Sounds more like a closing ceremony to us.
Clothing brand and retailer Opening Ceremony will shut down all of its multi-brand stores in NYC, Los Angeles and Japan by the end of 2020.
Since opening its first brick-and-mortar location in 2002, Opening Ceremony has become a staple store of lower Manhattan with a cult following. Founders Carol Lim and Humberto Leon took to Instagram Tuesday to break the news.
“It’s incredibly emotional for us to announce today that we will be closing our Opening Ceremony retail locations sometime in 2020,” Lim and Leon wrote. “We’ve made a decision to focus on growing Opening Ceremony collection and brand…Our brand takes the beautiful spirit of experimentation, fun and collaboration embodied in our stores and imbues this energy into the clothing we make.”
Opening Ceremony will continue to operate as a single brand under the leadership of Italian fashion company New Guards Group, which is owned by Farfetch. On Monday, the Milan-based holding company — which backs street style brands like Off-White, Palm Angels and Heron Preston — acquired Opening Ceremony, reports Business of Fashion. It plans to relocate Opening Ceremony’s in-house production to Milan and move its retail website to Farfetch.
Known for supporting emerging brands and designers, Opening Ceremony is no stranger to internal challenges. In 2018, the brand made major staff cuts for financial reasons. Despite the setbacks, Opening Ceremony continued to build a community of customers who craved clothes and fresh fashion experiences through its retail shops. Whether you were looking for an oversize Opening Ceremony bag or a haute hoodie, this store had it all.
“Hundreds upon hundreds of designers have called our stores home for their very first collections and it’s amazing how each store took on a life of its own,” the founders wrote on Instagram. “With our constant desire to reinvent, we will return to creating stores, but with a different mindset and perspective in order to wow people who are self-proclaimed shop-til-we-drops like us.”