Although Barbara Bui’s flagship store has been on New York’s Wooster Street for 15 years, the designer is as French as a bottle of Moët & Chandon.
On a recent February night, Bui sips a glass of the luxury bubbly casually at the Prince Street Intermix boutique around the corner from her shop.
“I have always loved New York, and especially Soho,” Bui says. “There’s something special here for me. For a Parisian, it’s very close to the feeling to being in Paris.”
The 56-year-old designer was born in Paris to a French mother and a Vietnamese father. She earned a master’s degree in English literature from the Sorbonne before deciding to “write with fashion instead of words,” and opened her first shop on the Rue Étienne Marcel in the late ’80s. The New York outpost came in 1999, and has been a downtown staple ever since.
Though Bui currently lives and works in Paris’ Le Marais district, she is stateside toasting Intermix’s newly renovated space, which will stock exclusive pieces from her unusually light spring collection — a 36-look ode to denim shown last September at Paris fashion week.
“I wanted to work on [denim] in a very creative way — by deconstruction,” the designer says of her effort to ennoble the everyday fabric. “It’s very powerful, authentic — a very true material that you feel confident in.”
To demonstrate, she cut and stitched contemporary shapes — blazers, skinnies, cropped tops — with couturelike attention and spun delicate embroidery motifs that were a far cry from the dusty whiskers of your rough-and-tumble dungarees. The artisanal finesse was fresh, if not etymologically on point. Denim literally means “de Nîmes,” or “from Nîmes,” a city in southern France.
And while fashion girls will surely flock south to Soho for Bui’s ultrachic fare, don’t be surprised if you catch one of her effortlessly cool classics on well-heeled celebrities like Gwyneth Paltrow, Kate Hudson or Zoe Saldana.
“It’s a pleasure for me, especially because all of these followers are completely representative of my style,” the designer says of her A-list fan club, which she says she doesn’t actively seek to dress. In fact, she thinks it only makes sense that stylish celebs are fond of her clothes, which work for any woman seeking something current yet timeless, sexy yet sophisticated, clean yet acutely rock ’n’ roll.
“Generally speaking, it’s very natural that [celebrities] like what I do. It goes with their lifestyles, characters, personalities, et cetera,” Bui asserts, adding that tasteful artistic types naturally gravitate toward her clever contradictions.
“When you are creative it’s nice to share it with people who are also creative,” she says. “Singers, actresses, writers, even bloggers — they are creative people, so it’s good when you understand each other.”
Touché.