The return of luxury fashion, Detroit designers react to Gucci store

Detroit — New York has Fifth Avenue, Los Angeles has Rodeo Drive and Paris has the Champs-Elysées. Detroit lacks such a luxury retail corridor, but the opening of a Gucci store this summer has raised hopes for the revival of high fashion businesses in the Motor City.

The trend-setting Italian brand, known for its high-end handbags, footwear and home decór, began welcoming shoppers to its new store on Library Street, near Woodward, on Aug. 19. The company said in a statement it was “thrilled to be one of the first global luxury brands to open in downtown Detroit.”

In addition, the McMullen luxury boutique, based in Oakland, California, and known for featuring and supporting Black designers, will open a six-month pop-up shop on Woodward Sept. 16.

The two new retailers offer tangible signs of rebirth for luxury fashion in Detroit, and designers and entrepreneurs say the industry has shown other signs that the city is a fertile market.

Among them: Bottega Veneta held its spring fashion show in Corktown, and the Council of Fashion Designers of America opened the Industrial Sewing and Innovation Center above Carhartt’s flagship store on Cass Avenue in 2018. Cassidy Tucker, the co-founder of Deviate, a Detroit-based emerging luxury brand, thinks Detroit is becoming a fashion city.

“These are all signals from major industry players … it presents this opportunity to really cement Detroit as a key player in the future of fashion,” Tucker said. “We have to just continue to highlight our creative talent that exists here … while also welcoming those larger industry players like Gucci.”

With the office market slowly returning to downtown and new residential developments picking up speed, Gucci’s arrival is a sign of confidence in Detroit, said Cindy Ciura, founder of the CC Consulting real estate consulting firm in Bloomfield Hills.

“It’s very unusual to hear of a luxury brand kind of going in alone,” she said. “They must have found out that … many of their customers were coming from Detroit and strategically, that’s why they placed the store there.”

Ciura, who has worked with the Ilitch family and the Schostak brothers on downtown Detroit development for two decades, said retail follows restaurants and entertainment.

Ciura said that 10-15 years ago, “The goal was to bring in more high-profile retail, and the challenge was the city of Detroit was still going through its growing pains and image problems. What was exciting about the last several years pre-COVID was that, I mean, Detroit had an amazing restaurant vibe.”

“All of a sudden, you saw Dan Gilbert putting all that retail along Woodward and you started seeing, you know, other areas of the city getting retail.”

Gucci’s opening comes, however, after a string of retail closures downtown this year, including Under Armour, Detroit is the New Black, and Madewell stores on Woodward. Earlier, in 2020, the high-end John Varvatos clothing shop on Woodward closed; the next year, a Greyson Clothiers store opened in its place.

Rebuilding a legacy

The last several decades saw the demise of Detroit’s once-thriving retail fashion industry, said Tracy Reese, a designer and Detroit native.

“When I was a child, my mom insisted on shopping in the city; there was a Saks 5th Avenue on Second,” Reese said. “And there were quite a few stores up and down Woodward, and she also shopped on Livernois on the Avenue of Fashion. … There were so many stores that had beautiful merchandise, luxury merchandise, good quality.”

There’s a market for high-end fashion in Detroit that’s waiting to be filled, unlike in cities such as New York and Chicago, said Gretchen Valade, owner of Eugenie boutique in the city’s West Village and director of sustainability for Carhartt.

“I think we have a lot of talent and a lot of designers here but in terms of retail, there’s room for opportunity,” Valade said.

Marlo Broughton, who helped found the Detroit Vs. Everybody brand with his cousin Tommey Walker Jr., said the city’s style and sense of fashion are under-used resources.

“I feel like in Detroit, we aren’t really seeing a lot of the authentic fashions and art that could actually come from Detroit because a lot of it is actually being catered to what is easy to be digested and also influence culture,” he said.

Detroit residents have always had a unique sense of style and an interest in shopping for upscale clothing and other goods, Reese said.

“It’s obvious that there’s a great appetite for luxury fashion here, and it’s a shame to only be able to access it in the suburbs,” she said. “I’m hoping that downtown becomes more of a destination for really great shopping because I want to keep my dollars in the city.”

‘One of the first’

Gucci’s downtown Detroit boutique is its second store in Michigan; the other is in the Somerset Collection mall in Troy. The median household income in that Oakland County suburb is $104,132, compared with $32,948 in Detroit, where about a third of the population lives below the poverty line, according to U.S. Census data.

The average price of a Gucci handbag is more than $1,000, and shirts can cost that much or more, leading some to wonder about the viability of high-fashion businesses in Detroit.

Reese is among those who think Gucci can be successful in downtown Detroit.

“I think Detroiters are already wearing Gucci sunglasses and Gucci shoes and accessories,” she said. “They might not be able to afford a $5,000 garment but they’re definitely accessing fragrance and glasses and entry-level price point items.”

Broughton expects the same demographic that shops at Somerset will go to Gucci in Detroit.

“You may have people who stay at the Shinola hotel go to the Gucci store,” he said. “I think there’ll be a lot more transplants and vacationers or staycationers at the Gucci store, more so than someone I know who takes the bus downtown to hang out.”

Vivianne Babajoz, a server at Vicente’s Cuban restaurant next door to Gucci, said the store will bring more customers to the restaurant. She said she visited the store and was impressed by its vintage atmosphere.

“I think it’s great, it’s bringing a lot of people obviously. There’s a ton of people in there shopping right now,” she said during an interview last Thursday. “I feel like we’ve gotten a pretty good amount of foot traffic just because people are walking by checking it out and then they stop in.”

Latonya Hudson was pleasantly surprised to find Gucci had opened downtown. She said the new boutique is chic and thinks it will do well considering it is near other developments such as the Hudson’s site.

“I think it’s really, really great. I think it’s going to start to open up the market for other luxury brands to come to the heart of Detroit,” the 49-year-old Detroit native said. “You know, they can say they’re one of the first.”

Gucci’s gradual entrance

The boutique isn’t Gucci’s first investment in the city. The luxury brand has supported students at Cass Tech High School, commissioned Jenn Nkiru’s “Black to Techno” film that celebrated Detroit art, and launched a capsule collection with Detroit Vs. Everybody.

Gucci’s collaboration with Detroit Vs. Everybody helped solidify the Vs. Everybody brand outside of the city, according to Broughton. He said the collaboration makes sense because street culture influences high fashion.

“As long as it’s tastefully done, I feel like it is good,” Broughton said. “The point where it’s kind of exploiting one side, to make it authentic for people who are buying into the culture, then that’s when it becomes a problem.”

The Gucci store opening was exciting for Valade, who said the retailer entered the market in a holistic way.

“They didn’t just appear one day,” she said. “I think that for a luxury brand to come into the city of Detroit, it can’t be transactional, it needs to be purposeful and be bigger and better than just a retail store.”

McMullen’s pop-up opening this month will add to the variety of high-fashion clothing available to Detroit shoppers.

The outlet “will be a multi-brand store … introducing Detroiters to a lot of emerging designers and other European brands and U.S. brands,” Reese said.

The company’s owner, designer Sherri McMullen, called Detroit “a city much like Oakland, with a rich history and culture and generally underrepresented in the fashion industry.”

“We look forward to tapping into the city’s arts, entertainment and food scene and engaging in meaningful conversations with the Detroit community,” she said in a press release.

For Detroit to continue to move up in the fashion industry, large luxury players need to be physically present and support local design education and training, Tucker said.

Awenate Cobbina, CEO of Bedrock Manufacturing Co., said the success of the company’s Shinola luxury watch brand demonstrates the appetite for distinctive lifestyle offerings in Detroit.

“The city is hungry for a mix of world-class retailers and fashion labels, as well as experiences that are unique to Detroit and the surrounding communities,” Cobbina said. “We need more brands willing to expand here, whether it be new storefronts, manufacturing or other operations.”

hmackay@detroitnews.com

Twitter: @hmackayDN

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