The Romance of Jack the Ripper

The Romance of Jack the Ripper

Article & some pics

By RUTH LA FERLA
Published: June 8, 2010

SOME girls will buy a cheap leather jacket and run it through the Maytag, or take a Brillo to a pristine pair of combat boots, roughing them up for that “I’ve seen action at Glastonbury” feel. Those girls are apt to be found haunting AllSaints Spitalfields, the British retail chain and purveyor of a romantically pre-aged look — all dun-colored bustle skirts, fatigued leather satchels and battered canvas boots that conjure a sepia-tone universe straight out of the gaslight era.


The AllSaints New York outpost on Lower Broadway, the latest, and largest, in this fast proliferating brand, was conceived, so it seems, as a showcase for the beat-up trappings of an early industrial age. Its exposed brick walls and wood-and-steel-beam floors, and signature rows of old sewing machines suggest nothing so much as an East London warehouse fallen into desuetude.

The store’s alluringly sinister aura is, in fact, a major selling point, a mood that has been faithfully replicated in most of the company’s 70-plus shops around the world. The plan is “to offer the same consistency, globally,” Paul McAdam, the chief executive of AllSaints North America, said in an interview. “We don’t tailor our offering for any specific store or population.”

What, after all, would be the point? Up to now, the company has prospered by forging an identity that is consistent, and distinctive, enough to virtually defy imitation.

Like the wares — men’s and women’s clothing, children’s wear and accessories — the ambience in this meandering space evokes the dour London of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper. Its artfully calibrated creepiness is of a piece with the brooding aesthetic embraced by the adherents of steampunk, the movement, the lifestyle — the brand.

Established in 1994 in Spitalfields, the Ripper’s hallowed stomping grounds, AllSaints thrives on paradox, having entered fashion’s mainstream by placing its stamp on a trend-averse marginal culture, one built on the fusion of modern technology and the crudely mechanized cosmos of the late Victorian age. Its offerings — voluminous dresses tucked and gathered every which way, as well as feathered brass chains and clockwork pendants that might have been plucked from a Cabinet of Wonders — exert a pull on those who shop as a form of cultural tourism or, in this instance, Wellsian time travel.

Browsing in this meandering emporium simultaneously evokes the past and a post-apocalyptic future — hence AllSaints’s scavenged-looking merchandise and scorched-earth palette. A similarly cheerless vein was mined as far back as the 1970s, by Vivienne Westwood, the doyenne of the British punk movement. Her renegade spirit seems to permeate a store awash in hourglass dresses, mutton-sleeve blouses and hobble skirts, their hems hitched up to show off shredded hose and gaiters.

That sensibility draws an ardent and often imaginative following. Visitors on opening weekend last month included a young woman with a fuzzy shoulder corsage that, on closer inspection, turned out to be a cluster of miniature teddy bears. Another had Gaga-esque bangs and a ribbon tattoo spiraling around her wrist.

The sales assistants, evidently hand-picked for their style sense and comeliness, are no less committed to AllSaints’ tough-and-tender ethos. “I quit my job to work here,” said one, who introduced herself as Rachel, and was swathed in a filmy tunic funked up with black leggings and chunky leather boots. “The brand is not wishy-washy,” she said. “It fits my aesthetic.”

It helps, of course, to be young. One visitor whose sylphlike days were long behind her was heard to grouse, “You really have to have a wasp waist to wear these clothes.”

Well, yes. A ballooning pansy-pattern skirt ($145); a black leather cutaway coat gussied up with soutache braiding ($500); and an white eyelet dress with a cardboard-like panel tucked inside its bodice, something like an Elizabethan stomacher ($350), had an appealingly vintage cast. But there was a catch. The pinched waistlines and snug-fitting contours seemed to have been engineered for a reedy Dickensian waif.

Undaunted, I wriggled into a shapely leather gamekeeper jacket ($400), only to be pointed, with infinite tact, to the next size up, a 12, the British equivalent of a 10 — and the company’s notion of a plus size. (At AllSaints, 14 is an extra large.)

A flapperish, mouse-colored tunic like the one Rachel modeled seemed promising but, on consideration, better suited to the daughters of my friends. I was tempted, if briefly, by a slinky black halter gown, suspended, with just the right amount of menace, from a leather harness.

On second thought, the shoes, displayed against a backdrop of worn wooden lasts, seemed more practical. In certain locations, including, perversely, Miami Beach, where flip-flops remain de rigueur, AllSaints can barely keep its stack-heel military boots ($260) in stock.

New York, in contrast, offers a heavy concentration of huaraches on five-inch heels; hybrid biker-and-combat boots with a surfeit of buckles and ties; and deck shoes incongruously tarted up with industrial zippers. Reader, I skipped them, settling instead on a pair of streamlined canvas jazz shoes ($180).

Laces? There were none — redundant, it seemed, in this retailer’s view. Just as well. Fumbling to tie them in my shopped-out condition would have been painful. And painfully uncool.

AllSaints Spitalfields

512 Broadway (between Spring and Broome Streets); (646) 862-1832.

AMBIENCE Dour by design. Steampunkers and latter-day Goths will feel properly at home in this time travelers’ universe.

SERVICE Sales assistants dress to impress, darting about in hobble skirts, multi-chain chokers and combat boots, dispensing wisdom as they go. Skip the sand-tone boots and go for the cream — “they’ll extend your legs,” one was heard to advise.

THE GOODS Westwood redux, all hourglass shapes, elaborate cowls and mutton sleeves.

Just looking at the pictures, I don't see "Jack the Ripper" in any of the clothes.