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September 4, 2005
Luring Fashionistas Uptown
[To Hamilton Heights]
By PENELOPE GREEN
EXACTLY two weeks before the start of the New York Spring Collections, otherwise known as Fashion Week, Malcolm Harris, a 37-year-old designer, was inching toward the debut of a solo line that he is calling Mal Sirrah (his own name, written backward) and describing an unanticipated stumbling block: his new neighborhood.
Joyce Dopkeen/The New York TimesMalcolm Harris is paying $2,800 a month
for an apartment in a Harlem town house
Mr. Harris is living, working and showing in a rotund brick-and-limestone Romanesque Revival town house on Convent Avenue between 143rd and 144th Streets, the bucolic center of the landmarked Harlem neighborhood of Hamilton Heights.
His second-floor 1,000-square-foot one-bedroom, where he lives with his boyfriend, Tyson Perez, a fashion stylist, rents for $2,800, which includes the use of the back parlor downstairs. His is one of only three floor-through apartments here. "It's Melrose Place," said Mr. Harris, who had dinner last spring in the top apartment and fell hard for the house.
The building's owner has kept the first-floor parlor and Gothic wood-paneled center hall and staircase as a common area for her tenants. It is here that Mr. Harris will set out 200 or so gilt chairs Wednesday evening at 6.
"Think early Chanel," he urged, meaning Coco, "and the models wafting down the stairs with me at the top, smoking a cigarette." Yet for the crowd of fashion press and buyers whose geographic limits were sorely tested by Miguel Adrover's East Village and Lower East Side shows a few years back, Harlem at first seemed to be a destination too far for the Town Cars.
"I've been calling the buyers to come up for a preview," explained Mr. Harris, sitting before the broad bow windows of his apartment.
His workroom is the richly paneled back parlor on the first floor below. "Everyone is so wonderful: 'Where are you showing?' they ask. And I say, 'In a lovely town house in Harlem.' Then it's like when the D. J. lifts the needle at 4 a.m.: this horrible dead silence."
That day, he had a notion to corral the fashion press into red double-decker tour buses and shuttle them uptown, but he had been tangled in the tour company's voice mail and couldn't get a human being to call him back.
Joyce Dopkeen/The New York Times On Wednesday at 6 p.m., Malcolm Harris will introduce a new fashion
line, Mal Sirrah, at a show in the house's first-floor common area.
Mr. Harris was elegantly macho in silk camouflage pants and a carefully slashed T-shirt with the words "The Myrmidons" written across its chest - tough enough for his business, unfazed by its challenges.
Behind him, a dress form wore a slight pale green silk gingham baby doll dress with a delicate ruffled tuxedo front. If you looked very closely, you might see the sequins embedded in those silk organza ruffles, a treat for the sharp-eyed.
Ten years ago, Mr. Harris and his best friend, Katsumi Edono, were living together in a loft in NoHo and introducing their girlish clothing line, Katsumi & Malcolm.
Two years later, the two had enjoyed a bit of fame - Madonna had bought a dress, and even invested in their company for a spell - and moved into the top floor of the Vanderbilt mansion at 35 West 57th Street. The J Sisters - the seven Brazilian beauticians who brought the phrase "the full Brazilian" (translation: the ultimate bikini wax) into the metropopular lexicon - had the two floors below them, a great boon to business, Mr. Harris said.
"One Sunday morning at 7 a.m., they ring us up and say, 'You'll never guess who's here,' " he continued, "and our door opens and there's Kirstie Alley. I don't know what she had done that early in the morning, but there she was, all over our clothes and the dogs."
By 2000, they had $10 million to $12 million in yearly sales, were represented by 30 stores in this country and were thoroughly over the whole "fashion" thing.
"We decided to take the money and run," Mr. Harris said. They bought a condo on Ocean Drive in South Beach and hung out for an entire year.
"It was so decadent, it put everything in perspective," Mr. Harris continued. "And then the reality sets in: South Beach is only 20 blocks long and six blocks wide. You've got to move again."
Ms. Edono went home to Tokyo, and Mr. Harris moved to Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. Katsumi & Malcolm became Kat & Mal, a more playful version of itself. The two collaborated long-distance, and Ms. Edono sold the line from Tokyo.
"We sold more T-shirts than anything else," said Mr. Harris, describing a signature T printed with stick figure cartoons of himself and Ms. Edono. "There was not much design effort."
Brooklyn, he said, felt just as far from Manhattan as Miami. "Out there, I felt disconnected from the reason I'd moved to Manhattan in the first place. I felt disconnected from fashion."
When his lease in Brooklyn ran out, in 2002, Mr. Harris moved to Tokyo to be with Ms. Edono and raise money for a future solo venture. He loved the anonymity of Tokyo, the utter strangeness of it. "People thought I was either a visiting rapper," he said, "or working in the military. I did Kat & Mal and saved money, squirreling away every single dollar."
He returned to New York in 2004 and sublet his way around the city, from the Lower East Side to the Upper West, trawling for just the right spot. He and Mr. Perez found a one-bedroom in a town house on 123rd Street and Lenox Avenue that rented for $1,650. They had seen it during a movie shoot, when every day the street was as quiet and as empty as any in a leafy suburb.
"Then, the movie wraps after we've moved in," Mr. Harris said, "and chaos ensues. There are still pockets of Harlem where things are not cleaned up, and that was one of them. It was awful."
A friend who worked in marketing offered to help him draw up a business plan for his new line and asked him to dinner in her Convent Avenue town house apartment. He and Mr. Perez moved into the second floor on May 1, after its tenant suddenly, serendipitously, decided to move downtown.
It is a bit of a stretch to imagine two grown men and two dogs living in this pristine and empty space. (Chance and Chandler, two young toy poodles, were vibrating and squeaking from their crate in the bedroom the other day.) "I used to be about all of that stuff," Mr. Harris said. "Now we have just the basics."
The sun was pouring through the three huge bow windows, flickering off the diamonds in Mr. Harris's ears, the mirrored front of a white leather desk and the satin ribbon edge on that green gingham shift.
"Success is different for everybody," Mr. Harris said. "For me, my best moments are working on something like this dress, in this room, in this light."
By last Monday, he had abandoned the tour bus idea and was instead planning a marketing stunt, a blizzard of T-shirts sent to fashion editors with the words "Naomi Campbell Slapped Me/And I Slapped Her Right Back," except that the shirt used a harsh female noun instead of the third person pronoun.
It worked: by last Wednesday 200 invitees had confirmed their attendance, he said, including Ivanka Trump, Andre Leon Talley and Kim Cattrall. Even Naomi Campbell's office had called, requesting tickets to the show.
He was tickled that he had secured Eva Pigford, a star of "America's Next Top Model," as a mannequin for his own show. "She defied the 15-minute rule," he said, "She has this attitude: 'I know you think I got here because of that, but I would have got here anyway.' "
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