It turns out that Nonpareil was not, strictly speaking, a retail store anymore. In 2010, when tailor Michelle Moenssen, with a degree in apparel design from Wayne State, opened the Nonpareil Shirt Company, she made custom shirts as well as hand-dyed jackets, scarves, and tops, but she quietly transitioned mostly into alterations.
Her Fourth Ave. shop will close this month when she moves to New York City to begin a job as head tailor at the extremely posh, bespoke Martin Greenfield Clothiers–Brooklyn’s answer to London’s Savile Row. Barack Obama, among other notables, gets his suits there. Martin Greenfield also does costume design for movies and TV. “I was four feet away from Bradley Cooper in his underwear,” says Moenssen of her last visit there to work out the details of her new job.
Martin Greenfield and Moenssen crossed paths when the company wanted working buttonholes on the sleeves of their custom blazers being sold through the Victors Collection and recruited her to make them. While it seems that Nonpareil’s story couldn’t have ended better, Moenssen says her business failed in a sense, and she wanted to talk about why.
She hadn’t intended to spend her life altering wedding dresses (the job du jour when we spoke to her in early June). She wanted to make custom clothes but found that most people here weren’t ready for that. “I was waiting for what happened with food to happen with clothes. With food, there’s been a revolution. People want to know where it came from. They’re concerned with labor practices. People should ask those questions about clothing too–if they knew what was going on with their clothing they’d make better choices.” A few examples among many: “blue jeans–the dyeing process is so polluting, especially if they’re distressed. And men want to wear wrinkle-free fabric. That fabric is processed with very toxic chemicals.”
In her new job, she’ll be supervising fifty or so stitchers in the workroom. She’ll also be getting back into retail by helping to put together Martin Greenfield’s first store.
