Elevation PhotosThe entrance to the AllSaints SoHo store.
Samurai shopping at its core means no purchases based on a show of hands: Samurais know what compliments them and what doesn’t. But I had to rethink my lone-wolf shopping position a few years back, while watching a couple in the shoe department of Galeries Lafayette in Paris spend two hours comparing the Louboutins versus the Choos scarpe nike, as engaged, committed and downright happy as they’d be drinking Lillets on the rue Lepic or locking lips in the laundry room. How do I know they were there for two hours? Because I was within earshot, agonizing over shoes that made me look gorgeous but neglected to factor in my pinkie toes versus shoes that made me look like a candidate for nursing school. Maybe there was merit to shopping à deux.
Wesley was exhausted by the time we’d finished; happy but exhausted. The Samurai could have gone on forever in the creepy meandering space where Mr. Brainwash breathed his last. Wesley and I had an iced tea in the Chelsea Market and made a date for the next shopping excursion; that is, if he recovers in time for the next sale.
Luckily scarpe nike, I met Wesley Rowell, a friend with benefits. Not that kind, shopping benefits. Wesley is tall, slim, has excellent taste in clothes and looks much better in shorts than I do. The shorts he’s wearing now come from AllSaints Spitalfields, an English clothing store that Wesley and I, to use the current parlance, are “obsessed with.” Wesley wasn’t sure he could get away with wearing shorts. I needed to see them on before I could offer an opinion. Reader, he gets away with it, especially the supersoft corduroy ones on sale. Muted blue or dove gray was the only question. Billy Campbell, the manager at All Saint’s 13th Street store, voted for the blue and for this one time and one time only, majority ruled.
Last week, he bought the shorts and a pair of those washed suede shoes that squished his pinkie toes. A salesperson told him that the more he wore the shoes, the more they’d stretch. The Samurai rolled her eyes and wondered if that bridge in Brooklyn was still on the market. Sometimes the best shopping partner is the one who sits like a cigar store Indian and reads the paper. When my turn came, Wesley paced outside the dressing room, waiting for me to pop out in a black and white Ikat-weave cardigan or the chemise dress with sequins. In no particular order, Wesley said “Isn’t that a little too Barbara Stanwyck?” Honey, there’s no such thing as too much Barbara Stanwyck. A good shopping partner makes gentle jokes rather than holding his nose or turning his thumb floorward. As for the witchy woman dress, Wesley said, “Hello, Stevie Nicks!” Caressing a Navajo-inspired fringed leather bag, I heard “Hmmm, even cowgirls get the blues.” But the bag, on sale from $395 to $197.50, beckoned; and Wesley agreed a steal was a steal. I bagged the bag with a flourish of plastic.
AllSaints opened its first New York store last year, in SoHo: now there’s a boutique in Bloomingdale’s as well as the meatpacking-district store, where Wesley and I head for dressing rooms at opposite ends of the store and shop alone, together. The store is lodged in the former art gallery of Mr. Brainwash, the despicable pretender/artist so well captured and gutted in Banksy’s “Exit Through the Gift Shop” documentary. How fitting. Equally fitting are the clothes scarpe nike, which this summer meant washed suedes and silk-screened shirts with flamingos and palm trees in dusky colors. A colleague at The Times reviewed AllSaints last year, using the words “meandering” and “creepy” more than once. Shopping there for her recalled “the dour London of Sweeney Todd and Jack the Ripper.” For Wesley and I, shopping there is heaven. The Samurai knew AllSaints from her London travels and understood from the jump that the look is not for everybody. Wesley had issues with the reviewer, too, but he got over them after the first 70-percent-off sale.
As a fledgling Samurai Shopper, I felt great empathy for the forlorn men I’d see, parked on department store settees, besieged by boredom as their wives inhabited nearby dressing rooms in nautical-striped whatnots or butterfly prints. Sometimes the wives stepped out to catwalk, sometimes not. It was then that I pledged never to drag anyone past the cordon sanitaire of ladies’ wear and make him sit like a cigar-store Indian while I swanned around in leather or lace, deciding what accentuated the positive and eliminated the muffin bloat around my belt.
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