric home, where she road-tested her products, sofas were used mostly as forts, while sheets were tents, she said, adding: "It was all about, 'Is it washable?' "
From that laboratory came Shabby Chic's best-selling sofa, covered in highly washable white denim.
Scale was also key. Shabby Chic sold enormous couches — at least 6 to 8 inches deeper, Ms. Ashwell said, than the norm back in those days — sensual, enveloping maws in which you could do just about anything. And for lanky celebrity clients like Jeff Goldblum and Warren Beatty, she said, she made them even bigger and longer.
Judith Regan, the publisher-turned-radio host who published five books of Ms. Ashwell's after seeing her Santa Monica store, still has three Shabby Chic chairs and three sofas, one of which she uses as an office. "I just crawl into it with my laptop and papers," she said recently.
If Laura Ashley was for good girls, Shabby Chic was for bad girls. Or at least grown-up girls. Also, as Ms. McEvoy said: "She saved herself from being too twee with the big volume. I think bigger saved her from being another cutesy-pie on the block."
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By 1992, Ms. Ashwell's company and its signature product had been noted by the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its annual trend roundup for reintroducing the slipcover: "not the trim, well-fitting kind," the article read, "but sloppy, wrinkled ones dubbed 'Shabby Chic' by a California company of the same name." Soon, many furniture retailers were selling some version, and there were knock-offs like Washable Posh, a line of slipcovers made by Domain.
Time marched on — through a reprise of midcentury modernism and then a '30s- and '40s-inspired maximalism. But Ms. Ashwell's sweetly sensual brand held to its soft aesthetic course and kept growing. There were books filled with limpid images of unmade beds and sun-soaked kitchens, and of Ms. Ashwell, slight and lovely in her jeans and peasant blouses. There was a television show, and a vast range of products, from pajamas and bedding to matches and sachets.
At its peak, five years ago, Ms. Ashwell said, she had 6 stores and 250 wholesale accounts — which is to say, retailers other than Ms. Ashwell selling Shabby Chic products — and annual sales of about $20 million. In 2004, she was introduced to executives at Target, for which she developed a line of sheets, bath products and furniture called Simply Shabby Chic, which she still oversees. Then, nearly three years ago, a venture capital firm, Goode Partners, reached out to her, proposing an expansion that called for nearly 60 stores across the country — just as the economy was crashing.
It's hard to say how such a plan would have fared in another retail era, but the combination proved fatal, and after opening 9 new stores during an 18-month period beginning in 2007, Shabby Chic filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy early this year.
"There's no bad blood," she said of her relationship with her former business associates at Goode Partners. "The Goode guys were good guys. It was just timing." (David Oddi, a partner there, declined to be interviewed for this article.)
Wearied by the illness of her mother, who received a cancer diagnosis the previous August and died two months later, Ms. Ashwell poured her heart out on her blog. And an interesting thing happened: a fan base, in hundreds of comments from women who called themselves things like Shabby Chick or Cottage Flair or the Whispering Poppies, poured their hearts out right back.
"There will be new beginnings as well," Cashmere Librarian wrote, in a typical post on Ms. Ashwell's blog. "This economic hardship has hit all our families."
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"You've opened my eyes to the beauty of worn things," Kelly wrote. "There is much love surrounding you."
With the liquidation of the merchandise under way, Shabby Chic had one final asset to sell that clearly had some value: the name. Enter Brand Sense Partners, an investment and marketing company that is also branding a line of jeans with Sheryl Crow and apparel with Bravo's "Real Housewives" series. It joined with Ms. Ashwell to buy back the name and design what Ramez Toubassy, the company's president and now the chief executive officer of Shabby Chic, called "furniture for the high end of the middle market."
The business plan, he and Ms. Ashwell said, describes a line of lower-price upholstered pieces that will appear in furniture stores sometime next year. Her new flagship stores in Manhattan and Santa Monica (a third is to open in London early next year) have been conspicuously named Shabby Chic Couture, to differentiate their higher price point — the new $3,500 sofa, versus one that might sell for $1,500 — from the new line for other stores.
"We think Rachel has developed a signature style that is totally relevant in today's economy," Mr. Toubassy said recently. "It allows you to take what you already have and combine it with Shabby Chic products to really capture the Shabby Chic life. And that is a massively relevant thing in today's market, the idea that to get Shabby Chic in your home you don't have to buy a lot of things."
Warren Shoulberg, editor of Home Furnishings News, said he thinks the brand "has equity with customers."
"It was a very iconic look when it first came out, and it influenced a whole generation of retailers and customers," he said. "She's still very much identified with that look, and you either like it or you don't. I'm not quite sure as many people like it as used to. But maybe we've come full circle, as the more modern and streamlined look has peaked."
Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide PR, a global marketing agency, described Shabby Chic's psychographic space as "a safe place, a battening-down of the hatches."
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"It's also undressed, a bit free-form, the opposite of fit and toned, which is what we were when we were on top of things," she said. Those are ideas that might have particular traction right now, Ms. Salzman allowed, but she worried, too, that the name itself was dated.
Sally Singer, fashion news and features director of Vogue magazine, who lives in the Chelsea Hotel with her husband and three sons and a white denim Shabby Chic couch she bought seven years ago, agreed. "Anything-chic seems a bit retro now," she said. "But I'm not sure what replaces it. I guess it seems dated, too, because Shabby Chic as an idea is now the norm, from what Martha Stewart makes to John Derian. Everyone mixes in the flea market finds that have been weathered by the rains of Maine with the big white couch."
Ms. Ashwell's fans, of course, could care less if Shabby, as Ms. Ashwell calls her company, is "in" or "out." When Ms. Ashwell blogged about the opening of her New York store last month, Alison, an English retailer whose online boutique is called Vintage Amethyst, wrote enthusiastically, "Oh my goodness, so much prettiness here."
Felicity from Australia gushed: "Be still my heart!!! My (Mr.) Darcy chair is coming back!!! And I'm sure just like the original Mr. Darcy it will be as handsome as ever. Thank you, Thank you, Thank you."
And Ms. Regan recalled a recent encounter with another fan, Suzette Colette Cole, who runs the Bunny Ranch, a legal brothel in Carson City, Nev. (Ms. Cole's boss, the Bunny Ranch's owner, is a friend of Ms. Regan's.) "She was so excited to learn that I had been Rachel's publisher," Ms. Regan said. "Shabby Chic, that was her thing."
Reached by phone last week, Ms. Cole said she has all Ms. Ashwell's books and endeavors "to set my house just like them," with chandeliers, vintage French furniture and Shabby Chic sheets.
Decorating this way, she explained, is her refuge from the brothel business, which, unlike retailing, is booming. "It's a 24-hour business," she said. "I love my job, but I love to piddle at home and dream about going to Paris. I'm not married, I don't have a boyfriend, I have no kids, and I do like spending time at home."
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Is there deeper meaning in the blowsy form of a Shabby Chic sofa? Why does it resonate with so many different kinds of women?
Dr. Prudence L. Gourguechon, a practicing psychoanalyst and the president of the American Psychoanalytic Association, deemed the sofa's lines "regressive, as in the human tendency to go backwards developmentally, towards the comforts and pleasures of an earlier time," like comfort food — vanilla ice cream, for example. "It's white, it's escapist," she said.
"It would be interesting to track the rise of comfort-food restaurants," she continued, and the sales of white, squashy sofas, "against Standard & Poor."
In fact, in an article last December in The Wall Street Journal, Kay S. Hymowitz, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, proposed a corollary to the old hemline-to-economics ratio: "When the economy goes south, sofas go overstuffed," she wrote. "Prepare for the return of what anthropologist Grant McCracken calls 'homeyness.' "
That may be true, but as Mr. Shoulberg cautioned, the home furnishings business is tough now. "It's the first business to go into a recession," he said, "and the last to come out of it."
Jerry Epperson, a managing director of Mann, Armistead & Epperson, an investment banking firm that specializes in home furnishings, and the publisher of a newsletter about the business, said that while he was not familiar with Shabby Chic, he thought the "timing couldn't have been worse" to introduce a new furniture brand.
"Most in the home furnishings sector have cut back on both inventories and on advertising any new ideas or products, as dumb as that sounds," he said, "until after this horrible recession passes."
For her part, Ms. Ashwell acknowledged that a rest would have been nice, but "even though it was looking to the public like I was walking into the sunset, that was never the idea." Target, she points out, is its own business, undiminished or affected by her company's bankruptcy. And along with her "new" stores, and new business plan, she has a new book, "Shabby Chic Interiors: My Rooms, Treasures and Trinkets," a book that looks, well, pretty much like all her others: there are the same unmade beds and the same chipped white furniture, and there's Ms. Ashwell in her trademark blue jeans, looking not a day over 30.
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/15/garden/15shabby.html
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