The Magda Butrym SoHo flagship on Mercer Street opened its doors this week, a move that marks the Polish designer’s most committed bet yet on the American market. And the timing was not accidental: the store launch coincided with the brand’s first-ever New York Fashion Week runway show, which FashionUnited reports took place on 13 September.
The space at 170 Mercer Street is not small. The boutique spans over 4,300 square feet across three levels, with 28-foot ceilings achieved by removing the floor between the ground and first storeys. Stockholm-based studio Stamuli handled the design. For a bootstrapped brand, it reads less like a retail opening and more like a statement of intent.
Why New York, and Why Now
The US is Butrym’s largest market and, tariffs notwithstanding, her fastest-growing. Jakub Czarnota, chief executive at Magda Butrym, confirmed to WWD that the US is the brand’s number-one market for direct-to-consumer sales. He described a strategic pivot from occasionwear, where the brand first made its name on platforms such as Mytheresa, towards what he called ‘daily statement wear’: a 360-degree wardrobing model that asks more of the customer’s wardrobe than just one show-stopping dress.
Butrym had already road-tested New York. A pop-up boutique ran at 140 Wooster Street from 31 March to 30 June. The permanent space is the logical next step; the designer herself said the city has pushed her to think about wearability more seriously.
It is still rare to make it as a woman designer. Less rare in New York, where Tory Burch, Rachel Scott, and Veronica Leoni all hold meaningful ground, but rare enough that the context is worth keeping.
The Collection: Aprons, Silk Layers, and Natalia LL
For the Spring 2027 show, Butrym reached towards the work of Natalia LL, the Polish feminist artist whose photographs, drawings, and moving-image works made her a pioneer of feminist art behind the Iron Curtain. Butrym put her identification plainly: ‘She was fighting for women in art and came here and nothing was easy, and I feel the same sometimes.’
What that produced on the runway was a departure. A designer celebrated for leather jackets and structural, cinched-waist silhouettes gave a large portion of her collection over to the apron, romanticised through the memory of her grandmother in the kitchen. Translucent silk layers, stacked in various combinations, replaced the usual armour.
The results were mixed in the most interesting way. At their strongest, the looks pressed the sheer against the contemporary: a midi-length nude slip worn beneath a translucent trench, pockets loaded with roses, carried both airiness and self-possession as the model moved down the runway. A shorter version of that silhouette would earn its keep in a downtown wardrobe without much effort.
The last look, styled with a 1960s updo, polite tights, and pearls, felt slightly haunted. Whether that was the point or a miscalculation is the kind of question runway reviews are good for and answers to are slow in coming.
There was enough for the existing fanbase to work with. A structured blazer with feathers at the neck, a cocktail dress with them at the bust, tights reworked with crochet-edged underwear, and sleeveless button-front dresses worn over slips, echoing the house dresses from her resort line. The Butrym codes were present. The question the collection posed was whether lightness can carry the same charge as structure.
Nara Smith was in the front row. For a collection negotiating between domestic tradition and contemporary self-determination, Smith’s presence, given her online persona as an enthusiastic practitioner of what some call ‘trad wife’ aesthetics, was either serendipitous casting or quietly deliberate. Either way, it read.
The Magda Butrym SoHo flagship on Mercer Street is now open. The brand’s plan, according to WWD, was to open the first week to VIPs, top stylists, and key local clients before the runway show drove a second wave of traffic. That second wave has now arrived. Whether the collection’s softer register converts as readily as the leather jackets is the bet Butrym is placing, and New York is the place to find out.
