May 21, 2008

Simply Irresistible
 

LONG before she became one half of the most knocked-off fashion label you have probably never heard of, Dana Foley was an aspiring playwright on the Lower East Side of Manhattan who used to avoid writing by shopping.

Given that there was not much money to be made by procrastinating, and that Ms. Foley had two children to feed, she often sold things at flea markets to buy more time to write. But then she would buy new clothes instead. So one day, about 12 years ago, Ms. Foley, a boho believer with rock-star hair, decided to be more resourceful and make a skirt for herself — a long, tight, sexy knit tube that she dyed in the kitchen sink.

“I avoided myself right into a new career,” she said. “I can’t make a pattern and I can’t sew, but I love clothes more than some things, more than lots of things.”

With the help of a friend who could manage a needle and thread, Ms. Foley made more skirts and put them on a table at the old flea market on Avenue of the Americas in Chelsea. The first day, she made $2,000. The kitchen became a factory. “My kids were sitting there eating pizza in a sea of organza,” she said. “I was making money for no good reason. If I had chosen this profession, I would probably still be, whatever, writing.”

Meanwhile, Anna Corinna, the future other half of the label, hated her job. Having majored in psychology at New York University, she was hired, upon graduation in 1995, as a receptionist at a shoe showroom in Trump Tower. That job did not pay well, either, so Ms. Corinna tried selling vintage clothes at the same flea market.

She arrived on weekend mornings with a big pile of whatever she thought looked interesting, like acrylic knit ponchos she bought from a closeout sale and resold for $35 to $45. Other dealers worried whether she would fit in selling such clothes, until Donna Karan, Anna Sui and other designers started shopping at Ms. Corinna’s booth. Ms. Foley was a customer, too, and as the two women became friends, they realized they had more in common than their vintage bohemian style and decided to merge their operations into one, called Foley & Corinna.

“Even though we were doing different things, our aesthetics were similar,” Ms. Corinna said. “It totally went together.”

In many regards, the story of how Ms. Foley and Ms. Corinna turned a flea-market friendship into a fashion company that now has $20 million in annual retail sales is uncommon. Neither one knew much about the mechanics of design or, for that matter, business. They have never been prominently profiled in Vogue or Elle, nor have they sought the Bryant Park runways. But Ms. Corinna has an eye for vintage fashion, and Ms. Foley is intuitive about how to make new versions of those styles for modern women. For those reasons customers — and knockoff artists — have sought them out.

Perhaps because Ms. Foley and Ms. Corinna have been content to remain just under the radar, companies that specialize in making cheap copies of designer fashion have been bold in appropriating their designs.

Last year, the retailer Forever 21 prominently displayed a $40 copy of a Foley & Corinna $400 floral print dress, which Paris Hilton had worn on the “Late Show With David Letterman.” The copy was so exact that a group of designers who were seeking copyright protection from Congress used it as an example of the pervasiveness of fashion piracy. Foley & Corinna’s signature City Tote handbag, a foldover style with a curved handle, also inspired copies. And a style of pants with a sewn-in belt appeared at Urban Outfitters within six months.

“We would kick people out of the store who we knew were knocking us off,” Ms. Foley said. “One guy spit at Anna’s feet when she wouldn’t let him buy a dress. He said, ‘But I could copy Marc Jacobs!’ — like it was a compliment.”

As bloggers on Fashionista.com and Counterfeitchic.com have helped uncover how much Foley & Corinna looks are being copied, the two women have found themselves pulled reluctantly into the industry debate over imitations. Indeed, as the Council of Fashion Designers of America lobbies for legislation to protect designs, the campaign has courted controversy — mostly because some designers have contested the notion that a dress or a handbag can be protected as original. Ms. Foley and Ms. Corinna, having seen their work in “splurge versus steal” magazine features, said they were uncomfortable being portrayed as victims.

“People who don’t necessarily know us, when they hear of Foley & Corinna, they say, ‘Oh, they’re the ones who always get knocked off,’ ” Ms. Foley said. “They are not saying, ‘They are the ones with the most amazing ideas.’ That’s not the sentence.”

One could wonder, though, whether the copies have made more people aware of Foley & Corinna’s existence, even driving shoppers to see what the fuss is about. But Ms. Foley said that those shoppers would still prefer to pay $12 for a copied handbag than $400 to $800 for the original. And after the floral dress at Forever 21 was publicized, some customers returned the originals.

“This is the downside of being successful but relatively unknown,” said Susan Scafidi, a visiting professor at Fordham Law School and the author of the Counterfeitchic.com blog. “If you bite a well-known brand, you get caught very easily. If you bite a couple of sweet girls on the Lower East Side, how many people will notice?”

In 1999, around the time that Ms. Foley and Ms. Corinna thought of opening a store, they had their first knockoff experience. Ms. Foley was selling what you might call T-shirts at the flea market. She had taken her children’s old soccer jerseys, cut them up and crudely stitched them back together into fitted halter tops, with the seams showing on the outside. They were so popular that Ms. Foley started making them for a few stores, “until the stores realized they could make them for themselves for less.” Before she knew it, the reconstructed sports T-shirts were everywhere that summer.

Ms. Foley realized that if they did not give their company a sense of establishment by opening a store, and if they did not begin to wholesale their collections more seriously, no one would perceive Foley & Corinna as more than an incubator for other designers.

So, when a landlord called to say that a former butcher’s shop at 108 Stanton Street had become available, Ms. Corinna rushed to sign the lease. The rent was about $3,500 a month, and there were constant expenses for upkeep, but she said they did not want to take out a loan or seek investors. The store, she said, worked for them — it was cheap, though for a reason. “We could hear the rats running across the ceiling like cavalry sometimes,” Ms. Foley said. “And we just put the music louder.” (They have since moved to 114 Stanton Street.) During their first year, Foley & Corinna sold $500,000 worth of clothes, a remarkable haul thanks, in part, to Ms. Corinna’s vintage business.

That business thrives because most designers take ideas from the past, especially from vintage clothes, a fact that does not help the cause for copyright protection. Designers often send memos, for example, to vintage dealers describing what they are looking for each season, and so Ms. Foley and Ms. Corinna usually knew what trends were going to turn up. They also saw how women gravitated to certain pieces in the store, but never bought them because the fits were outdated.

“They were seeing something cool in it,” Ms. Foley said. “What is it?”

The idea for the City Tote happened when a customer admired a tiny vintage foldover bag Ms. Corinna had unpacked. She decided not to sell it. Instead, she realized she could enlarge the bag and add a pocket and the handle, with knots at both ends. Foley & Corinna sells more than 1,000 of the bags each month.

After the neighborhood, the fashion girls and the celebrities discovered Foley & Corinna, with its velvet chairs and chinoiserie wallpaper, Bloomingdale’s, Saks Fifth Avenue and Henri Bendel began to pick up the collection. Heidi Klum, the host of “Project Runway,” wore the label on the show; her stylist told Ms. Corinna that she was Ms. Klum’s “favorite unknown designer.”

Stephanie Solomon, the women’s fashion director at Bloomingdale’s, said the line was so popular that it sometimes sold completely off the floor. Last week, there was just one blouse left in the 59th Street store.

Two years ago, when their sales entered the millions, Ms. Foley and Ms. Corinna decided to take their business more seriously. They opened a store on Melrose Avenue in West Hollywood, Calif., last year and began to scout for locations on Madison Avenue. They also hired a director of operations, retained a publicist to wrangle more celebrities into their clothes and moved their offices from the back room of the store to a showroom in Chelsea.

“We had all these things — we had this idea of being funky girls, we don’t knock anyone off, we try to have original ideas, we had a store, we had a wholesale business — so I started thinking, don’t be an idiot,” Ms. Foley said. “We would really be dumb not to take this business and tie a bow around it.”

The point, Ms. Corinna said, was to become known as something more than the company everyone copies. If they are successful, they may be able to revive some old dreams. Ms. Corinna, for one, has other business ideas and wants to spend more time with her son.

And Ms. Foley would like to buy a theater and try writing again. Of course, she will need to do some shopping first.