A huge industrial building on New York City’s West End where powerful machinery was once unloaded from freight trains will be transformed into a fashion hub for at least a week.
The Starrett Lehigh Building, a vintage Leviathan-sized monument to the city’s manufacturing and shipping era built in 1931, will be the new headquarters for New York Fashion Week, which begins Friday.
The streamlined building on 11th Avenue at West 26th Street features a runway featuring 70 designers including Bach Mai, Badgley Mischka, The Blondes, Libertine, Prabal Gurung, Son Jeong-wan and Pamela Rowland. A show will be held.
Event sponsor IMG “wanted to bring all of Fashion Week together under one roof,” said RXR Managing Director Bill Elder. The company purchased the building in 2011 for $920 million.
In recent years, starlet Lehi has acquired an even more fashionable image than in the past. RXR has taken things to a different level with extensive infrastructure upgrades, including thousands of new windows that equate to 8 miles of glass.
The renovated office and showroom facility has attracted companies such as Zimmerman and Fashion Mania, whose largest tenant is Ralph Lauren (which recently renewed its lease for more than 250,000 square feet).
RXR has also attracted chef Marcus Samuelsson’s Hav + Mar restaurant and Olly Olly, an expansive gourmet food hall and market, both of which host Fashion Week events. The landlord also launched the 15,000-square-foot 601 Athletic Club, crediting Adidas as a “programming partner.”
Bach Mai, a Texas native and two-time CFDE Emerging Designer Award nominee, remembers the first time he stepped into the historic building.
“After the flash floods many years ago, I was wading through knee-high water in the street with my portfolio to meet Georgina Chapman from Marchesa, so it was my first time doing this production with IMG. “It’s really a full-circle moment for us to be able to do this.’It’s an iconic building,” said Mai, the son of Vietnamese immigrants.
IMG will lease 68,000 square feet on the 18th floor for the show and 17,000 square feet on the 17th floor for support space for Scott Rechler’s RXR.
Elder declined to say how much IMG was paying for the short-term space. Standard term rents for the building range from the low $60s to the high $70s per square foot.
Elder said the building is more than 70 percent leased and other transactions are “in the works.”
NYFW used to be held at Spring Studios downtown, and before that at Lincoln Center and Bryant Park.
