In today's Thursday Styles, Critical Shopper Cintra Wilson has recovered from her Dolce & Gabbana intoxication and fled to the West Coast to file what we like to think of as a "vacation report" on the new San Francisco boutique, Carrots.
La Cintra is not amused.
We won't be able to visit Carrots ourselves to follow up any time soon, so we will have to trust her impression. She has a penchant for ascribing human personality to a store, if not to the individual items it holds, and in this boutique she find a bland, uninspired soul.
It's hard to say if Carrots is truly a second rate effort, or if Cintra is judging it by harsh New York standards. Not every city has the abundance of inventive stores that we have here, although we understand that the shopping in San Francisco (home of fabled stores like Wilkes Bashford, Gump's and the fondly remembered I. Magnin) is pretty damn good. Still, sometimes what we New Yorkers see as a fair to middling store can be received as a godsend in another city, while another city's crown jewel can become a presumptuous interloper when they migrate here. (Remember Louis,Boston on West 57th Street? Louis would like to forget it.) Of course, Carrots has been open for a scant few months, so perhaps it needs a season or two to develop a more definitive character. We have to wonder if MAC (Modern Appealing Clothing), the veteran San Francisco boutique she holds in comparison, was such a smooth running machine in its first few months. Is she being too hard on the produce heiresses who opened Carrots? We
can't help remembering how about 25 years ago, Carolina Herrera was
just some socialite who thought she was a designer. Maybe the store is just unoriginal and overdesigned, but a little research on line suggests that the rest of San Francisco appears to be thrilled with the new addition to the scene. Of course, every new shop is entitled to a stupid mistake or two,
I found a nice black dress by Alberta Ferretti ($1,450), and a nice black dress by Narciso Rodriguez ($995). There were also nice black dresses by Helmet [sic] Lang, but I fell asleep before I could price them.
Suddenly ... Eureka!
“I must try that on, or I’ll never be happy again!” I shrieked at a saleswoman, pointing at a strapless nine-pound cocktail dress made entirely of clear plastic gems
“Ooogh, I’m sorry, but you can’t. It’s not ours. We, like, rented it.”
My eyes rolled out of their sockets.
There's no reason to display clothes that you can't sell. This may be the moment when the tide turned for Carrots in Cintra's mind. As she has said, don't poke the cobra.
Critical Shopper - Carrots: Has Vitamin A. Needs a Martini. by Cintra Wilson (NYTimes)
Carrots 843 Montgomery Street, San Francisco
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