Lena Dunham on the Retail That Raised Her

Walking down memory lane with the 'Girls' creator and author of 'Famesick.'

I can’t believe I’m saying this, but the one and only Lena Dunham wrote a guest post for Shop Rat this week!!! Ahhhh! ICYMI, she just published a new book, Famesick, and is currently on tour, with a stop at BAM in Brooklyn tonight. If you enjoy reading her Substack, Good Thing Going, as I do, I’m sure you’ll also devour her memoir, which she worked on for seven years and is a collection of essays on fame, sex, illness, and the messiness in between. I’m beyond honored to publish this letter she wrote about the stores she loved visiting in Soho, where she grew up. The mention of Blimpie’s subs brought a tear to my eye. I also lol’ed at the line about agnès b. snaps at pickup and gasped at the Mystique Boutique discount. Plus, she gets the final word on CBK’s style. Enjoy! — Emilia

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When I grew up in Soho, boutiques were few and far between.

You could go down to Century 21 for an imperfect Jean Paul Gaultier on sale (I spent so much time in that dressing room trying to ignore all the boobs that were not my own). You could make your way up to 8th Street for neon club wear and Pleaser heels. But on our block—Broadway between Prince and Spring—we had Hasidic men wholesaling shoes and stockings, a Blimpie’s sub shop on the corner, and a stationery store on our ground floor that I loved because they gave me the defective stamps to lick and had off-brand Precious Moments figurines. I also loved the porn video store where they sold 50-cent plastic babies that came in clear eggs and smelled like baby powder, and the “$10 Shop,” where I got the sepia, crushed velvet long-sleeved top I wore to my first boy/girl dance with off-brand Docs and Wranglers.

KIDZ, a Tribeca children’s clothing store, sold largely deadstock. Those sample sales made Century 21 (or “Cench” as my mother and aunts called it) look chill. Ladies punched each other there—and over Kenneth Cole! When it closed, founder West Murray started her own perfect children’s line, IZZY, with Dolly Meckler’s mom, Jackie Shapiro. They made power-clashing harlequin dresses, mini-circle shirts with fat paillettes, and faux-fur floral winter coats with a Connor Ives feel.

IZZY forever! I still have this…

From the agnès b. kids sample sale.

This dress was a gift from Ileana Sonnabend, my father’s art dealer at the time. It was the most expensive kids' item my mother had ever encountered, and I wore it as a flower girl in my Uncle Jack’s wedding at the Old Lyme Church. Socks and German sandals courtesy of knowing a lot of women who loved to scrunch.

From a dance supply store with an “Everything Must Go” sign. Yes, I wore it to school. The difference between my aesthetic and my parents' mid-century taste was already rearing its head.

My mother bought a lot of boys’ suits for her dummies at Daffy’s (another discount haven), and then I reaped the benefits. Ah, to share clothes with a dummy!

Our version of CBK casual. I’d wear the fuck out of both our looks (and even baby bro’s).

Lounging with my still-very-chic friend, Genevieve Hudson-Price. (Check out her jewelry line Blue Morpho!) Her family kept doves in an antique brass aviary in their kitchen, and her room had a Moroccan tent. I’m definitely wearing her clothes here while we play-act being stressed working women on a relaxing vacation.

I’ve always loved stores. It’s not about the shopping, although shopping is really fun. It’s about the chance to enter someone else’s mind for a moment—a curated space where time stops and, in the best-case scenarios, life looks a little more like you hoped it would. It’s the same way I feel when I enter a wonderfully production-designed set and notice all the thoughtful details that set decorators have added: for a moment, I’m not me.

For a while, Soho was full of artists and not yet full of commerce. But there was a brief moment in time—before Victoria’s Secret, Sephora, and H&M appeared on our block, but after the Cuban-Chinese diner left—when it was the single most cutting-edge place in retail. We had the holy trinity of Comme des Garçons, Yohji Yamamoto, and Issey Miyake.

The Comme store in 1994. Try understanding this as an 8-year-old. But also, perhaps you understand it better that way! (Credit: Archived.)

We had Marc Jacobs’ first spot. (This Instagram account makes me woozy with nostalgia!) There, my mother bonded so intensely with shop girl Stacey Battat—now an iconic costume designer who collaborates closely with Sofia Coppola and who also did the pilot of Girls—that she’d leave my brother there while she ran errands and he’d finish his algebra as the cool kids who worked there busied themselves trying XXS waffle knit cashmere on him and gave him a little pale green leather driving cap. (This was the vibe, but imagine pistachio ice cream.) Once, I saw Miss Sofia there and told her I was writing a play and also that I loved Milkfed, oh G-D! My mom had gone to Japan for work and brought me back a Milkfed leopard boat neck in this exact key, but it was angora, so I couldn’t wear it without major sensory issues. (A fight about angora is a theme in our relationship.)

What else? There was the palpable, fairly ket-y contact high from passing Patricia Field’s demented neon haven, Hotel Venus.

Inside Hotel Venus. (Credit: Village Preservation/Harper’s Bazaar.)

Supreme didn’t yet have lines, just actual skaters scattered around looking sort of dumbfounded and hot all day. (I went out of my way to pass them en route home from school.)

Supreme on Lafayette Street in 1995. (Credit: Sue Kwon.)

Hot people doing hot people stuff. (Credit: ESPN Films.)

Agnès b. opened her first U.S. store in Soho before Soho was fully Soho, which resulted in every kid at my preschool grabbing the wrong mother’s pair of legs at pickup, since they were all wearing either black cotton leggings, stiff, high-waisted jeans, or men’s khakis with a pleat, combined with a white tee and the iconic snap sweater.

Everything old is new again— this could literally be my mother in 1993. (Credit: thefrench.com.)

Not everyone was pushing a stroller. There were lofts full of gallery girls and fabulous people who had time for midday drinks outside Fanelli Cafe and would probably now be influencers, but back then were just druggy and sexy. They came not necessarily for the still-affordable rent, but to surf a vibe. (Carolyn Bessette famously said that, upon moving uptown, she was desperately homesick: “I used to step over drunks and crack dealers to get to my apartment. Everybody at Calvin thought I was crazy, but I couldn’t imagine coming to New York and living anywhere else.”)

Carolyn was a decidedly uptown girl, wardrobe-wise (are we ready to continue having a circular discussion about minimalism for the next six months!? I’m not, but that’s alright.) Meanwhile, in Soho, Daryl K and X-girl catered to the It-girls who leaned more toward a Brutalist barfly.

Entering most of these stores, which held no more than a few circumspect browsers at once, had a similar effect to dropping your lunch tray in front of the cool kids’ table mid-convo. The average salesperson’s “Can I help you?” was not the chirp of someone so desperate for commission that they’ll tell you how great you look in a marabou fedora. It was the acid “Can I help you?” that you’d deliver to a pervert you suspect of upskirting you on the train. (It’s why the SNL Jeffrey’s sketches will always be my favorite. Once, a salesman at Jeffrey’s complimented my mother’s double-layer wool coat from the latest Isaac Mizrahi collection (she traded with him for art). “Thank you,” she said. “It’s the warmest one I have!” He looked her up and down and snapped: “Then you must not have very many coats.”)

Face Stockholm was the first place I saw pastel nail polish. Once a week, we’d go to the store, and I’d paint every nail a different color, then let them air dry as we walked home.

My mother was good at letting me get inspired—with Prada, Anna Sui, Betsey Johnson—then guiding me toward what we could afford. At Canal Jeans, we bought vintage army pants from a huge canvas bin, a shrunken Bubblegum Jeans denim jacket, a shredded prom dress in grimy violet, and a blue angora shrug to match.

Losing my first tooth in a faux Missoni cotton knit that feels very Eckhaus Latta. The headband was angora, a fabric my mother deemed chic and that gave me hives.

In my tween years—that vast wasteland where personal style goes out the window in favor of something more like camouflage—my mother’s once-inspiring choices were starting to make me feel like a freak.

Who cares if plaid leggings and a hip-skimming terry tunic top with brogues are fabulous for a woman going to the Union Square farmer’s market, then off to drinks?

Well, you can’t say my mother was asking me to do anything she wouldn’t! The family that wears patterned leggings together stays together.

Anyway, I just wanted to be cool, hot, and normal. I was no longer interested in my father using his new sewing machine to attempt a three-armed jacket modeled after Comme (even though he did make me a sick blue silk mermaid tail that tied around my waist and extended out behind me).

No more Laura Ashley nightgown with a scratchy French wool jacket and a yellow revolutionary’s beret!

In a nasty little mood. “I’ve never even been to Nova Scotia! This Film Forum hat is bullshit!”

My plan was simple: use some Sun-In, get a bob, and get a life.

Also, get a sheer daisy blouse from the $10 Store and wear it over a tank from The Limited Too at the Paramus Mall, which I thought was a chic retail haven on par with the Paris flea.

But the trouble with trying to be cool is that it only makes you less cool. People smell it on you: a sticky desperation that repulses girls who are native to spaghetti straps.

My parents dropping me off for my first summer at camp. We only had one day to prove ourselves before the uniforms. It was all girls, but we know girls are scarier than boys, so I planned it to a T: I insisted on dying my hair brown because of a group of girls named Rachel. Everything else was from the final Delia’s catalogue of the year, where they slashed prices, and you had to make do with a too-big tank by knotting the shoulders. I love how my mother has been wearing a white shirt and sunglasses for 30 years at this point, and she’s just like, “Fine, do whatever, you’ll get it eventually.”

By the time I was in the double digits, our block had a Dean & Deluca (you know, where Felicity worked), a Sephora, a Victoria’s Secret, a Steve Madden, and countless other fast fashion repositories. My father started calling it “the mall of the Americas” and timing his exits and entries around when stores would close. (He worked downstairs, so sometimes he found himself not going out for days, lest he be bumped into by a group of giggling sorority sisters on a spree, smelling like Vicky’s Secret vanilla body spray.)

We put the apartment up for sale. My mother, whose wave of friends set the tone for what was to come but couldn’t stand to stick around and see it through, had been in the loft since 1971. She ended up raising a family in the no-stove, no-heat, hundred-dollar-a-month spot she moved into after college—hard to imagine in our current New York, when most first apartments don’t have room for a shoe rack. Somewhere along the way, she was offered a chance to buy the loft from the city, at a price too gasp-worthy to name but considerably less than a Demna shearling coat.

But before we went, the stationery store was replaced by the embodiment of all I wanted to be: Mystique Boutique.

Full of Z Cavaricci jeans, three-quarter-length-sleeve polyester V-necks, lamé halter tops, and feathered tube skirts, it was heaven to anyone who loved Clueless and was, in fact, clueless.

Because we had to leave for three days to the Chinatown Holiday Inn while Mystique Boutique laminated its floors with a toxic substance (so fun; dim sum breakfast and we watched Mrs. Doubtfire in bed) and because we had to tolerate their thumping club soundtrack from 10 am to 7 pm, six days a week, they gave us a perma-50% off discount that might as well have been the keys to the city. I started seventh grade at a new school wearing stretch flares, a baby tee with an iridescent bug on it, and a pair of imitation Steve Madden stretch platforms from Payless. I had highlights and hoops. I had been planning it all summer. But it’s hard to avoid yourself. It’s not that easy to keep up a facade. I’d be terrible on Traitors!

We moved to Brooklyn. I started wearing plaid again, usually with leopard. Wherever you go, there you are.

Recently, my brother and I realized we’d been having the same dream: That we go back to 547 Broadway and the stationery store is still there. They have a key for us at the cash register. The block is quiet except for some men loading suspicious produce into Blimpie’s. We go upstairs and crawl to the back of the loft, where you never could tell if it was night or day, and fall into a dreamless sleep. (In one of my dreams, I had to evict the Olsen twins, but he hasn’t run into them so far; it’s not full-on telepathy tapes.)

Sometimes I look up the loft on Zillow and scoff at the price of the last transaction. Sometimes, instead of counting sheep, I go to bed visualizing the block during any given year—‘89, ‘93, ‘98—and try to remember every single store, right where it was.

— Lena

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