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LEONA

Two and a half years ago, Lauren Leonard turned down a handful of New York design jobs to launch a women’s clothing line from her parents’ Tuscaloosa home. Today, the twenty-five-year-old lives and works in a Buckhead loft and hopes to round out a list of sixty-plus boutique clients with a department store chain. Leonard declined a turn on TV’s Project Runway three times to focus on her company. Leonard also custom designs bridesmaid dresses and, for college-town clients, game-day dresses. “I was trying to tap into a market that New York designers don’t get and don’t want to get. Dresses to football games in school colors? They would never stoop to that level,” she laughs. “But I will!” Leona is available locally at Tulipano, 2140 Peachtree Road, 404-351-3220, tulipanoboutique.com, and at shop.leonacollection.com.

SHREE MONI

Shari Gray had a fetish for footwear out of her price range, so she developed a line of avant-garde but accessible shoes, priced between $150 and $300 and sold at boutiques around the country. “I take pictures of art. I go and pick weird things off the ground and go, ‘This would be kind of cool on a shoe,’” says Gray, who travels between Atlanta, New York, and China, where her shoes are manufactured. Her spring collection featured playful, Parisian-themed designs, and her fall collection features crushed-leather knee-high boots and a sleek ankle boot in cobalt-blue suede. Find Shree Moni at Seven, 2140 Peachtree Road, 404-367-5333, and at the SoShoelite Shoe Lounge, 240 North Highland Avenue, Suite C-1, 404-525-2103, thesoshoelite.com.

UCCÉ

You can’t accuse Uche Ude of not aiming high. “I hope to go farther than Chanel,” says the Nigerian-born designer, a former accountant for British Petroleum. When her women’s wear line, Uccé, debuted in August with a runway show at the St. Regis, it was the culmination of a lifelong obsession with fashion—from childhood doodles to design courses at SCAD. With tailored suits, dresses, and sportswear, Uccé is geared toward the sophisticated career woman, though it shines in the playful details—exposed zippers, asymmetrical lines, coquettish ruffles. Ude, who for now works out of her Dunwoody home, plans to add accessories and a men’s line. “We’re thinking big. This is just the beginning,” she says. Visit ucce.com for a list of retail locations.

Photographs by Joe Martinez

Most people see a bottled beverage for what’s inside—flavor, texture, the promise of a buzz. Kathleen Plate has a different take. Beer bottles, she’ll tell you, are made from a soft glass; their shape is often imperfect. Champagne bottles are hard, built to withstand the pressure of carbonation. Coke bottles just have this sparkle—“almost effervescent, like the product.” Plate, who founded Smart Glass Jewelry seventeen years ago, has long incorporated glass in her designs, but the bottles are a more recent obsession.

A whiz with a soldering iron, Plate built her company around a line of stained glass jewelry encased in sterling silver. But in 2006, for a special commission from Coke, she bought her first band saw. She cut the embossed logos out of old bottles, then fashioned them into earrings and pendants. Coke loved it. Plate loved the saw. She kept on cutting through the bottle scraps, aquamarine rings rolling off like cucumber slices. Then, with the bravado of an inventor, she bought a kiln. “It took me three times to find the right temperature,” she recalls of her initial attempts to fire the rings. “The first one didn’t melt, the second one I just disintegrated into nothing, and the third one was the sweet spot.”

The sweet spot indeed. That was two and a half years ago, when the demand for eco-friendly goods was surging. Her new jewelry line, which she would augment with the greens and golds and cobalts of other beverage bottles, particularly struck a chord in L.A., where a laundry list of stars—Katherine Heigl, Sienna Miller, Leighton Meester, Amy Smart—would wear it. Smart Glass was included in the official 2008 Sundance Film Festival gift bag, and the story is that Isabella Rossellini and Sharon Stone had a playful squabble over who got which necklace.

Today, Plate is the owner of two massive Diamond Laser 7000 band saws. She oversees a staff of four in a Candler Park studio she calls “a cross between a quilting bee and a sweatshop.” They continue to make jewelry but have begun tackling large-scale projects: wall installations, chandeliers, a series of glass dresses that went down the runway at L.A. Fashion Week. In June, Plate held her first art show at Atlanta’s Emily Amy Gallery, and it was filled with friends and clients who’d supported her work in all its stages. “There were many, many years where I felt like I was chained to the workbench,” Plate says of the endeavor. “It’s fun for me to be an artist again.” smartglassjewelry.com

Photograph by Jamey Guy

The breakthrough designer (remember Michelle Obama’s inaugural ball gown?) appears at this month’s Jeffrey Fashion Cares fundraiser. He chats about stepping out in the South.

Have you gotten used to being an honored guest? I’m never used to it. I’ m very low key, I like to entertain at home, I’m that type of a guy. My company’s just three years old, so I’m experiencing a lot for the first time. And we’re just really fortunate to be growing during an economy like this.
We’re lucky, but also because of that we work harder than we would ever
work, because it’s the only way.

What are your hours like? Crazy hours. It used to be, a month before Fashion Week we’d work overtime, but now every day is Fashion Week. There’s
so much going on all the time that my staff—we’re always there.

I guess you really need to love what you’re doing. It’s the only way to do it. When I went to Parsons [The New School for Design], one of
the first things I was told was if you don’t love fashion you need to
get out. It’s a very glamorous industry, but most of all it takes hard work and dedication. Five percent of it is glamorous. The other
ninety-five percent is hard work and just like incessant—I struggle
over a bead or [if it’s] a shade off on the fabric.

You’ve pointed to illustrations of fairy tales as the inspiration for your latest collection, and you design for a line of dolls. Are you drawn to elements of child’s play? I think fashion can be only so serious. One of the dresses [in the
fall 2009 collection] had a print that featured little vignettes of
fairy tale drawings. It was a mature-looking dress, but up close there
was a whimsical element about it. I think you’ve got to have fun with
fashion. I think the second you take anything too seriously, it’s not
fun anymore.

Having worked on designing dolls since I was sixteen, that gave me a
lot of experience in having attention to detail and just general work
experience—knowing what to do and what not to do when you’re operating
a business. Those things really helped me when I started my business
three years ago.

Wow. When I was sixteen I was lifeguarding. I was a ski patrol before that. I was in Connecticut and that was all I did.

How did you make the leap into fashion? Well I was not a great ski patrol [laughs]. It was certain I was
not going to be doing that for a living. But I was artistic ever since
I was five. That was one of the reasons my mom moved me here—because I
wasn’t going to have the opportunities I had here in Taiwan, where I’m
from originally. Especially in the eighties, Taiwan was less open to
the idea of boys being in the arts. Most of my cousins and friends
ended up in business. That was the norm. My mom saw that early on—that
I was really artistic and obsessed with dresses, and she thought it
would be best for me to move here.

Does your mom ever give you feedback on your designs? She gives me her input. She’s got great taste. My dad, though,
really has a lot of input into what I do because he’s a businessman,
and a really great one at that. He’s helped me a lot. Being a designer
in a self-owned company, you are operating a serious business on top of
being a creative person. It’s not just drawing and painting and draping
fabric all day. It’s about keeping the company afloat and letting it
grow and grow under these crazy circumstances. My dad has been really
great about giving me monthly advice on how to make it work. So I have
extraordinary parents.

Jeffrey is your exclusive retailer in Atlanta. How did that relationship come about? It’s a strategy we felt strongly about—that as a young collection we can’t be readily accessible. I think the definition of luxury has somewhat been lost in the last few years. I think as a society we thought luxury just meant something that was really expensive, when in my opinion it means something that’s unique, special, timeless, and rare. That’s my approach to making clothes—to make only the best and to sell in places we really believe in. And so Jeffrey in Atlanta was the obvious choice.

I imagine your designs—polished, feminine, modern—are a big hit in the South. We had a tremendous response [last season at Jeffrey]. I think I understand the ladies here and I think they understand my aesthetic. You know what else I’ve discovered that the store manager at Jeffrey introduced me to? Chick-fil-A. It’s my favorite! So I’m a Southern boy at heart.

Jason Wu photo courtesy of C&M Media

Fabu Face Spa Photograph by Caroline Kilgore

Rejuvenate Spa’s Minifacial, $20 (Wednesdays only, cash only) The spa caters to Downtown workers on the go, and on hump-day you can snag this treatment (normally $50) for a song. It includes a cleanse, steam, exfoliation, a mask, and hydration with all-organic products. The esthetician even taught our tester how to make similar concoctions at home. 303 Peachtree Center Avenue, Suite AL-112, 404-577-4877, rejuvenatespas.com

Float Spa’s Minifacial, $35 ($21 for members) This tidy, earthy spot in Inman Park bills itself as “the affordable spa experience.” The minifacial saw us cleansed, exfoliated, masked, and moisturized with products by local line Silky Smooth Urban Oasis, and we emerged softer, cleaner, and—in a welcome twist—fit for public appearance. 240 North Highland Avenue, Suite F, 404-228-4423, floatforvalue.com

Fabu Face Spa’s Men’s Fitness Facial, $45 Inside a cozy, pale blue treatment room, our tester received a daily cleanser from the Jack Black product line, a papaya- and pumpkin-enzyme exfoliating mask of Fabu’s own invention, a carrot vitamin mask, herbal toner, and Jack Black SPF 20 moisturizer—plus plenty of hot towels and gentle massages. Bliss. 335 West Ponce de Leon Avenue, Suite E, Decatur, 404-377-6363, fabufacespa.com

Jazmin Spa’s Hydra Flash Facial, $45 The regimen features a precleanse, cleanse, exfoliation, and colloidal mask using only Dermalogica products. By the end we felt so warm and tingly we didn’t want to move. The best endorsement? Getting an unsolicited compliment on our complexion later in the day. Three intown locations, including 506 Moreland Avenue, Suite B, 404-521-3002, jazminspa.com

Invigo Spa’s Minifacial, $45 (15 percent discount for members) Our experience consisted of a cleanse, enzyme peeling cream, a high-frequency wand to zap bacteria, and a gel mask, plus intermittent hand, shoulder, and head massages. We loved the crisp, citrusy scent of the Pevonia Botanica skin care line as well as the smooth morning-after results. 2550 Sandy Plains Road, Suite 125, Marietta, 678-905-7377, invigodayspa.com

Seed Factory, a new children’s store on the westside, is a parent’s fantasy of what a child’s playroom could look like—sun-filled, many-colored, with everything in its place. Toys, trucks, and Dr. Seuss mingle with papier-mâché dolls and fabric birdhouses. T-shirts and cargo shorts hang next to gauzy tutus and jeweled babouches. Tree branches with tissue-paper cherry blossoms provide an earthy centerpiece.

The 4,000-square-foot space in the White Provision development backs up to a view of Westside Urban Market, where sister store Sprout—catering to infants and toddlers—resides. Owner Rachel Baba opened Sprout in 2002, and its steady success prompted her to extend the concept to older children. “Every year as our families [at Sprout] grew up, there would be a wave that would say, ‘When are you going to do a store for older kids?’ I think they came to trust our sensibility,” she says. At Seed Factory, that sensibility encompasses safe, simple toys (wooden checkerboards, old-fashioned bike bells), classic books (Harold and the Purple Crayon, The Secret Garden), and high-quality fabrics (popular clothing lines include Petit Bateau and Kit + Lili). Baba gravitates toward designs that feature flowers or cars rather than cheeky slogans or Nike swooshes. “We try and approach everything from the kid’s point of view,” she says.

Where Baba really shines is her ability to arrange kid-friendly merchandise in an adult-friendly package. Meaning, quite simply, the store is gorgeous. Baba received her MFA in painting from New York’s Pratt Institute, but a thriving side job designing window displays diverted her career plans. When she returned to her native Atlanta in 2000, she landed a job arranging tabletop displays at Anne Quatrano’s Star Provisions, and Quatrano eventually backed her when she opened Sprout. Now, with her second enterprise, Baba has room to incorporate a pet project: a 1,000-square-foot activity room where she hosts arts and crafts classes, story time, and even yoga sessions. The classes are for kids; parents are welcome to stick around. Says Baba, “One of the things that’s so strong about Sprout is that we have a real community, we get to know the families. We want the same thing here.”

VITAL STATISTICS

ADDRESS/PHONE 1170 Howell Mill Road, 404-355-2043

HOURS Monday–Saturday, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

TAG LINE Children’s apparel, books, and toys with a classic bent, for kids ages two through twelve. Clothing ranges from $30 to $80.

Photo by Caroline Kilgore

If clothing stores were beverages, Lila would be an ice-cold glass of lemonade. Sunny in decor and disposition, with prices that will make you say “ahhh,” this newcomer on North Highland has a simple goal. “I wanted to bridge the gap between people who shop in high-end stores and people who are stuck at Target,” says owner Salima Manji, a Montreal native. “If you just want to look cute on a cheese day and spend less than a hundred bucks, you can get a full outfit.”

Save a handful of “investment pieces” (AG Jeans, Hobo bags, a Hale Bob screen-printed dress last seen on Salma Hayek), most of Lila’s offerings stay comfortably below that mark. You’ll find lots of clean lines and solid colors—a navy capelet by Piko 1988, jersey dresses in edible-looking hues by Color Me Red—along with more whimsical items, including a retro print dress by Collective Concepts and an embroidered ivory sundress by Minuet. The jewelry selection includes delicate gold-dipped creations by Top Shelf as well as wood pieces of Manji’s own design. Handbag favorites include Shiraleah vegan leather bags (priced around $60) and leather messenger bags by The Sak that fold over to become clutches. At less than $30, TokyoMilk perfumes are pretty enough to top any vanity, and they smell good, too.

Manji cites Inman Park’s walkability as one of its chief appeals, and Lila pulls in its share of passersby—women on their way back from kickboxing, or perhaps drawn by the “Beck disco floor” mural on the back wall. “I wanted people to drive by and be like, ‘What the hell is that?’” Manji says of the yellow, green, and blue blocks that preside over the store. The motif, inspired by a Beck music video, extends to the price-tag art, the cube-shaped seats, and the swinging square dressing room doors. Manji cautions: The doors are very swingy. Also: She might be tempted to play stylist and throw another outfit over the door, or offer feedback if you’re willing to model. It’s a boutique, after all, where personal service reigns and shopping often consists of spirited debate and adventurous assembly. If you’re not into that, there’s always Target. 

VITAL STATISTICS

Address/Phone: 240 North Highland Avenue, C-2, 404-584-5452

Hours: Tuesday–Friday noon–7 p.m.; Saturday 11 a.m.–8 p.m.; Sunday noon–6 p.m.

Tag Line: The look is minimalist meets whimsical. Soft jersey dresses for day, tailored jackets for work, and festive jewelry for night are available for less than $100. Denim lines include AG, Miss Me, Level 99, and Anoname.

Photo by Lauren Rubinstein

It’s not by chance that EcoEmporium, the new earth-friendly boutique in
West Midtown, looks familiar. Owners Carol and Bruce Held hired the
designers behind mall chain Anthropologie to create a calming space
with antique display cases and simple art. Only instead of bohemian
wares, the Helds’ “bazaar of sorts” provides a step-by-step guide to
decreasing your ecological footprint.

Carol, who has a
background in banking and interior design, adopted a green lifestyle
after discovering she was allergic to her husband’s office furniture,
which was sealed with formaldehyde glue. After researching products
such as detergents, dishware, toys, and towels, she decided Atlanta
needed a one-stop shop for everything organic, nontoxic, fairly traded,
repurposed, and recycled. And Brickworks, a renovated warehouse turned
shopping center, was the ideal location.

Catering to home, baby,
and pet, many of EcoEmporium’s goods are made from organic cotton or
bamboo. Check out the Bambu flatware, plates, and bowls, which can be
easily washed and reused; there’s even supersoft loungewear and wedding invitations
made from the woody stems. Kids’ tees with slogans such as “I recycled
my juice box today” and “I didn’t take a bath to save water today” are
hot items. Other whimsical offerings include jewelry made from soda
bottles, bullet casings, bicycle chains, and cut-up credit cards; and
purses constructed from magazines, gum wrappers, recycled felt, and
rubber reclaimed from tractor-trailer inner tubes. The two biggest
sellers, though, are utilitarian staples: diapers and mattresses. The
gDiapers starter kit comes with two pairs of washable cotton pants and
ten flushable refills for $28. For around $3,000, you can get a
queen-size Savvy Rest mattress made from natural rubber, organic
cotton, and pure wool (it repels dust mites!).

The Helds and
their official greeter, Krissie, a rescued border collie mix, hope to
franchise in the future. They also plan to host community classes on
such topics as how to set up your own organic baby nursery.

Vital Statistics:

Address: 1000 Marietta Street, Suite 114

Phone: 404-875-5224

Website: theecoemporium.com

Hours:  Monday–Saturday 10 a.m.–7 p.m.

Bargain buys: Inexpensive
finds include reusable glass straws for $5.99 and a four-pack of SKOY
kitchen cloths for $8.95. (Using just one of these bio­degradable
cloths can save fifteen rolls of paper towels.)

Photo by Deborah Whitlaw Llewellyn

Alex Branch removes a slightly browned piece of paper from its plastic
sheath. “Hold it in your hands,” he says. And in an eerie,
pull-back-the-veil sort of moment, the remarkably legible script of
Lilyann Williams comes to life:

I am a woman that in the
year 1787 was taken a prisoner by the Creek Indians in your state and
my husband afterwards died. I was pregnant when taken, and while a
prisoner brought forth a female child—and in May 1795 I was brought
into Savanah and exchanged for, but the Indians refused to give up my
child, which is now near twelve years old—and now being informed that .
. . there is a way . . . to get her from [the] Savages . . . I humbly
petition your Excelency to . . . take such steps as to you may seem
mete. [1799, letter to Georgia Governor James Jackson]

After
more than a decade of amassing historical documents, maps, and rare
books, Branch, founder of real estate investment firm Branch
Properties, signed on managing curator Kenneth Hosley to help transfer
his treasures to a Buckhead shop. A professed cartophile, Branch is
fascinated by the shifting shapes of land over centuries. “A map gives
you so much more feel than reading a history book,” he says, pointing
to a 1625 map that depicts California as an island. “It’s the extent of
what they knew at the time.” Bibliophiles will enjoy browsing through
benchmark titles of American literature, all first editions, rare
printings, or signed—Gone with the Wind, Atlas Shrugged, To Kill a
Mockingbird, In Cold Blood, an edition of Alice in Wonderland signed
and illustrated by Salvador Dali.

When appraising an item,
Branch explains, you look for three things: authenticity, condition,
and rarity—which is why a 1925 first printing of The Great Gatsby might
be worth $5,000, but its fragile dust jacket would be “a steal” at
$90,000. Similarly, his pristine Audubon turkey, once the much-handled
first page of an “elephant folio,” is worth about $165,000. One might
think it foolhardy to make such an acquisition in a poor economy, but
there’s security in wrapping one’s money around a book or seeing it
mounted in a frame. “It may become a little less liquid,” Branch says,
“but it’s not affected by the price of gasoline.”

Vital Statistics

Address/phone: 2300 Peachtree Road, A-101, 404-352-2990

Website: greyparrotgallery.com

Bargain bin: Early-twentieth-century city maps and signed, first-edition contemporary novels may cost as little as $15.

Photo by Amy Herr