Patience and Perseverance: 201 Mulberry is Finally Here
The age of COVID-19 has forced us to slow down and appreciate our material essentials in their purest most functional form. The longer we stayed home the more we were forced to focus on each detail of sameness in our material space. While the virus raged, every day was a groundhog day exercise. We started wearing the same sweatpants and old t-shirt daily, caring more about how the fabric felt on our skin more than anything else. The quality of each thing becomes more precious and imbued with meaning. Some of us started to feel the urge to nest and create a true sanctuary in our homes in ways we had never done before. For those who worked virtually, the home became a space of both work and rest, professionalism, and domesticity. Even as we all logged on more and attempted to continue living amongst each other in the digital realm, our desire to experience newness did not disappear. Whether we were entering new worlds through books, tv, film, and video games, it’s clear that we still yearn to exist outside of our alternating couch, kitchen table, and bed. Online sales surged during quarantine and it is evident that our desire for new things had not changed. Human beings are creatures of tactility and touch. When times are hard, we enjoy being transported out of life’s daily cycles.
O.N.S’s Mulberry Flagship is a refreshing disruption to today’s retail climate and its future beyond. Keeping up with our philosophy of comfortable, versatile everyday garments, we hope to bring new pleasures through dynamic store design, exceptional customer service and products made for lifetime comfort, and timeless modernity. We spared no details on pursuing our own ideas of hybridity in our store’s unique ease to meet urban with home, retail with events, and community with sustainability. Our new location in Nolita plants us directly into a democratic area of downtown that borders a diversity of neighborhoods. Our neighborhood and by extension, community connection is very important to us and as a result, our store design reflects exactly that ethos. Working again with our longtime Hong Kong-based collaborators, Collective Studio, we’ve transformed a previous garage space to a multi-dimensional retail experience that houses an Oak Room and The Stage. To execute, we called upon NY based architects, Tang Kawasaki Studio.
To emphasize our fluidity to the street, we’ve filled 2,700 sq/ft of the backspace with Aquaphalt, a 100% environmentally friendly, water-based material similar to asphalt without the toxic petroleum-based solvents. Facing the street is our Oak Room to draw window shoppers in with its soothing clean lines and minimalist design. Here, we house our mainline collection. Currently, our latest Fall/Winter Nocturnica Collection is on display. As you walk deeper into the store, skylights fill the space with natural light to make the shopping experience feel expansive and unrestrictive. Exotic and leafy plants pepper displays and hug sunsoaked corners. The backroom is what we call the Stage that houses independent brands such as George Cox shoes, Druthers socks, and Klattermusen to speak our ethos of discovery, and exploration that extends beyond the local to the global. Following our hybrid philosophy, the Stage will also function as an event space for exhibitions, pop-ups enabled by a Kvadrat designed elegant, obliquely cut curtain that falls as a movable soft wall and hovers at 100-ft long. To us, retail isn’t just about shopping, but an immersive lifestyle experience with endless opportunity for community gathering. Bringing a touch of comfortable domesticity and quality workmanship, our dressing rooms are built out with world-renowned Mutina ceramic blue tile, and the cash wrap is made from Facture Studio resin, made from a fine balance of color, gradient, and consistency, finished with an imperfect edge.
We were supposed to open in March of 2020 and COVID slowed our momentum but that did not stop us. During this trying time, we were able to step back and truly assess why our brand exists. As the way we view clothing and shopping shifts towards sustainability, slow-fashion, and experience-based physical retail, we hope that our new Flagship can inject new and meaningful energy into what clothing means to you as an extension of everyday life.
201 Mulberry St, New York, NY 10012
Phone: 212.966.8865
MON–SAT 11a–7p, SUN 12p–6p
Find out more information about the store: here
Words by: Sheenie Yip
Photography by: Eric Petschek
