At her cozy new store on Bond Street, Gigi Hadid is inviting everyone to be her guest.
On Wednesday morning, the model and entrepreneur, clad in her latest 100 percent cashmere fashions, welcomed WWD into the debut flagship for her brand, Guest in Residence, where her 360-degree creative vision is coming to life in NoHo.
“We wanted this to feel like someone’s living room. An easy place to come shop, hang, play chess in the back. It’s warm, it’s cozy, and it’s getting cold in the city, so come see us,” she said, surrounded by colorful cashmere fashions lining wooden fixtures, amid plush furnishings and artful decorations.
The new location is set to open Thursday on the ground floor of 21 Bond Street, a six-story, pre-war residential building nestled between the upcoming J.Crew storefront and Goop’s Manhattan boutique.
Since its inception about a year ago, Hadid’s 100 percent cashmere label has quickly grown a global presence through seasonal collection drops, exclusive partnerships and pop-up shops, steered by the model and entrepreneur.
Leading up to the store opening, Hadid partnered with LuisaViaRoma to debut a limited-edition capsule collection during Milan Fashion Week with exclusive styles and colorways, such as a tie-front cardigan or crop top with scalloped hem, which sits alongside the brand’s fall 2023 collection. There are ongoing activations online and IRL through November. In addition to the brand’s current LuisaViaRoma and Le Bon Marché pop-up instillations, Guest in Residence will soon open future pop-ups with Selfridges and Bergdorf Goodman.
Hadid said the success of those partnerships and pop-ups proved that Guest in Residence was ready for a permanent store.
“We’ve learned so much about our success with our pop-up stores … That pushed us to open this first flagship faster,” she told WWD ahead of the opening.
So far, bestselling styles across direct-to-consumer sales and interactive pop-ups — spanning from last winter’s New York City “Feel Shop” and Aspen’s co-branded capsule with The Snow Lodge to retail events and activations in Milan and Paris — are the Everywear cardigan, oversized crewneck, Layer Up! vest and Stealth cardigan.
Hadid added that although selling direct-to-consumer through Guest in Residence’s e-commerce was a perfect start for the label last year, her company realized how retail pop-ups engage and change the perspective of prospective shoppers.
“You don’t know how people are going into, or what perspective they’re taking looking at your website, but I think when people are in a store and they’re in front of it and they feel it, it makes sense,” she said. “That’s when people fall in love [with the brand] the fastest, because it’s cashmere. Once you have it in your hands, you’re like, “Oh! I do need one of those,” she said.
“My colleagues, my business partner and his wife are in the store all the time and did a lot of the pop-ups. I just love hearing the really personal stories of specific people going in. I’ll get calls during the day, even this week, of, ‘Hey, a family from Arizona just came in, loved it and bought all this stuff,’” Hadid said. So far, the “simplest moments,” such as seeing people on the streets wearing her designs, make up her favorite memories as founder and creative director during the last year, she said.
“I love hearing random personal stories and I think it helps us to make the experience better for everyone,” Hadid said.
She underscored that the pieces are wearable — “ageless, timeless and genderless,” she said, seemingly in line with much of the fashion that came down the fall runways — and can be “worn and styled so many different ways.”
“You always should be like thinking about what you’re creating from the lens of different people,” she added.
In addition to the Guest in Residence flagship opening, the brand has also expanded from direct-to-consumer to a global distribution network for the fall season. Retail partners, beyond those Hadid has previously collaborated with (Antonia Milano, Le Bon Marché, LuisaViaRoma), now include Selfridges, Ssense, Net-a-porter, Bergdorf Goodman, Fwrd, Elyse Walker, Kadewe, Holt Renfrew, Mr Porter, Harrods and Rinascente Milano.
“It was a response to how well we saw these [pop-ups] do when people could actually walk up, touch and see them in person. Now we are at Le Bon Marché in Paris and LuisaViaRoma in Europe, and then this in New York… I think just placing them where I feel people will be excited about it, then learn and go from there,” she said.
Hadid and her team are creating exclusive Guest in Residence silhouettes and colorways for retail partners, which Hadid says is “such a good opportunity to give some people something special with each place.”
Bon Marché, LuisaViaRoma and Fwrd, for example, stock limited-edition colorways, she said. “Our store will also have that over time,” she said.
Although not an official partnership or available for retail purchase, Hadid excitedly described a pair of Adidas Samba sneakers — her go-to shoe — created specially for her in homage to the Guest in Residence opening, in her brand’s signature yellow gold and royal blue hues.
“It has the Bond Street store address on the outside,” Hadid said. ”When you see this colorway, you know they’re special. Even though the shoes aren’t cashmere, it [speaks to] how I love to have something that feels like a memory and an experience. A good sneaker is a staple, like a good sweater.”
“My normal outfit is jeans, a sweater and Sambas, so it just works out,” Hadid said, adding that “one of her biggest dreams is coming true,” through a separate, secret collaboration that she’s looking forward to debuting in the next year.
“Obviously, I am a fan of collaboration, especially working in one medium with a cashmere company. It’s really fun to be given the tools and resources from other brands and companies that we love and be able to put our own spin on it — it’s a new little highway for us,” she said.
Taking learnings from these partnerships and previous pop-ups, Hadid emphasized the importance of offering new customers an experience that speaks back to the brand DNA — offering timeless and luxurious future heirlooms – and her love of “all things cozy,” while offering existing customers access to new iterations of their most-loved Guest in Residence styles.
“I want people to have their favorite things and I want that to be a comfort for them where they’re like ‘hey, I need a new sweater. I know I love that Everywear cardigan style, oh it comes in a new pop of color,’” she said. “I had a lot of experiences with brands where I would fall in love with a piece that they had and go back the next season, because I would buy that in a different color, and they just never made it again. I really want people to have a comfort item.”
The idea of ease and coziness ties directly into the Guest in Residence retail space, which was designed in partnership with Yaoska Interiors.
Keeping with the brand’s sustainable ethos and high craftsmanship, the flagship was noted to be designed with low-impact materials, such as white oak clothing racks, foraged metal lighting and hardware and original stripped floors.
Leaning into the brand’s cozy DNA (with nods to Hadid’s time spent in nature as a child), the space features cabin-inspired Douglas fir wood fitting rooms with branded yellow and blue carpets; “cashmere”-hued lime-washed walls, a fireplace, vintage furnishings (including reupholstered ’50s Danish club chairs and a driftwood coffee table), and artful ceramics and paintings, like artist Negin Dastgheib’s 2015 “Poolside” work.
“I want it to feel like you’re walking into someone’s living room,” Hadid said. “It’s still clean and simple and has to be a place that’s a base for us to then go as crazy as I want, if I wanted to, but also it can be scaled back and chic so that we can go through different seasons and holidays.”
“I want someone who’s not shopping to get cozy,” she added. “I guess it’s because it’s part of my job, but I love to throw on a sweater over what I’m already wearing. I’m not trying to go into the dressing rooms all the time; I want it to feel like you’re kind of in a living room and just comfortable. I think that that’s kind of the feeling of our company and the people that work with us anyway,” Hadid explained. Part of the flagship’s personal touch stems from inspiration from her own heirlooms; sweaters within her own closet that were passed down from her parents.
In addition, the flagship’s Bond Street location is meant to serve as an extension of the brand’s community.
“It’s nice to feel a little sense of community. I think that when people walk into our office, they feel that right away,” Hadid said of the brand’s nearby headquarters. “We have so much fun together and there’s a really nice energy and friendship among us, so it’s nice to have that on Bond Street,” she added.
“Living around the area, we have friends that own and who we’ve gotten to know [from] the restaurants and stores. It’s nice to invite them in and feel like part of the community in a new way,” Hadid said. And her team has been “putting their own little personal touches” on styling, she noted, calling it “a nice, sweet feeling.”
Through the holiday season, customers can experience in-store activations through a partnership with The Laundress, such as monogram embroidery services and gift-with-purchase of The Laundress Wool and Cashmere Shampoo, with cashmere care instructions (the latter is also available both online through the end of the year).
Hadid said the collaboration will teach customers how to wash a cashmere sweater in a sink, and more. “Anything you can use on your hair works on cashmere, so hand-washing in the same way and hanging it out,” Hadid noted.
With the opening of the store, the brand is launching its first circular Take Back program in partnership with Italian business Re.Verso.
“People can return our 100 percent cashmere pieces for 10 percent off of their next purchase. We can then take that sweater, send it to [Re.Verso in Tuscany,] Italy; they un-weave and reuse those fibers for new recycled pieces, which we can use for whatever we want,” Hadid explained. The program is meant to help reduce textile waste, save resources, reuse and recycle fibers for new garments and expand the textile industry’s circular economy. Stella McCartney, Eileen Fisher and Patagonia have also used the facility.
“I just got the first sample of our first sweater we’re making with this recycled cashmere and it’s so beautiful. Because it’s recycled, it’s put into categories of colors, so although it looks green, once you walk [closer], it has specks of a million different greens — it gives it these special, almost new colors that are not in the normal standard cashmere color book,” Hadid said.
In addition, the brand has announced its partnership with the Sustainable Fibre Alliance (SFA), the nonprofit organization noted to work with Mongolia and China-based herders to ensure cashmere is produced ethically and with minimal environmental impact.
Hadid said waste was one of the reasons she hesitated to produce products until recently.
“With anything and everything that one is going to manufacture, produce, sell, there is a form of waste and I think that’s why for a long time I didn’t want to just have a company and make stuff, just to produce and sell it for 15 bucks and you don’t know if you put it too close to a light bulb, if it’s going to light on fire kind of thing. I think that’s why it took me so long to choose this,” Hadid said.
For the opening, the store offers Guest in Residence’s extensive assortment of core styles alongside its first winter collection drop, inspired by the ’70s psychedelic art movement. Hints of ‘80s and ‘90s Benetton and Americana Prep could also be seen along the walls in the form of primary pop-colored polos, color-blocked accessories (beanies, socks, both adult- and baby-sized), bright cardigans and jumpers, and myriad plaid work shirts. New additions to the core offering are also available, such as the workwear jumpsuit, which has been brought back from one of the brand’s initial drops and updated in core hues of sand beige and black.
“We’re bringing stuff back from other collections that we decided, since they were people’s favorites, we are introducing them in the core collection; maybe a little bit more simple but in neutral colors. Then our holiday drop will be out soon, which has more stripes, beautiful cardigans — in a different style, flannels,” Hadid said, noting the brand is leaning more into holiday layering rather than debuting a second ski town-inspired lineup. “It’s not exactly that ski lodge vibe again, but these pieces can really be styles for après ski, always.”