Eclectic and Personal, A Détacher Outfits a Niche Audience

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Critical Shopper

By Molly Young

Monika Kowalska was born in Poland and moved to Baltimore at age 9, when she imagined herself becoming an airline pilot. Instead, she grew up to be a designer and professional magpie, founding a company that combined her clothing line with objects collected on her travels.

She started A Détacher in 1998 with $60,000 in the bank, and grew the business in a manner — slowly, steadily — that would mystify the venture capitalists who are increasingly swashbuckling into fashion.

Ms. Kowalska has limited her retail presence, for example, to a single store on the northernmost border of Little Italy (a recent relocation from a few blocks north, on Mott Street) and her wholesaling to a few dozen outposts. The company is kept afloat by a handful of employees. Ms. Kowalska writes the program notes for her runway shows herself, and sometimes models the clothes. One season she turned her teenage daughter’s handwriting into a print.

Collections emerge in high-concept dollops. Past shows have been inspired by disobedience, sports injuries, grandmotherliness, divorce, the novelist Elena Ferrante, camouflage, Mount Vesuvius, knots, folklore, futurism and female coal-mine workers of the Victorian era. Flipping through photos of old shows is like treating yourself to a rapturous hourlong session with the “Random” button on Wikipedia.

The current collection favors roomy playclothes in prints and colors straight from 1970s album art. A cotton top with a jumbo cloud print ($450) has dropped sleeves that yawn at mid-arm, as though a puff sleeve got drunk and keeled over. A marigold frock ($680) is featherlight to the touch and cavernous in shape, less like wearing a dress than being hugged by a bolt of silk.

Some of the smocklike items toe the (surprisingly thin) line between “graceful” and “escaped sanitarium patient,” but this doesn’t seem like a misapprehension that would bother the store’s target demo. A burnt-caramel sack dress ($575) is fashioned from the sort of stiff cotton Barbara Stanwyck’s character wore in “Night Nurse.” It loops over the shoulders with coarse rope straps.

After visiting the store one afternoon, I had lunch with a friend and admitted that I was struggling to nail down the customer.

“That’s easy,” my friend said. “The A Détacher woman subscribes to Architectural Digest, Artforum and Apartamento. Her heroines are Annabelle Selldorf and Eva Hesse. Her recent Google image searches include Tina Chow, custom cowhide rug, weekend ceramic class and acupuncture Hudson Valley. She met her financier fiancé when he came into the gallery she assistant-managed. She professes to admire Basque culture above all others.”

Suddenly it all made sense.

A Détacher also offers treasures and souvenirs for the woman in question, like a dish of vintage museum postcards of Piero della Francesca paintings and bundles of cedar rope incense from Nepal ($12). All is illuminated by ceiling lights scattered in no particular pattern, as if someone had tossed a handful of bulbs upward and let them stick where they may. (It looks cool.)

On one visit, I watched a man pick up a silver vessel shaped like a lima bean ($195) and display it to his wife. “Is this an antique hot water bottle?” he asked. “I think I need this. Do I need this?”

“No,” said his wife.

A lot of the items in A Détacher fit into the category of things-you-obviously-don’t-need. Like a Peruvian horn dish ($32) scaled to fit a handful of cashews, or a magenta yarn-fringed pillow that looks like a scalped Muppet ($253). We can all live without these curiosities, yet they will make a certain kind of person — a person whose tastes converge with Ms. Kowalska’s — exceptionally happy. The store feels personal to a degree verging on taboo, like sneaking upstairs at a dinner party to poke around the host’s walk-in closet.

It’s also an experiment in behavior modification. The quantity of goods at A Détacher is spare, and few are displayed at eye level; a retail consultant would walk in and pass out from the sheer defiant inefficiency of the merchandising. Many things are at ankle-level or knee-level, on cinder blocks. Ms. Kowalska’s arrangements demand that you view each treasure at a specific and uncommon elevation — and why not? It’s rare that a proprietor thinks this carefully about every last inch of her wares. No doubt she knows best.

Near the front of the store, a repurposed birdbath holds a passel of knee socks. In the Norman Rush novel “Mortals,” a character observes that “the love of a woman with a funny mind is the definition of paradise,” and I’m pretty sure he was describing the sort of woman who looks at a birdbath and thinks: “Innovative sock storage solution.”

In my case, I went straight home and typed “antique birdbath free shipping” into eBay, hoping to replicate the gesture. My search results were discouraging.

Underplay These clothes are not for flaunting. The A Détacher woman would rather look interesting than hot.

Right of Way Service is gently hospitable. The music is low, the windows are open, the saleswoman is happy to help.

Everyday No surprise: The store’s name means “to be detached.” All interpretations of the term — serenity, renunciation, otherness — make sense here.

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