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KNITTING PRETTY
With its teeming streets, New York City is the de facto people-watching capital of the world. And it's from her glass-fronted vintage store, MZ, that designer Michelle Zacks gets the best view of the cool girls who filter through her Lower East Side neighborhood. Good thing, because they're the kind of girls who make and mold trends, influencing Zacks' own knit line, Spring & Clifton.
"Every day, I see what real people are attracted to," says Zacks, 30. It helps, too, that a good portion of that crowd visits MZ, where the designer gets an up-close peek at what girls are picking off the racks. That's how she knows that a cute knit vest with a peacock eye-like intarsia or a cozy grandpa sweater trimmed in gold studs will find a home with one of downtown's denizens. At MZ, opened in 2001, the label hangs among the vintage finds.
A San Diego native, Zacks moved to New York after graduating from Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied fashion design. Since then, her resume has included design stints at Nicole Miller, C. Ronson and the Alife's women's line, as well as a post as senior fashion editor at Sportswear International. Along the way, she got the itch to start her own line and launched Spring & Clifton for spring 2004 with Alife colleague Jennifer Dwin, who has since moved on to design for Old Navy.
"It was not romantic at all," Zacks says now of the label start-up, which she and Dwin named after the streets they lived on at the time. "It was a business decision. It was like, let's look at something that not everyone is doing at the moment." So she focused on knits. "I felt there weren't a lot of cute knit lines out there," she says. "I wanted it to be cute stuff we could wear -- affordable and accessible."
Now, her pieces with colorful hearts, dangling charms and ruffled sleeves can be found at some 45 specialty stores around the country, such as Fred Segal Fun in Los Angeles and Chicago's Active Endeavors, as well as downtown New York boutiques I Heart, Atrium and Shop. The wool and cotton sweaters wholesale in the $70 range.
Though...