Words: Brent Rosen
Fashion designer Billy Reid, and his eponymous clothing line, call Florence, Alabama home. Known across the fashion world for his Southern-accented work wear and suiting, Billy Reid’s men’s and women’s clothing uses unique fabrics and silhouettes to turn traditional suits, shirts and dresses into something rakish and modern. The Florence store also stocks a number of graphic t-shirts designed for bands like the Alabama Shakes, Dawes, and Driving and Crying, made from decadently soft cotton. The feel and texture of the clothing demonstrates Billy Reid’s belief that sight is not the only sense that matters when judging a garment’s quality.
While the clothes play star, the store itself is incredible in its own right. Billy Reid’s flagship is outfitted with Reid family heirlooms – portraits, sculptures, alcohol accouterments and taxidermy of various kinds – conjuring the sort of house one imagines Flannery O’Connor and Truman Capote would have lived in had they been roommates – so long as part of each room was a dedicated closet. This same design aesthetic permeates Billy Reid’s other stores in New York, Austin, Atlanta, Nashville, Charleston, Dallas, and Houston, but none of them are the brand’s true home.
On the second floor of the building sits Billy Reid’s design studio. Unfinished concrete walls, ancient heart of pine floors, and an original tin ceiling share a patina normally found on the pavement of overused logging roads, but this drained color palette sets off the antique furniture and oriental rugs that form the workspace clusters of various Billy Reid employees. Rolling racks full of clothing, baskets of fabric samples, a wall of clipboards detailing the specifications for each garment in the Fall line, an inspiration board that could inspire a color-blind accountant: I’ve never seen a more beautiful place to work.
Interested? Stop by the Billy Reid pop-up shop during Southern Makers and check out his clothes and design aesthetic for yourself.