Where you can get old-school luncheonette coffee with your bespoke Bode tuxedo. …
When designer Emily Bode and her partner, Aaron Aujla of Green River Project, heard their neighborhood coffee guy was retiring, they were naturally distraught. The Classic Coffee Shop on Hester St. was right next door to the Bode retail store, and around the corner from the couple’s apartment. Open for over 40 years, it was one of those spots that had survived several waves of gentrification and became an institution, with prices that seemed straight out of the George H.W. Bush administration. Also: “The coffee was great,” Aujla says. They went by almost every day. But proprietor Carmen Morales was ready to spend more time with his wife, and the final service was set for Christmas Eve.
So when Morales’s lease came open, Bode and Aujla sensed both a chance to fulfill one of Bode’s longtime dreams, which was to have a tailor shop of her own, and to preserve the spirit of a local institution.
The Bode Tailor Shop, which opened yesterday, is the second outpost in Bode’s growing menswear empire. Customers at the store next door can bring over new purchases for alterations, and owners of Bode’s delicate lace shirts and antique quilted jackets can bring them in for mending. “With the tailor shop, not only can we create a community in and around our store and service that community, but we can also extend our product life cycle to the longest it can be,” says Bode, whose own closet is full of soulful hand-me-down sweaters and jackets that have been lovingly mended rather than
