JNBY is a high-style line of convertible clothing that morphs at your caprice.
SAVE ON CHIC | My husband and I had dinner with good friends not long ago, and when the wife opened the door, she was wearing this crazy-awesome little black dress. “I call it the Cryovac,” she said, explaining how the dress, which “looks like a rumpled bag on the hanger,” transforms into an interlock-fabric version of shrink-wrap when you put it on and twist it up and down to whatever hem length you want. Everything about this garment from its flattering cowl neckline to the wearer’s ability to determine the extent of its ruching adds up to an overall effect that is eye-catching, sophisticated and arty. “I love it; where’d you get it?” I enthused, thinking she’d probably picked it up at Boboli or another similarly expensive shop. “I got it at JNBY at Tinseltown; it was $79.”
JNBY (Since 1994), an acronym for Just Naturally Be Yourself, is a fashion label out of Hangzhou, China, with a cult following among artists and celebrities in that country. If you didn’t already know this clothing was designed in China, you’d think it had come from a serious design workshop in Japan or Belgium because so many of the complex cutting/construction techniques and design details feel inspired by fashion giants like Yohji Yamamoto and Ann Demeulemeester.
JNBY has around 600 boutiques worldwide (they launched in Manhattan this May), but Vancouver boasts the first North American operation, a franchise opened by Michelle Lou at Tinseltown mall in 2007. Since 2008, JNBY has set up several more company-managed shops in the Lower Mainland, and there’s buzz that some of their fashions will be available at Holt Renfrew in the fall.
JNBY’s clothing line is huge, around 2,000 different pieces a year, according to Lou. This means that every JNBY store can personalize its inventory. Lou, who travels home to Hangzhou to handpick her merchandise, runs a markdown shop. Everything in her JNBY is 20 to 60 percent off the regular price (which is reasonable for the quality to begin with). Twenty percent of her merchandise is current, while the rest may be a season or two old, which means nothing since JNBY is about being distinctive rather than up-to-the minute trendy.
In a recent New York Times review of the JNBY boutique in Manhattan, writer Ruth La Ferla had high praise for JNBY’s “shape shifting” properties, something local JNBY aficinados are quite familiar with. “I tried on a grey wool sweater at Tinseltown,” my “Cryovac” friend told me last week, “and the owner showed me five dramatically different ways to work with its elements, which included long tails. The design was old and new at the same time, very Dutch, like something Martin Margiela might have designed for a film set in Europe in the late 1930s.” JNBY is fashion by way of creative assembly, she says, “first you put these pieces on, and then you start to play.”—Annabel Lee
JNBY at Tinseltown is a markdown shop located at 1177-88 W Pender St., (604) 683-745. Right now there are three other JNBY locations, 2201 West 4th Avenue, 2623 South Granville Street and Metropolis at Metrotown. For more on JNBY’s current collection, read this review in The New York Times and visit www.jnbynyc.com or www.jnby.com (which is coming soon).
Photo: Courtesy JNBY