There were pedestrians ambling and drinkers drinking alfresco on the warm June day that Carla Sozzani stood outside what would shortly become 10 Corso Como New York, the American outpost of her pioneering Italian concept shop. That descriptor, now common for boutiques that stock not only fashion, but also art, furniture, books and whatever else tickles their proprietors, could well have been coined for hers. (According to her, it was.)
“It has the feel of an Italian piazza, no?” Ms. Sozzani said on a site visit to New York, looking out toward the water. “I hope it stays like this.”
But we were at the South Street Seaport — cobblestoned, yes, but not often imagined as Italianate — a New York landmark that has had many lives: bustling port, scrubby artists’ community, hurricane victim, tourist trap. Ms. Sozzani’s store is part of its continuing transformation.
10 Corso Como is to be one of the tent poles of the new new Seaport, which its developer, the Howard Hughes Corporation, hopes to coax into a hub of culture and commerce in New York City.
The company is betting on Ms. Sozzani as one of the new local attractions to do the pulling. Its chief executive, David R. Weinreb, spent five years courting her, and the developer is a partner with her on the store.
“She was initially not interested in opening a store in New York,” Mr. Weinreb said. “There were dozens of calls to her.” With the store now about to open, Mr. Weinreb added, he is confident “Carla will in fact be the pillar that we wanted in the area.” (The company declined to comment on the terms of the partnership, though Hughes has been known to subsidize rent for its commercial tenants.)
Ms. Sozzani’s original 10 Corso Como — at number 10 Corso Como, in a former garage in the Porta Nuova neighborhood of Milan — opened in 1991, and in the 27 years since, it has become a much imitated blueprint for high-end retail. The store sells luxury fashion from Prada, Gucci, Dior and Comme des Garçons, along with artists’ editions and ceramics.
Ms. Sozzani had been a magazine editor before opening the store — she was famously fired from the Italian edition of Elle — and considered her store a kind of living magazine. It was a place to browse and linger as well as to buy. (She put chairs everywhere for the purpose.)
The store opened around the time of the Slow Food movement, and Ms. Sozzani envisioned a slow shopping. 10 Corso Como began life as a photography gallery, and now includes a bookstore, a cafe and restaurant, and an on-site, three-room hotel.
“Today, it’s so obvious,” Ms. Sozzani said. “At the beginning, it was difficult. People did not really know what it was.” Her store, set back from the main drag of the promenade, had no windows on the street. Its front courtyard was a garden.
Fashion can be a racy business, in speed and in sensuality, but Ms. Sozzani, 71, with her whitened blonde curls and immaculate wardrobe, has calmly and cannily lasted out the tidal cycles of trend and counter-trend. In a moment of click-to-buy instantaneity, Ms. Sozzani looks like a luxury abbess, a lone beacon of calm.
From its roots in Italy, 10 Corso Como has unfurled widely. There are branches around the world, in Shanghai, Beijing and Seoul; the 28,000-square-foot Seaport shop, which opens Sept. 7, is the first in the United States.
It sits all on one floor, where books run seamlessly into tchotchkes into high-end fashion into a gallery space, which will have a separate entrance. For the opening, Ms. Sozzani is showing photography by Helmut Newton and a lighting installation — for sale — by Michael Anastassiades.
Like its brethren, this 10 Corso Como includes a restaurant and bar. And as with all the Corso Comos, Ms. Sozzani’s partner, Kris Ruhs, has decorated the space with the usual sunburst motifs and scribbly 10 Corso Como logo, with hand-wrought tiles and mosaics, and vases of the glass flowers that signal that, wherever in the world one is, one is still in Ms. Sozzani’s garden.
Whether this will be enough of a draw to lure New York’s luxury shoppers off Madison Avenue and out of SoHo is a potent question. The Hughes Corporation has invested significant energy and resources into rebuilding the area, which was battered by Hurricane Sandy in 2012, and also seems intent on scrubbing away the memory of its prior life as a grubbier sort of mall and out-of-towners’ entertainment.
“Over the years, the district has been loved by New Yorkers, but it really became a tourist trap,” said Saul Scherl, the president of the New York Tri-State Region for Howard Hughes.
Further openings are well underway, part of a rebranding of the area that Howard Hughes hopes will draw foot traffic and, ultimately, more commercial tenants. (Plans for a residential tower were scrapped in 2015 after an outcry from the community.)
“By 2020, we’ll have approximately 70 percent more retail than we had in 2014,” said Jessica Lappin, the president of the Downtown Alliance, whose territory, south of Chambers Street, includes the Seaport.
Sarah Jessica Parker’s SJP Collection store is under construction opposite 10 Corso Como, and a Roberto Cavalli boutique will open next door to a Big Gay Ice Cream shop soon. Mr. C Seaport, a boutique hotel run by Maggio and Ignazio Cipriani, the younger generation of the famous Cipriani hospitality family, opened its doors in July.
“When I moved in, there was literally nothing in the area,” said Ignazio Cipriani, who lived for 10 years in the nearby financial district.
For all that, the area is still off the beaten track for many, as Aurora James, the founder and creative director of Brother Vellies, a made-in-Africa designer accessories label, learned when she teamed with Howard Hughes to open a shop on Fulton Street in 2014.
“The initial reaction when I would say the South Street Seaport was confusion and shock,” Ms. James said about the location for a brand like hers. The most frequent visitors, she added, were “tourists that came in smelling like Abercrombie and Fitch.”
Ms. James closed her shop earlier this year and relocated to the Greenpoint section of Brooklyn.
“I was so grateful for that to be a community and world for us for a certain time,” she said of the Seaport area. “But, ultimately, I need to be in an authentically creative area, which is why I moved to Brooklyn.”
Could Ms. Sozzani change that perception? The Hughes Corporation hopes so, and she herself is stretching out of her usual comfort zone to try.
“I was very close to Azzedine Alaïa, and he used to say, ‘Every day I learn something. I am a debutante, every day,’” she said. “That’s the way it should be.”
