IT was a look — and a phrase — that defined a generation of living rooms, and spawned an industry of knock-offs. And it enjoyed a long and fruitful run. So when Shabby Chic filed for bankruptcy last January after nearly 20 years in business, its creator, Rachel Ashwell, felt both anguish and humiliation, not to mention flat-out exhaustion.
Ms. Ashwell, who had just turned 50 and had already been blown sideways by the recent death of her mother, was soon presiding over the liquidation of 15 stores and the dismissal of her hand-picked teams of upholsterers and sewers, designers and salespeople. Afterward, she imagined she would be taking a well-deserved, if not exactly planned-for, rest. But it was not to be.
The woman who had made unlikely stars out of a giant squashy sofa and a baggy white slipcover — the decorating equivalent of a peasant blouse and worn jeans, a sartorial style that the very English Ms. Ashwell almost exclusively favors — was courted by a new partnership. And so it was that last month she found herself hurtling between New York, her home in Santa Monica and London, stocking three new stores with the chipped white furniture and blowsy upholstered pieces that had long been her trademark. So little time had elapsed between the liquidation and this ramping up that Ms. Ashwell’s Santa Monica storefront was still available, so technically only two of the three “new” stores would be housed in new real estate.
All of which prompts the question: what are the chances that a new business whose product and gestalt are based on a rather old — that is to say, two decades old — idea might find success in a still-punishing retail environment? To put it another way, does the big white couch still have legs?
In fact, late 2009 may be the prime moment for products that derive their energy from comfort, sensuality and the idea of hunkering down. For in many ways, 2009 is shaping up to look a lot like 1989.
Back then, when Ms. Ashwell, a newly divorced film stylist with two young children, opened her first store in Santa Monica, she filled it with flea-market furniture and reacquainted Americans with a particularly English idea, the slipcover. She certainly didn’t invent the look, but by exaggerating it — making the sofas bigger and the covers baggier — and branding it with the phrase “Shabby Chic,” Ms. Ashwell intuitively positioned herself in opposition to the buttoned-up decorating styles associated with the financial excesses of the 1980s and the subsequent recession, which was soon to be in full bloom.
With a style she likes to describe as “my mush” or “the beauty of imperfection,” she was marketing the sort of at-home comfort that would form the backdrop to what the futurist Faith Popcorn had called “cocooning” years earlier, the widespread response to those excesses.
Not that a Shabby Chic sofa came cheap, by any means, but it was an anti-decorating statement; it showed that you were culturally in touch enough to assume a laid-back style.
“She taught people that it was O.K. to be slightly messy,” said Marian McEvoy, a former editor in chief of Elle Décor and House Beautiful. “That you can have wrinkles and puckers and your cabbage roses can be tea-stained, and it’s O.K. because it’s your house, your family, your kids.”
In Ms. Ashwell’s own child-centric home, where she road-tested her products, sofas were used mostly as forts, while sheets were tents, she said, adding: “It was all about, ‘Is it washable?’ ”
From that laboratory came Shabby Chic’s best-selling sofa, covered in highly washable white denim.
Scale was also key. Shabby Chic sold enormous couches — at least 6 to 8 inches deeper, Ms. Ashwell said, than the norm back in those days — sensual, enveloping maws in which you could do just about anything. And for lanky celebrity clients like Jeff Goldblum and Warren Beatty, she said, she made them even bigger and longer.
Judith Regan, the publisher-turned-radio host who published five books of Ms. Ashwell’s after seeing her Santa Monica store, still has three Shabby Chic chairs and three sofas, one of which she uses as an office. “I just crawl into it with my laptop and papers,” she said recently.
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