These Two Best Friends Turned a High School Fashion Club Into an Avant-Garde Pop-Up Shop
These Two Best Friends Turned a High School Fashion Club Into an Avant-Garde Pop-Up Shop
Part of the fun of Instagram is discovering weird little nooks of the fashion world that you never knew existed. It’s a vast space made for deep dives into the random accounts of never-heard-of designers, startup labels, and out-of-the-ordinary shopping destinations. One such delightful find is Café Forgot, a pop-up shop concept founded by best friends and New York natives Vita Haas and Lucy Weisner. Since last summer, the women have successfully opened three pop-up shops in and around the city: two on the Lower East Side and one in Brooklyn. Café Forgot is about giving young talents a platform, both through the pop-ups and the seasonless, sporadic photo shoots they post to Instagram. Haas and Weisner have worked with labels such as Lou Dallas, Auto Body Clothing, Kahle, Marland Backus, and Piera Bochner, among others. While their previous pop-ups were open just two weeks, their latest outpost, at 165 Duane Street in Tribeca, will be open for the entire month of August.
“The majority of our customers hear about Café Forgot on Instagram,” Haas explains. “During the pop-ups, we like to post a lot of impromptu photo shoots with visitors and friends trying on the clothes in the shop, and we use those on our account. We also do shoots between the pop-ups, which very much makes it a year-round project.” Haas and Weisner like to refer to Café Forgot as a project because, simply put, it was born out of one. Growing up, the women formed a fashion club in high school and worked toward a pop-up concept in which they could, in Haas’s words, “offer designers and clients a space that gives emerging talents a platform to sell their beautiful, one-off pieces without having to make a million samples. We love fashion, but we aren’t interested in copying styles that are trendy or current to the season. We’re into clothes that move us.” Besides the clothes, Haas and Weisner also curate art and furniture installations and hold events for each pop-up space. In August they will host an all-female comedy show, a nude figure drawing class, and a book club. The pair is also working on publishing a book of the past collaborations between Café Forgot and the designers they’ve worked with.
