Jewelry designer Alexis Bittar is a true showman. He’s got fashion retail in his blood and in the last few years he’s unleashed the old-school Hollywood producer in his soul. After buying back the eponymous jewelry he’s sold years before, he launched a social media series that became an instant viral sensation. He’s a disruptor and an original thinker and we’re super fans. Oh, and he also makes fabulous jewelry.
Alexis Bittar at Indochine by Eric McNatt
Let’s flash back to the very beginning. Did you start selling jewlery on a TV tray on St. Mark’s Place? Or did I dream that?
It was vintage clothes and antique jewelry on a quilt on St. Marks near Cooper Union. I was 13 years old. I needed to be in the middle of the East Village. At all costs.
Wow. Did you grow up in New York?
Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. I had finagled some car service to get these free vouchers, and they would pick me up with these garbage bags of used clothes that I’d buy in Washington Heights, by the pound, then bring them to the East Village. That was my weekend business.
Did you just throw the clothes in the can or did you pick and edit them?
Pick and edit. I’d have to pick through. It was a massive place in Washington Heights on 106th Street. At the time there were very few vintage stores. It was 1982, so they didn’t really exist. Canal, what was it?
Canal Jeans.
Canal Jeans, right and Unique Boutique had some vintage, but there wasn’t a ton.
St. Marks was the place where you would go and find stuff. I was there from 13 to 18. I actually never got off the street until I was 25.
Did you go to school?
No, I’m a dropout. I’m a drug addict dropout.
Let’s hear it for the dropouts. What made you want to do vintage clothes and jewelry?
My parents are history professors, and so they really instilled this history through objects and this understanding of history with fashion was kind of important from the beginning. And then my family would watch old movies. The 39 Steps was the first movie I saw. We would get a quarter allowance a week, so there was not a lot of money happening, and they instilled this sense of entrepreneurship at a really early age. I started selling on the street when I was 10.
Vintage clothing then was from when, the ’30s or ’40s ?
You could still get ’30s and ’40s. But actually what was really moving a lot at the time was ’70s because the whole mod look was really happening. There were a lot of black leather jackets from the ’70s.
And when did you then segue into designing jewelry?
When I got sober. I started designing, maybe even right before I got sober. I started designing and I was like I don’t want to be finding vintage things. I want to create my own. And I basically used all that knowledge and compressed it into design and quickly got picked up by stores, but I continued selling on the street.
When did you start doing the jewelry?
I think probably at 24. I was in Bendel’s and then Takashimaya, Barneys, Bergdorf’s. It was pretty fast, but I still was selling on the street. I was so into the street. This was 1990. So, I got sober in 1990. So ’94, ’95 was when I stopped selling on the street.
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