D.C. fashion is better than you think
A conversation with Nancy Pearlstein, owner of the Georgetown institution Relish.
Welcome to a new series called “The Most Interesting Person in D.C.” I’ll be talking to notable figures in the city’s creative scene, because that’s what I personally find interesting. It’ll be fun and juicy even if you don’t live in D.C., I promise.
Do you know someone who I should interview for this series? Hit reply and tell me about them!
Washington, D.C., is a wonderful and vibrant city, but it’s not exactly awash in independent boutiques selling gorgeous, nuanced, and challenging clothing. Maybe I’m being unfair — I’ve only lived here a few years — but I have a pretty good nose for these things. And my nose has struggled.
This is why I was so excited to learn about Nancy Pearlstein’s Georgetown store Relish. Tucked away in a quaint little alley by the canal, Relish is filled with brands like Dries Van Noten, Auralee, Guidi, R13, Marni, and The Row. (Gorgeous, nuanced, challenging.) Pearlstein grew up in the retail business, and she’s been operating the store for over 20 years. She knows what her customers like to wear — and as she told me, D.C. locals are way less conservative and boring in their tastes than everyone assumes.
Pearlstein is the kind of person you want to encounter in a fancy store: funny and gregarious, with an irrepressible laugh and big, round glasses. She makes fashion seem fun and beautiful and slightly less intimidating than it might otherwise be. (Being a non-practicing Masshole myself, I’m also fond of her unmissable Boston accent.) On a sunny morning in October, she let me drop by Relish to pepper her with questions about D.C. style, her favorite restaurants, and how she’s survived in the tumultuous retail industry.
Here’s our conversation, edited for clarity and length.
Let’s start at the beginning. You’re not from D.C.
I’m from Brookline, a very nice little suburb of Boston. When I grew up, it was really kind of a cool time to live in Brookline. I’d take the streetcar and go into town. One of my favorite things to do when I was 16 years old was to go listen to music. Music venues had maybe 125 seats, and I would listen to Eric Clapton, or I would listen to someone that amazing. I was a wild child, so that was also part of the fun of it.
Were you very into music at that point in your life?
I was into boys. I was into anything boys were into. I was very into sports. That was really my passion and the love of my life. I loved gymnastics, tennis, and field hockey. Not so much school.
So what was your path to D.C.?
I went to the University of Colorado, where I studied partying. And skiing. I was gonna stay there because I had a boyfriend. I was gonna get married, and he was the guy I was gonna marry. But I didn't want to stay in Colorado, because as much as I loved it, I missed the East Coast. There's a certain energy on the East Coast, and a certain edginess that wasn't in Colorado. So I dragged my boyfriend back to Boston. He hated Boston. We split, and that was the end of that story. Once he left, my mother looked at me and said, “You need to find a job because you’re not living in this house.”
I went and I worked at Ann Taylor. That was the only job I could get at the time. I actually liked it a lot. In the meantime, my father owned a clothing store called Louis Boston. Have you ever heard of it?
I have. So retail is in your blood.
Retail is in my blood. My great-grandfather started the store. My father finally said to me, “Listen, if you want, why don't you come and work for us?” I had avoided it like the plague, because it's the family business, and I didn't want to do that. But then I said, “Okay.”
I started in the men's department, selling suits. I had no idea what the fuck I was doing at all, but what I'm really good at is listening to other people. So I started listening to these guys sell men's clothing — what they would say, how funny they were, how relaxed they were, and how they knew what they were talking about. I just wanted to be like that. I started becoming pretty good at it, and I enjoyed it. I did that for a while, and then I said to my father, “We need to open a women's shop within this store.” It was all men's at the time.
I grew the women's department to be 40% of the entire sales of the store, in one-ninetieth of the space. Then he said, “Now you have to come back and help me with the men’s.” He really educated me. He took me to fabric shows in Italy. I met all the big players in the fashion industry. I learned all about tailoring. He took me to factories. Most people don’t get that advantage, of course. I was very lucky.
That lasted for 15 years. My mother had been very sick, and she passed away. My father had a girlfriend at the time, so I went to my father and said, “Listen, I am not working for your girlfriend. I need some equity in this thing. I've been here for 15 years, and I can't stay unless you give me something. It can be 10%, but it needs to be something.” One of my customers was giving me this advice. Believe me, I wouldn't have known it myself.
He said no. I said, “Really?” And I left.
Was it a surprise that he said no?
This was at a time when, if I had been a man, he would have said yes. This is what irked me about the whole thing. I said to him, “If I was a man, would you have given me the job?” And he said, “Probably.”
Wow.
I was actually surprised because my father was a hip kind of guy. I was surprised that he was so narrow-minded about it. I was also surprised that he didn’t appreciate the work that I had done. I was very capable, and he didn’t trust that I was. Did he not trust that I was capable because I was a woman, or did he not trust that I was capable because he just didn’t trust me?
Or because you’re his kid, and he's always going to think of you as a kid…?
Maybe. I have no idea. So I left, and for three years I couldn't find a job. No one in the retail industry wanted to hire me because they thought that I would go back to my father, or that I was spoiled, or they didn't think I was that good.
I finally got a job at this store called Mark Shale, which is out of Chicago. They had nine stores. They were very conservative men's and women's clothing, and they hired me to be the general merchandise manager of the women's division, which is a pretty big job. I hated it so much. I hated everything about Chicago. It was just not a good fit for me at all.
After two years, I left, and I said to myself, I have got to just open my own store, because obviously, no one can stand me, I can't stand anybody else, and I need to do this on my own.
I looked around. I went to Aspen, I went to Santa Fe. I tried to figure out places that were secondary cities, but that were up-and-coming, where I could establish myself and maybe be successful. My brother was living here. He used to write for the Post.
What did he cover?
Business. He said, “Nancy, I know you don't like politics and you're not even remotely interested, but I do think there's a client here for you. I think you might be a little funkier than them, but you have the basis of tailoring. I think you might be good.” So I said, “All right, I’ll come and spend the weekend, and I’ll look around with you and see if we can find a space.” I came here, and there was a space in Chevy Chase.
Chevy Chase in D.C. or Maryland?
It was right over the border. It was diagonal to Saks. It’s where the drugstore is in the Barlow Building. Are you familiar?
My father-in-law’s office is in that building!
This guy had a store there, and he was closing. It was just the perfect space, the perfect thing. I'm the kind of person who says, “Okay, well, this has fallen into my lap, and therefore it must be right, and I'm gonna try it.”
The first three or four years were miserable. First of all, everybody kept telling me how conservative people were here. And that is just a fallacy. When I first opened, I said, “Okay, if everybody's so conservative, I'm gonna carry jackets, pants, suits, and blouses, but I'm going to do them in nice materials, and I'm going to do them in a menswear-y kind of way to make them better than what is being offered.”
The first year, I just bombed. No one was interested at all. A woman who has to dress like that doesn't want to spend a lot of money on that kind of wardrobe. They would rather spend less money on that and more money on something that's more exciting for them. After about a year of doing that, I said, “Okay, I'm just gonna buy what I like and what I want to buy, and fuck everybody else.”
One of the people that I’d bought at Louis was Dries Van Noten. I had a nice relationship with him. There were a couple of other people that I had bought at Louis that were generous enough to sell to me, give me nice terms, and make it so that I could possibly succeed. And that clicked. That clicked right away.
Once you started selling the brands and clothes you were really passionate about.
The women of Chevy Chase didn't want suits. They wanted fashion, and they wanted understated fashion. They wanted casual, nice clothing that — even if they didn’t work — would make them look professional. They didn’t want high style, nor did they want to look like they were going to work.
That’s a very specific slice.
Exactly, it’s a very specific slice. They took to it, and I took to them. It just started growing, and after nine years of being there and being pretty successful, this girl I knew came into the store and said, “Nancy, there’s a new area that’s opening up in Georgetown, and you are the perfect person to open a store there.” She was extremely persistent, to the point where I said, “Okay, already, I’ll go and look.”
Did she have a financial stake in it or something?
She knew the landlord. They were friendly, but she had no financial stake.
When did you move into this space?
It's like 23 years now.
I want to go back to what you said about the fallacy that people in D.C. just want boring, conservative, conventional clothes. Can you tell me more about that?
I waited on customers in Boston for 15 years, and I waited on customers in Chicago for two years. I felt like the Washingtonian woman, in general, was much better traveled and much more knowledgeable about the art of dressing in a kind of classic, chic way. In Boston, we had a very nice audience, and they were sophisticated — but the Washingtonian woman had a little bit more adventure to her. She had a little better taste.
The funny thing was, when I opened, the women who eventually became clients were like, “Oh my god, I’ve been looking for a place like this. I have to go to New York all the time because there’s nowhere around here.” And I kept saying to myself: Why didn’t somebody open this already, if this is the reaction I’m getting? It was almost like, instead of doing this understated thing — nice fabrics, nice tailoring — [D.C. retailers] would do more elaborate or showy things.
Honestly, I haven’t found a lot of clothing stores in D.C. that I’m really excited about.
There’s nothing.
I don't get it.
I don't understand it either. Listen, first of all, I think it's very hard nowadays to open a specialty store. You’d be an idiot to open a store right now. If I had to do it over again, believe me, this would not be the business idea.
But I think retailers think it’s a secondary market that’s not exciting, or the people are boring. They don’t realize that you have an international clientele. You have a constantly changing clientele. It doesn't get stale, it doesn't get staid, and you're always getting a new influx of personalities and people coming in.
Over the years, what designers have really resonated with D.C. folks? You mentioned Dries.
Dries resonated from the very beginning. He started as a menswear designer, so he’s more mens-y. His fabrics are more classic. He’s from a family that had a store, so he’s sensitive to that kind of thing, and he understands, as well as being a designer, what people really want and what they’ll accept. So I think that’s why he clicked.
Sacai does unbelievable here. All of the people that are successful in this store have classic roots. [Sacai designer Chitose Abe] has a very classic feeling. She takes classic ideas and puts a twist on them. I also buy Dries in a classic way — you can buy Dries in a million different ways.
And then we have Massimo Alba, which is a very classic menswear line. He also does women’s, and that does very well here. It’s more classic, but it’s not Brooks Brothers classic.
I want to drill down on the D.C. aesthetic you’re describing — that idea that your customers are adventurous but classic. What are some brands or pieces that you’ve sold that embody that sensibility?
This one is very interesting to me — D.C. women really relate to Yohji Yamamoto’s collection. Because for me, it's kind of funky. It can be very forward in its look. I was always a little timid to buy the collection, even though I like it, because I always thought, this is just too far out.
But in fact, there's something in that collection that grounds it and makes it relatable. Like, their jackets — if a woman comes in and wants a blazer, seven out of 10 times, they’ll buy the Yohji blazer. It’s fitted without being tight. It’s casual without being too casual. They like the fabric. They like the fact that it’s black. Black is a very big color in Washington, D.C. And even though it’s one of the more expensive lines in the store, it just seems that they’re drawn to that aesthetic.
Also, Yohji is the kind of thing that they can wear and they don’t feel like people will go, “Oh, you look so weird,” or “Oh, that’s Yohji.” It looks nice and elegant without being identifiable.
It seems like you were a little hesitant to check out D.C. when your brother suggested it to you. Can you tell me about the world that you’ve carved out for yourself here? Do you like it? I know that’s a weird question, but it’s also a real question.
I ask myself that quite a bit. I miss the ocean, of course. I miss skiing. You don’t have those things readily available. In that sense, when I first moved here, I was really kind of bummed out.
I'm not a brainiac, but I really love to talk to people here, because they are so smart. For me, that's a big plus. I really enjoy listening to them and what they have to say — whether I agree with them or not, it doesn't really matter. I’ve learned a lot.
I find the men to be a little disappointing, but that's okay.
Is that men, or is that D.C.?
I'm not quite sure. I can't answer that question. Maybe it's me.
I think the weather here is perfect. I think it’s a beautiful city. When I go to museums downtown and look around, I go, “This city is so beautiful.”
Like you were saying, retail has obviously gotten so much harder over the years. Has business been pretty steady for you, or were there moments where you weren’t certain you’d be able to survive?
We’ve had ups and downs, for sure. I have slumps before everybody else, and I recover from the slump before everybody else. My brother, when he was writing about business, he said, “You know, I can tell how the economy is doing from your business.”
Speaking of retail changes, do you do e-commerce at all?
I don't. First of all, I don't like e-commerce. I think it’s so boring. Secondly, I don’t think these clothes convey on the computer. There’s something so unromantic about it and unappealing to me that I just never did it. Which is why I’m not a millionaire.
I think that’s pretty rock and roll, though.
A lot of people find it really frustrating. They go, “Why don’t you have a website? I would buy so much more from you.” I’m sure that’s probably true. But I gotta come to work every day and enjoy it. And now I’m glad I didn’t do it, because I think it’s just trash. There’s no point of view, no romance, no nothing. It’s just product.
Did you ever think about opening a second location of Relish?
I've thought about it, and I find that when you start duplicating, it kind of dilutes the message and the energy. It becomes more of a business than a passion or something artistic in its scope. I didn’t want to lose that.
If you weren’t running Relish, what would you be doing?
I really don't know.
Ski instructor?
You know, I probably would have gotten married and had kids. Probably not had kids, but I probably would have gotten married.
One thing that drove me — and this is the truth, and it’s a lesson to be learned. When my father denied me that situation [with an ownership stake in his store], I said, “I have got to make my own money. I can’t rely on a man.” That’s what drove me. I wanted to have freedom of money.
Two more questions before we go. What’s your favorite restaurant in D.C.?
And what’s your advice for somebody who’s just moved to D.C.?
Be patient, because the reward is worth it.
Relish is located at 3312 Cady’s Alley in Georgetown. It’s on Instagram, but don’t even think about trying to shop it online.