Opening Ceremony Is Closing, Here Comes Café Forgot

They say it’s a dead breed — the kind of New York boutique that helped sustain a creative community of makers and thinkers throughout the Eighties and Nineties selling a curious array of one-off clothing, accessories and knickknacks likely made on the floor of a cramped studio apartment. Filling quiet corners of up-and-coming artistic neighborhoods, these stores often represented more than just commerce — they were community projects, giving creative refuge and a source of income to the city’s underground design community. And thus, the small New York labels whose experimental, hand-made designs forged a crucial connection between shoppers and the city’s creative bohemia evaporated along with them. Rising rents and the increased cost of living may have suppressed a generation of New York creatives — as many designers resigned themselves to a nine-to-five career, numbing their appetite for an artistic side hustle and putting a damper on the number of small labels launched in Manhattan. But two TriBeCa kids are hoping to revive the onetime New York retail tradition — creating a roving gallery space highlighting the kind of scrappy fashions for which the city was once known. Café Forgot, a store concept founded in 2017 by Vita Haas and Lucy Weisner

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