It’s Madeleine Gallay’s Turn to Go Solo
One year after Charles Gallay opened his Gallay boutique in Sunset Plaza in West Hollywood, his former wife is opening her own boutique, called Madeleine Gallay. It is directly across the street from her ex-husband’s store.
The former husband-and-wife team ran the trend-setting Charles Gallay shop on Camden Drive in Beverly Hills from 1971 to 1985 and then opened the Azzedine Alaia store on Rodeo Drive in 1983. They were divorced last March.
“This really is a rite of passage for me as a woman, as a person,” said Gallay, who turns 39 on Feb. 3, the day her store is scheduled to open. The high-energy Gallay, model thin with a shaggy mane of dark brown hair, has earmarked the day after the opening to quit smoking.
‘Pronoun Problems’
Dressed in faded jeans and a T-shirt as she toured the space, still under construction, Gallay recounted how she wanted to open her own store “about 15 years ago” and discussed the idea with Charles, but “he/we had a very successful store, and we did it so well together that it didn’t make a lot of sense.”
She injects that since the divorce, she occasionally has “pronoun problems in referring to his, ours, mine. We were together since I was 19. We’ve only not been together a year. I’m doing it different than we used to do it.”
Once she was on her own, and with the encouragement of friends and former customers, such as singer Joni Mitchell, Gallay began scouting locations. “I just wanted to have my own store. I drove through Melrose and Beverly Hills and up here, and then the old Marion Wagner space became available, and it was across the street from the ex-husband. It was incredible.”
How did Charles react to the news she would be moving in? “He wishes me well,” she said.
“Beverly Hills has changed a little bit too much,” she continued. “You can’t park and it’s so serious. This is more like real life out here, and younger.”
The two neighboring Gallay shops may overlap in the types of customers they attract--fashion-forward women--but not in merchandise or environment. While Charles Gallay’s stark, steel-and-terrazzo store specializes in the designs of Romeo Gigli and Alaia, Madeleine Gallay’s shop is an altogether different experience.
“He’s monastic and minimal and I’m not. I’m slightly off mainstream,” she said. “There’s an old Saint Laurent quote about fashion being ‘poetic craft,’ and I agree.” Working with stylist Jackie Crier, a colleague of designer Andre Putman, Gallay is creating a soft, colorful environment complete with Dutch doors opening onto an English rose garden and a whimsical painted floor with trompe l’oeil effects simulating chipped cement, a puddled drain and a cracked heart inscribed: “MG loves. . . . “
For spring, Gallay has purchased the designs of “slightly off-mainstream designers.” While the accessories are from American resources, the clothing is strictly European, including designers John Galliano, Rifat Ozbek, Liza Bruce, Chantal Thomass, York & Cole and Garage.
“There is still, even in the ‘80s going into the ‘90s, a richness of what the Europeans are able to make,” explained Gallay. “I’m working with very young people. John Galliano is 26. They’ve got the spirit to be a little bit offbeat and to do what I saw in the beginning of the ‘70s.”
In those days, when the Charles Gallay boutique offered the designs of Giorgio Armani, Issey Miyake, Chloe and Missoni, they were considered “avant-garde, risky clothes. People thought we were wacko and wouldn’t be able to sell them. Then they became established and changed. Armani was probably the last one who took it to the top.”
A Vigil on Price
Gallay is also keeping a vigil on price. “Barring the unsureness of what the dollar will stabilize at,” she said, “I’m very, very conscious of value.” A York & Cole cotton tank dress, for example, will retail for $104. A Galliano dinner skirt “with seven yards of fabric” will carry a $700 price tag, but “it’s the best skirt I’ve ever seen,” Gallay qualifies.
Among the accessories are $15 cotton scarfs with hand-rolled edges and one-of-a-kind silk scarfs for $1,000.
“I believe there has to be a relationship between the garment and the price not based on the label.”
Gallay will also carry Manolo Blahnik shoes from England, with no apologies for their $330 price. “They’re the finest handcrafted shoes in the world. That’s for real,” she said.
