Alexis Bittar is back, baby, and better than ever. The acclaimed jewlery designer has returned from a self-imposed five-year absence from the fashion world to reclaim his namesake brand from Brooks Brothers, who bought his brand in 2015, but filed for bankruptcy in 2021.
Bittar’s road in fashion has been long and winding. According to the designer’s website, Bittar discovered the NYC club scene in 1983 while still attending high school and his interests rapidly turned to fashion and design when his attendance at seminal night clubs Danceteria and Area become more frequent than his classes at school. In 1992, by the time he turned 22, Alexis had started designing his own line of costume jewelry, beginning by carving his Lucite collection from his one bedroom apartment.
Bittar’s rise from there was fairly meteoric. That same year he was discovered by Dawn Mello, fashion director of Bergdorf Goodman, who offered the budding designer his first steps into the world of retail. Just two years later, he started to sell internationally through Harrod’s in London and Isetan in Japan. And just four years after that, Bittar was designing Burberry’s first ready-to-wear jewelry collection, interpreting their signature plaid onto Lucite.
The 2000’s saw Bittar climb quickly to the top and stay there. First, Bittar collaborated with the stylist and costume designer Patricia Field, creating custom designs for the character of HBO’s ‘Sex and the City’. In 2004, Bittar celebrated the grand opening of his first boutique, located just two blocks from where he first began selling his wares on the street a decade earlier. Later in the year, he is named the “Rising Star of the Year” by the prestigious Accessories Council of Excellence (ACE).
In 2008, his designs appearedon the September cover of French Vogue styled by fashion editor Carine Roitfeld. A year later, for New York Fashion Week, Bittar collaborated with Michael Kors, Dennis Basso, and Michael Angel for their Spring 2010 ready-to-wear collections. Alexis’s designs appear on over 15 editorial covers including Time Magazine, Italian Vogue, and Harper’s Bazaar UK. In 2010, Bittar was awarded the CFDA’s ‘Accessory Designer of the Year,’ and continued collaborations with designers like Jason Wu and Jeremy Scott.
In 2015, Bittar and TSG Consumer Partners (with whom he entered a business partnership in 2013) decided to sell the brand to Carolee LLC, the jewelry arm of the American heritage brand Brooks Brothers. The designer’s decision to leave the brand was a personal one, focusing on raising his children and pursue his philanthropic interests. Says Bittar in an interview with Fashionista’s Ana Colón, “I had two kids as a single parent — I made that conscious decision, because I had 400 employees before, and I wanted to be a present parent,” he says. “It really dovetailed in a great way.”
Bittar didn’t really think of his time away from fashion as a hiatus — it was more of the closing of a chapter, a turning of the page. He was done. Then, amid a global pandemic, Brooks Brothers filed for bankruptcy. Bittar had the opportunity to buy back his name. “I really had to think, ‘What would it take to get back into this business?,'” he says now. “If I’m going to partake in this dirty industry, I want to get it right.”
Alexis Bittar officially relaunched in September 2021. Known for featuring unique models to be the faces of his campaigns, like 80’s Dynasty icon Joan Collins in 2010, fashion icon and activist Lauren Hutton in 2011, and the Absolutely Fabulous comedy duo Jennifer Saunders and Joanna Lumley in 2012, for his first striking campaign after his return, Bittar chose Ericka Hart, Sylke Golding and Kiara Marshall photographed by Amber Pinkerton to set the tone for this new era.
“I came into it very clear about where our customer is, understanding that we wanted to focus on strong, independent, artistically-inclined, predominantly urban independent thinkers who saw themselves as not needing to be in the middle, but more that they really knew themselves,” Bittar says. “I was everyone’s largest costume jewelry designer. I was a big part of everyone’s pie. Everyone had voices and were like, ‘But we need our Texas women to wear a lot of crystal.’ So I was like, ‘Wait, okay. This is who I really want to focus.'”
The target demographic is now the 40 to 60 age group. “I relate to that age group because I am that age group. I felt like we always were in that age group, but there are very few brands that really talk to them,” he says. “Most people chase the 20-year-old through marketing, and it’s generally a very curated image. There’s not a lot of real content and, I don’t know, just real life shit.”
The business also looks a little different behind the scenes. For starters, Alexis Bittar is scaling back wholesale, once a massive slice of the pie (both for the brand and for its retail partners), significantly. He closed the majority of those accounts, shifting his attention to direct-to-consumer and brick-and-mortar. Also, production is no longer in house; instead, he hired the team that used to make all the product, now working under their own company, as contractors. Then, when it comes to leadership, there’s no private equity. Bittar has two business partners, who he worked with at the beginning of his career and now each have a 10% stake in the company.
Bittar doesn’t have any regrets about working with private equity in the brand’s past life. He just wants the freedom to take a more “unedited” approach, “for better or for worse.” Says the designer, “I went from selling on the street to having my business. I’ve never worked at a job — I was a waiter for a minute, and they fired me — so I spent my early adult working life trying to understand the business and then, once the business really started to move, really embracing corporate life, which has many benefits,” he says. “But once I partnered, it was much more difficult, because I was sharing a business. There was an element of chasing the numbers that I just wasn’t into… I’m an artist and I’m a business person, so I have no problem with business, but I think it was the way we were going about it — I just disagreed.”
The goal is to grow the company to the point it was before, and even exceed that. But Bittar has a new approach, one that’s rooted in the message and a good product. The designer really stuck to his guns on the latter, tapping into what worked (and always had worked) for Alexis Bittar — “the artistry, the craftsmanship, the higher perceived value than what we were pricing it, the sense of humor and honesty in the advertising.” There are also new categories: soft accessories, homewares and fine jewelry. Handbags are coming this spring.
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