Blushington Teams With Tucker by Gaby Basora for All-Day Trunk Show
UPTOWN GABFEST: Women buzzing by Blushington’s Upper East Side location Thursday had the added bonus of checking out spring styles from Tucker by Gaby Basora, and meeting the designer.
“The Sugar Detox” author Brooke Alpert was one of the 40 women who picked up a blouse during the all-day trunk show. Having gone from having a lot of wholesale accounts to being largely direct-to-customers, Basora said events such as the one at Blushington are “really great since people have been e-mailing inquiring where they might be able to try things on and feel the fabrics. We’ve been having a nice turnout doing little collaborations with people that we adore.”
As one brand owned by Resonance’s Lawrence D. Lenihan and Joseph Ferrara, Basora’s company is based in the West 28th Street building that once housed The Tunnel nightclub. The designer plans to use the facility’s bleacher seating for readings and other special events that will include a shopping element. With many people short on free time, it can be difficult to find time for both, Basora said.
Having recently attended a Women in Innovation Forum where BareMinerals’ founder Leslie Blodgett was among the speakers, Basora said, “It’s an interesting time right now with people trying to reinvent and to understand where the opportunities are.”
From an information standpoint, selling direct to consumers is so valuable, she said. That is not always the case with department stores where designers don’t have direct access to understand what individual customers may want from specific brands. “Sometimes there is a disconnect between what the buyer wants to assort for the floor and what the customer wants from your brand,” Basora said. “It’s nice that we can give them what they want in a much more natural way then, if you were getting that information secondhand.”
Known for unexpected collaborations, such as a short film featuring her designs on BMX bike riders, Basora hopes to stage a multisensory presentation with Amsterdam-based viola player Esther Apituley, whom she recently met with in New York. “She plays Bach, but she also performed a couple of modern pieces, including from one Dutch composer that was so profoundly haunting and beautiful. Now I would really like to take this composition and have Mark Morris or someone do the choreography and do the costumes with Tucker. That’s really the goal — to do some bigger projects that have a multisensory reach.”
As a sign of the increasing prevalence of co-branded shopping events, Blushington chief executive officer Natasha Cornstein had another retail commitment Thursday night at the Belstaff store.
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