By: Alan Behr, Phillps Nizer Partner and Fashion Law Practice Chair

The inexplicable year 2020 was marked by technology connections that curiously spun into the fashion business worldwide.  It is easy to point to the new Zoom wardrobes people have been buying online as a good example, but consider for a minute some far more circuitous connections:

That had earlier come to mind when a neighbor’s dog, a rescue animal with emotional problems, charged at me and sank her fangs into my right kneecap, tearing open the sturdy denim of my Levi’s 511 jeans.  The owner offered to pay for my pants.  As I managed the bleeding, I explained that was the least of it, and lucky her that I had just changed out of a Henry Poole suit.  The tech connection continues from there: while going for my tetanus shot, I asked for a COVID-19 test, and it came back positive.  For reasons not clear to anyone, I spent a lucky quarantine completely asymptomatic, but that gave me plenty of time to reflect on all that and to consider future posts I hope to provide.

For now:

Tailors such as Henry Poole depend on foreign trade.  (Well-dressed London men remain ubiquitous, but there simply are not enough of them to keep all the houses going.)   For the tailors, even more so than for me, not being able to travel internationally was an enormous disruption—one that, without concessions from landlords and others, could prove ruinous.  As reported in The New York Times, most of the properties on the Row are owned by a single landlord, The Pollen Estate, just under four-hundred-years old and therefore mercifully able to think long term.[1]  It gave the houses the rent accommodations necessary to hold them over until business improves.

We have seen similar prudent arrangements made in New York City where landlords who see the bigger picture and, if permitted by their lenders—which sometimes have a say in the matter and which also have to think in broader terms if their own customers are to remain viable—have been similarly forgiving.  Accommodations can take several forms, including forgiving late payments, stretching out due dates for payments, abatement of rent for a period of time, permanent reductions of rent, and allowing tenants to sublet or to surrender all or a portion of rented space (sometimes in combination with the foregoing or in exchange for lengthening a lease term).

Despite rumors to the contrary, the practice of law can sometimes be a satisfying experience, and it has been a particular joy at the firm to help our fashion clients and so many others navigate through the perfect storm brought on by the pandemic.   

And so, our suggestion to the fashion community at the start of a new, and let’s please hope, better year: retrieve that lease you signed and have a good look.  Work with counsel and make sure that you understand what it says about your options when things might go wrong.  And while you are at it, have counsel do some digging on your landlord to find out how it responded to tenant problems during the pandemic.  As always with commercial law: what you understand now, when things are relatively quiet, can only benefit you later—when, after all, who can tell?

[1] Norges Bank Investment Management (the sovereign wealth fund of Norway), holds a majority interest in The Pollen Estate.