“Chicagoans are not renowned for their fashion sense at all,” says Evelyn Buckley-Browne, who hopes to open a store of local fashion designers’ wares in the weeks before Christmas. But she thinks we have potential. She remembers the early days of the Design Centre, an incubator and outlet for Irish designers that set up shop in her hometown of Dublin 20 years ago. Dubliners aren’t known for sartorial elan any more than we are, but that didn’t turn out to be an obstacle. “They had Irish woolens, they had crochet, they had linens, and really good quality, unique items. There was absolutely a great buzz about the whole thing,” Buckley-Browne says. “We’ve a lot of fashion shows in Dublin now, and it was that place that got it on the map.”
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Her new venture, she admits, was “a copycat idea,” modeled on the Dublin Design Centre. She knew there was no lack of local talent. “A lot of designers go to design school in Chicago and then they end up going to London, they end up going to New York,” she says. “Why go there when you’re going to be one of millions when you can stay here and be one of thousands?” Through business networking clubs she met the owners of local high-end clothing stores like Ikram and p45, who told her they wondered why someone hadn’t already opened a place like the one she was plotting. “They have to go to London to get fashion for their clients. I mean, that’s crazy,” Buckley-Browne says.
Last March, Buckley-Browne took out a classified ad in the Reader. “Budding fashion designers wanted,” it said, and listed her phone number. Those few words generated a lot of calls, but she had trouble finding designers who met all her standards. “Some, their product is not good enough. And some designers are fantastic but they don’t have the motivation,” she explains. “You get the personality but you don’t have the product. You get the product but don’t have the personality. In order to make this work, these people have to be all-round.”
Then, about seven weeks ago, Bangs and McNally, along with Jodi Ingham, another designer, left the group to open their own store, taking a lot of the other designers with them. The trio won’t specify what caused the split. “We were all in a position where we were running a business that wasn’t necessarily how we would want to do it,” says McNally. “It was just a bunch of little decisions.”
The competition doesn’t seem to worry either party much. “I think it’s good,” says McNally. “Because then all of a sudden people are going, What is this all about? What have we been missing out on?” Buckley-Browne predicts that “we’ll be fine.” Her designers are a mix, she says, so “students can shop there, and Lake Shore Drive people can shop there.”
