Rachel Comey Makes Herself Comfortable

The designer has built an independent fashion business making other women feel that way too.

- Cathy Horyn

A lot of people think of Rachel Comey as “a quirky Brooklyn designer.” Her clothes aren’t actually quirky, and she lives in a converted barn in the Hudson Valley (though she keeps an apartment in New York). But she is cool and she does have a devoted following of offbeat creative types. She is so cool that when she wants to invite artists or actors whom she has never met, but whose work she admires, to her show, she drops them an email—no hustle. They almost always say yes. She is so cool that I know exactly what Maya Rudolph means when she says, about meeting Comey for the first time in her Soho shop, “I’m such a wannabe fashion designer in my heart—it’s my hidden secret—she was just instantly approachable in a way most designers are not.” Comey has the same face for everyone.

But to call Comey’s fashion “quirky” is less a description than an evasion. “It’s so rude, ‘quirky,’ ” she tells me over dinner at La Mercerie, the busy café at Roman and Williams Guild in Soho. “It translates to ‘I don’t want to try to understand.’ ”