Before Steven Alan became a designer known for his stylishly rumpled button-up shirts, he was a merchant known for his eye.
Mr. Alan opened his first store in 1994, on Wooster Street in SoHo. He stocked that 500-square-foot space with vintage jewelry, Casio watches imported from Japan and Ugg boots (before they were popularized by the likes of Oprah Winfrey and Paris Hilton). He later added apparel from buzzy brands — Daryl K, Built by Wendy and Sofia Coppola’s Milk Fed among them — before starting a namesake clothing line and opening more stores in New York City, across the country and abroad.
At its peak, Mr. Alan’s domestic retail footprint included about two dozen stores, the majority of which he opened after a private equity firm invested in his business. But in 2019 he closed all his U.S. locations. Overseeing them while designing his own clothes and sourcing other makers’ items to sell became too “difficult for me to manage,” Mr. Alan said, adding that it got to the point where he would have had to sell more equity in his business to make a profit.
This month Mr. Alan, 58, is trying a sort of do-over with the opening of a new 500-square-foot store. The shop, on West 20th Street in Chelsea, joins the five other Steven Alan stores still in operation in Japan and South Korea.
Like his original shop on Wooster Street, Mr. Alan’s just-opened store carries a tight assortment of products he loves: vintage jewelry and watches, tubular T-shirts from the German brand Merz b. Schwanen, leather footwear from the Aurora Shoe Company. And, of course, items from Mr. Alan’s label, including his “reverse seam” collared shirts — named so because the internal seam is on the outside — which, in the late 2000s and early 2010s, found a customer base in bespectacled creative directors and Brooklyn dads alike.
Back then, it was not uncommon for a certain type of New Yorker — creative, stylish, but not too pretentious — to wear entire outfits bought at a Steven Alan store: a reverse seam shirt in a check print with, say, white Common Projects sneakers and jeans from Acne Studios, a brand Mr. Alan sold back when it was known as Acne Jeans.
Scott Trattner, a creative director at Airbnb, said the reverse seam shirts “felt, in a way, California.” (Mr. Alan began his career after graduating from the University of Southern California.)
“He was taking a shirt with some formality and deconstructing it,” Mr. Trattner, 53, added. “It was a nice conceptual intervention, nothing hard-core like Margiela, just an elegant touch.”
In the early 2000s, Mr. Trattner was part of the team that made Apple’s “Get a Mac” TV commercials featuring the actor Justin Long. Danielle Kays, a stylist who worked on the advertisements, said Steven Alan shirts were among the wardrobe items she sourced for Mr. Long. The style, Mr. Trattner said, “epitomized, for us, a tasteful, modern way of dressing.”
Mr. Alan, who lives in Ditmas Park, Brooklyn, described himself as an obsessive person who has never been obsessed with fashion trends. “I just know the things that I like,” he said. And when he likes something, he tends to geek out.
“It’s like, I’ve got to make the perfect shirt,” Mr. Alan said. “And it’s the proportion, the buttons, all that stuff to me, if it’s not right, I sort of cringe.”
The closures of Mr. Alan’s former local stores and others with curated inventories like Barneys New York, Opening Ceremony and Bird played a big part in his decision to attempt a retail comeback. He is hoping to deliver an experience that offers a sense of discovery — the kind of store where, as he put it, “you’re like, ‘Oh, that’s interesting, I like how they put that and that together,’ or ‘Hm, I don’t know that brand.’”
On a recent Monday, Mr. Alan was buzzing about his shop folding sweaters and arranging accessories inside a glass-top display case. He redesigned the space, which used to be a coffee shop, with help from his 22-year-old son, Max, who is studying architecture at N.Y.U.
Against the back wall are metal shelves stacked with folded reverse seam shirts in various stripe and check patterns. Near the shelves is a wood case filled with vintage jewelry and a few new pieces made by his 84-year-old father, a jeweler who goes by Jerry Grant and has sold baubles to entertainers like Frank Sinatra, Liberace and Liza Minnelli.
Michael Williams, who became acquainted with Mr. Alan after starting the men’s wear blog A Continuous Lean in 2007, said that the renewed interest in 1990s and Y2K fashion made it a good time for Mr. Alan’s next act.
“People really want to see specialty retail come back,” added Mr. Williams, whose blog is now a newsletter with an associated podcast, and who once developed styles of the reverse seam shirt with Mr. Alan.
“There’s something about the mix, seeing things mixed together,” Mr. Williams said. “I think there’s a lot of inspiration in that. You’re always discovering stuff in his stores.”
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