Alan Bilzerian has been a staple in the Massachusetts fashion community for over 5 decades, and continues to make an impact in the fashion industry globally. After getting his Bachelor’s of Science in Finance from Nichols College, Bilzerian found his love for fashion through a post-grad Europe trip. He shifted focus professionally and soon opened Body Shop in 1967 in Worcester, Massachusetts with his wife Bê.“We started in 1967, and over the years I grew out of being one in a group of people in a routine. My idea was to get out of this system of retail and explore my own way of looking for new ideas. I traveled Europe and saw a chance to separate myself from the rest of the pack. We started to make a few things and buy them and it turned into something very successful. The attraction of what people really wanted kept making me go back. It was feeding into my satisfaction with what I had started... It was initially selling Issey Miyake in the 70s in Worcester, Massachusetts.” - Alan BilzerianBody Shop was a fresh and new perspective towards fashion in the ‘60s and ‘70s, stocked with printed corduroy trousers, bellbottomed Landlubber jeans and velvet Western shirts. It allowed Bilzerian to expand his imagination for fashion retail, breaking barriers and pioneering new directions in fashion.
After 13 years in Worcester, Bilzerian and Bê decided to shift the business to the heart of Boston, as they relocated to Newbury Street in 1980 and renamed the storefront Alan Bilzerian. With a keen eye for emerging designers and brands, Alan Bilzerian was one of the first shops to showcase the works of Walter Albini, Yohji Yamamoto, Issey Miyake, Giorgio Armani, Katherine Hamnett, Rick Owens, Alexander McQueen and Rei Kawakubo's Comme des Garçons. Alan and Bê worked extensively to introduce Japan’s “Big 3” to the Western world, and developed deep personal relationships with Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, and Yohji Yamamoto. This helped the designers access a new audience on the other side of the world, as collectors and enthusiasts devoted their attention to the brands that Bilzerian showcased. Alan and Bê also kept a close eye on European fashion, as they purchased Alexander McQueen’s premiere collection and John Galliano’s graduate pieces for their store in Boston. They were also strong supporters of Martin Margiela’s initial collections, bringing the Belgium designers’ genius perspectives to Boston and beyond. Alan and Bê have devoted their lives to curating tasteful and timeless fashion collections to their clients and community. However, they are not focused on the commercialization of clothing. Their goal from the beginning was to showcase creativity through fashion and build a genuine community. 57 years later, their goal has not changed.The ARCHIVE.pdf team was given the opportunity to interview Alan and Bê on a crisp Boston Saturday morning while capturing some of the most iconic and never-seen-before moments in the two’s journey in fashion. We are very excited to showcase this interview and let Alan and Bê tell their amazing stories. It’s time to give them their flowers.
Hello, Alan. Hi, Bê.Bê: Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you again. It's been a while, so you wouldn't remember me. How have you been?Alan: I'm not bad. I'm hanging in there, for an old man. It's a matter of perspective, isn't it? Well, tell me a brief history of the store. How did you two meet?Bê: We met in Paris. And then... [some] years go by. We met again because I was in Italy working for Fibucci, which I'm sure you don't know but he was like one of the big new upcoming stores in Milan. And he asked me to redesign his shop in Milan. So, I came with my friend, we came to the States. We were going around and I wanted to make his store into a diner, an American diner. So, that's when I met Alan again. You think that it was meant to be, that you two both had interest in fashion?Alan: In fact, yeah. I was looking for velvet jeans in the late ‘60s – ‘68, ‘69 – and I was in a showroom in Paris and I asked the guy I was working with, ‘Do you know anybody that carries [an] unusual small production that I can bring back that's exciting?’ So, he gave me an address on the back of a match book and I got in a taxi. I'm in the taxi, I'm going, ‘Oh shit, I'm going to get screwed on this one.’ And he takes me to this residential area in Paris. In the back of the house that I was dropped off at was an incredibly beautiful small factory. I went in the factory, opened the door and they were making these incredible dresses in suede, very, very Native American but much more sophisticated. I wanted to redo everything and the woman said, ‘Can you wait a minute? I'll call the designer.’ I'm there for about 40 minutes and in comes the designer. I said, ‘I want to do this, I want to do that, I want to change this.’ At the end of the conversation with the woman who owned the factory, she said to me, ‘Are you going back to Paris?’And I said yes. And she said, ‘I'll give you a lift.’ So, we got in her mini-moke and we drove into Paris together– we were both with other people [at the time]. But when we drove up to her house, there were three people standing in front of her apartment that were very close friends of mine. When we drove up, they were going, ‘Hey Bilzerian, what are you doing?’Bê: At that time I had a band of musicians from New York staying in my place in Paris. So that's why those friends that he knew from New York were staying with me, and they were surprised to see him, and he was surprised to see the band.
That's an amazing story. So you had the store set up before you even went on that trip to Paris? You've been going to Paris for a while.Alan: Yes. I've been going for quite a few years. I started in 1967, going to London. Well, that's when we first opened, in 1967, and a year and a half after we opened I said, ‘There's not enough here for me.’ So I started to travel to Europe by myself and I did England, France, and Italy, and I started to do Fair Isle sweaters. I don't know if you know Fair Isle sweaters– very, very beautiful. They're very valuable now because nobody does it anymore. And I was collecting all kinds of unusual clothing from the ‘30s. I brought things to Margaret Howell and Jean Howell to remake, because they had the capacity to do that. But I kept on going back every time I had a season to change. And when we started, [it was] in a tiny little shop. It was $115 a month [to] rent– I can't forget these figures. And it just progressed and progressed, and it absorbed my way of working. And I got to know Europe better than any of the [other] companies. Bê: That was good for you. Back in those days, the American generation was not traveling to Europe that much. It was an unknown territory, for you to go on vacation with your parents, but you don't go for work to research. And Alan has a very big bug about trying to find things. He loved to go hunting. That's his passion. He still loves to go hunting for interesting things, new things. That's why he still became known as having new things, different things, things that you would not expect. When we met in Milan after we were together, I introduced Alan to Prada. He had a store in Worcester, and he was the first one to have Prada in the US. People don't even know who the hell he was. Alan: Prada was selling me keychains.Yeah, I thought they started as a luggage outfit. Bê: Prada was working in her father's shop in the Galleria Passarella, and she was making jewelry for the store. That was her first passion, way back then. Because they go by families. A lot of those historical families, especially in Western Europe, were multi-generational. So they would inherit the father’s [business]. Bê: Yeah, you pass them down. Some of them continue successfully, and some are not capable stuck with the parents because the new generation doesn't know how to carry on. Right, right. It's not unusual because Hermes has been, I don't know, maybe three centuries… So is that the same case for you? Riviere told me that you started the shop.Alan: No, In 1967 I opened a shop called Body Shop, and that's where it started, with $115– tiny little shop. And your father was in real estate? Alan: Yeah, my dad was in real estate and I was very bored with what he was doing and I wanted to do something completely off the floor. Five years later we moved to a little bit larger store and it was called Moon. When we moved here, we put it under my name.
What was the reasoning behind putting it under your name? You think it had more prestige doing it that way?Bê: It was me who instigated that. We were driving looking for a location, and we found a location and Alan said, ‘Should we keep calling the store Moon or should we find a new name?’ Alan: At that time it started to be too much related to the moonies. Oh, right, Reverend Moon. Alan: Yeah, exactly. And it was sort of… uncomfortable. Bê: That's when I told Alan, I said, ‘I don't like any of those names that don't represent anything. Use your name.’ And he said, ‘are you sure? You know, my name is pretty strong. It's very ethnic.’ I said, ‘Who cares? I know that a name is good if you become successful. If you're not successful, the name is not good and it doesn't matter.’ Al: That's true, that's very motivating. But how did you come about starting the store in Worcester instead of Boston? Or Boston was an evolution of the store in Worcester? Alan: The Boston store was an evolution of Worcester. It drove me absolutely nuts to have people coming into the store and saying, ‘I had to come from Philadelphia; I had to come from Maine; I had to come from Vermont…’ Every day. Everybody said, ‘What are you doing here?’ And it actually worked on me: I got a beating every day. Plus, there were so many things emerging, where I missed out on a lot that we should have had. Bê: The city has a limitation. Alan: Yeah, you're talking about a city of 250,000 compared to a real city. They don't even have an airport. They have an airport on a thimble, a needle head. I mean, people brought their own planes to come and shop in our store. But I thought in my mind that the city would grow in the speed that I was growing. But it never really came about. So as a consumer it was sort of like a treasure hunt, but as a business person it was very limiting. Alan: Well, yeah, it was. I would be so excited to bring these things to the shop and then it went… it was just an emotional flatness. I was exhausted by the excitement of what I was trying to drive through the customer… They didn't really care. I can't blame them. I mean, they're not doing what I'm doing. And so I just said this is not working for my psychic exposure.
You had the establishment in Boston for how long now? Alan: We opened in 1980. So from 1980 to 2024, it's been an incredible ride. Bê: And it was really a perfect storm. It's all because we moved in ‘80 to Newbury Street. The real estate people told us, ‘You are crazy, you should move here. There's nothing happening.’Alan: Yeah. This is the worst block. Bê: And I said, ‘I'm going to stay here.’ It's better to be in a place that is a little bit exclusive than instead being in the crowd there.But that year, I was invited by the president of Issey Miyiake to come to Japan to go to the hot spring. It was a perfect situation– I really wanted to go to Japan because I felt like something [was] going on there. Because at that time we had the Walkman coming from Japan, we had all the high tech DVDs, and everything was in black... I really wanted to know what was going on, so I went to Tokyo. [Alan] opened the store, he was busy. [When] I arrived in Japan, a friend of mine called me at the hotel. He said, ‘There's a dinner party. I want you to come.’ I just landed after 15 hours. He said, ‘Just take a shower and come.’ So I went to dinner, and he introduced me to Rei Kawakubo from Comme Des Garçons. Alan: They hadn't come to Europe yet. Bê: This is before they debuted. And she invited me to her showroom the next couple of days to go and look at her clothes, her collection. I went there and I was out of my mind. I wanted everything. And she said, ‘Just tell me what you want, and we’ll ship it to you.’ At the end, I said, ‘You should go to Paris and do the show. Your collection's incredible.’ And she said, ‘Will you give me some names? Who to invite to my show? If I do the show in Paris, who should I invite?’ I said, ‘I'll send you a list of stores in the US that you should invite, and the press that I know in Paris.’ The rest of the week, I went with Mr. Tada from Issey Miyake to the hot spring. Then, I came back to Tokyo and I was with the director of Isetan, which was the big department store. He showed me the store and I saw in the corner [on a] stand, I looked at the thing and, my God, these trousers are so unusual, they're really nice. I asked everybody around me, ‘Do you know this company?’ The ticket only said waist, nothing else.Nobody knew. I finally got an address. The taxi drove me there, and it was on the outskirts of Tokyo. I went into that shop and there was an older lady who received me and she was very rough. She said only two, three words of English. ‘Sit down and wait.’ And then a little bit after, the director came in. He took me to the showroom, it was a warehouse kind of place. I saw all those things and I went crazy. I said, ‘This is the best thing that could happen to me. This is unbelievable. You guys have to be showing this, nobody knows you exist.’ And he said, ‘Just put everything you like in a box and we ship it to you.’Then he said, ‘Will you sit here? The designer wants to meet you.’ The designer shows up. It was Yohji [Yamamoto].And we sat down and talked about fashion; about everything. And then the director said, ‘Bê, can you stay an extra day? Because of Japanese law, we have to have documentation.’ Alan: It's very complicated. Because at that time there were quotas on each particular fabric. So anyway, you had a file for a license to ship to America. Bê: So anyway, I said, ‘I fly tomorrow, but I'm going to see. I have to tell my husband I'm not going to be home tomorrow.’ And he put out the phone and said, ‘Call your husband.’I called [Alan] and said, ‘I found this incredible collection, it's going to be better than when we found Armani years ago. It's so new, It's so different. I have to stay.’ Alan said, ‘I don't care what the hell you do. They just stole my Porsche.’ Click. [Laughs] And Yohji started laughing, and he said, ‘I like your husband. I want to meet him.‘Did you find the Porsche?Alan: Well, what happened was half an hour after I went to the front of the building, then to the back, [I said] I know I parked it here. Two minutes later, the phone rings. It's the police: they said they're coming down to arrest me. They said, ‘Your car was in a hit and run.’ Bê: So anyway, Yohji and Mr. Hayashi organized to ship everything. And I came home with all those boxes, and I'm telling you, we opened the box and it was like a fire was happening. Customers were coming in, going crazy. That's when we were at number 12.
I thought you were in this spot?Alan: No no, we were at number 12 because we moved in 1980. We were open for only four years and then I bought this building. So we had to wait till the leases ran out and then redo the building, and then move the store from 12 to 34. Bê: So that's when Yohji and Rei started showing in Paris. Alan: It was perfect timing, it was absolutely perfect timing. Bê: The Yohji collection was all black, Rei was all black. And the first show they did, Women's Wear Daily, had the front page with the big name, ‘Sarunaya,’ bag lady because they had a sweater. So nobody was ready to accept this invasion of fashion from Japan. And it was very racially charged too because the title was ‘Hiroshima Chic.’ It was a very famous title for them. Alan: Well they didn't want to give them a vehicle. [John] Fairchild hated the way they had all of a sudden emerged. And [Yohji and Rei] never spent any money on advertising. So they didn't want to actually give them any position. Bê: Fairchild resisted because Rei and Yohji went to Paris, and Paris embraced them. The French recognized that before New York, and the explosion happened there. [In America], they said, ‘Oh no, we're not into that; the bag lady, the clothes are not clothes, they are trash.’ But the consumer here didn't care about the price. They were into it. I mean, it was insane. And that vehicle made us even stronger. We were the first store in Boston [to carry them]. People, even from New York, were coming here.
The stereotype nationwide is that Boston is a very conservative city, and I would assume back then it was a different atmosphere compared to that. Alan: No, no. It was very, very conservative. It was just that there were pinpoints of timing. People were reading about it, they were waiting for this to happen. They didn't know where it was going to be, who had it, who was going to be the first. We just happened to have the perfect timing of having the emotion to say, you know, I have a feeling something is happening in Japan. Before that, when we met Mr. Tada, who was the president of Issey, I went to the first show in Paris of Issey. It was in the basement of La Coupole, a huge restaurant. It was like 8:30 in the morning, I was dragging my ass to the show. I saw the show and I'm going, are you kidding me? I was so inspired and after the show I went backstage and I said I want this from my store in Worcester. It was in Worcester we started Issey. Rest in peace, it is too bad he passed away. Alan: Yeah, yeah, great friend. He gave this dinner in Paris and he only invited one store out of all the people that were there, everybody else was press. Bê: It was his birthday. Alan: It was kind of like, the way I started as a hippie with long hair, and looking for the most unusual, and found Issey. We had Issey in 1968, 1969, in Worcester, with Prada, [and] Armani Black Label. Bê: But then here in 1980, with Rei and Yohji, it made us even more hungry to go hunting. I mean, we've been lucky, but it was very interesting to find an unknown designer that has something to say, that maybe we suspect it, but we don't know what it is.At that time in Boston– maybe it's a coincidence and it's just a perfect situation– it was a lot of professional people, architects and people in the art field or design field, who were really interested to find us, and what we discovered gave them inspiration, and gave them energy, even in their field. Alan: You know, it was very interesting. Constantly people from Harvard, constantly people from MIT. It's still the meeting road. Architecture and design and fashion are still crossing us all the time. When I want to be inspired, I buy a new architectural book to see who is putting something in Brazil, who's making something anywhere in the world. It can't be just Italian or Japanese.
Do you think the ‘70s and ‘80s were the “golden age of Boston cutting edge fashion”?Alan: The ‘80s for us were so fantastic. We felt that we had something that nobody could really duplicate, and it was so far out compared to what everybody was wearing. Nobody wanted to make the attempt to go towards that. They didn't know what was coming. They didn't know the feeling that was emerging…. It just kept on getting bigger. Kept on getting stronger. I was curious about how folks that were older than I was, how they happened to adapt in the environment on Newbury Street; how Alan Bilzerian, and maybe a couple of other shops, fostered this environment of fashion around the ‘80s. Alan: It was two completely different pictures. We had a completely different symbol of who we were at that time, because we really instigated that entire image of the Japanese. Between Rei, Issey, and Yohji, which were the three pioneers coming to Europe and showing [that] they were the depth in Japanese fashion, we didn't deviate from that. We were committed. Bê: We got so involved with Yohji that he wanted to meet Alan, and the relationship developed into a friendship and then he asked us, ‘Can you help me? I want to open a store in London. Can you do it? Can you help me?’So we ran around looking for the perfect place for Yohji. We put down the idea on paper of what we wanted, he said, ‘You can do whatever you want.’ I said ‘Can you tell me, do you want the store to black? You want it white?’He said, ‘I don’t know, you do it.’ [Laughs] So we opened London and New York at the same time.Alan: We became very close friends. Many times he stayed in our house, when Bê wasn't feeling well. After a show, he got on a plane and went back to Tokyo and called me up and he said, ‘I'm going to be in Boston next week.’Bê: He came just overnight to see me because I was very sick. Alan: Rei and him came here when they were together. They came and spent the weekend with us. That was a long time ago.
How do you feel about those designs becoming the mainstream? Do you think that's a good thing? Alan: They're really not so mainstream. You know what I mean? They're individuals that are always going to be separated from the bunch. Maybe with some of the secondary things that they've done–Like Commes Des Garçons Play. Alan: Exactly. Bê: Or like Yohji does Y-3. So that is more mainstream, and that will be more exposed. Alan: I think that these people are the essence of unusual aspects of taking fabric or understanding… They're very conscious of the street. They're very, very modern in a lot of ways. What I love about those designs is the intensity and the detail to the craft is what I find very attractive. The Japanese aesthetic. There was one example of a business that's been around for 400 years, and all they sold was Gyoza or something, only one item. Alan: And then, they just focus on that one thing. Making it better. And just reiterate, reiterate. Like this here, the average designer wouldn't think about putting a back button to reinforce. And you know how long I’ve had this jacket? Alan: They've taken every single 1940s or 1930s piece that's ever been made apart. And they've gone through the waistbands, the interfacing, all the actual aspects that make the piece not look on the outside very good, but the inside better. And that's one of the keys of success with them, where people say, ‘this is my favorite piece of clothing. What do you have that I can continue with that's exactly like that?’ You know how hard that is to tell somebody, ‘we don't have anything? We don't have another thousand dollar pair of pants?’ That's part of the whole rhythm of what they do. Well they're not alone, right? Because their influence transcended to other designers from other nations like Ann Demuelemeester, Dirk Bikkembergs… Alan: Margiela.And you've got the ones like Poelle, right? What do you think about that designer? Alan: Oh, Carol's a completely different project. Carol's on a completely different wave. I bought Carol's first collection 35 or 40 years ago— I stumble on these things. The nose or something tells me where the smell is and I find it. From Austria, right? Alan: Yeah. I bought his first collection, this guy that I knew had it, and we bought it and it was absolutely incredible. Then he went through some kind of… I don't know what he wanted. And then he reinvented himself again and we were there to continue with him. And now he's like, the god for the kids. Bê: And you have people that emerge like that, like Maurizio [Altieri], we used to go and buy his shoes and his clothes. Maurizio from Carpe Diem.
What brands excite you? Alan: I think still Japanese small companies keep on emerging as technical and fabric-oriented. The best denim in the world is coming from Japan. There's a whole area, like Worcester would be, where denim is being made in Tokyo. That's where every beautiful piece of selvage denim is being made. So you can't say that Japan is already played; that tune is not going away. They work so much harder to make something, like the knife handle that's been made for 400 years. These people will make the best fitting jean in the best fabric that they can, and they won't give the indigo dye formula to anybody. When they die you've got to come up and make your own formula, you have to find the root and make your own dye. And if you can’t find the color that they've been [using] to make the denim so beautiful, too bad. That's your problem. Bê: But I also think that because there's so many names, and so many big names everywhere, you can be in Milan, or in Paris, or on Madison Avenue; everything's the same. Alan: People keep on coming into the store and saying, ‘You know I'm so bored with seeing the same merchandise in every store.’. The success of what we are about is hard work. It's hard work. You go to Europe. We don't go to a show, we're going to pound the pavement, to be exposed [to] basically everything that we can totally feel that there's gonna be longevity. I met Margiela, before Margiela was ‘Margiela’, because he worked for Gaultier. When I met him, I knew what he had done, and then I went to his first show. We bought it for Worcester. We sold 12% before sale [Laughs]. I couldn't even swallow, and I said, ‘Oh shit, this is unbelievably bad.’ So sometimes you're not on the road to where the consumer is. Bê: If you want to make a lot of money, you go mainstream. We are not.It can't be just the money. It has to be something else. Alan: It's the passion. It's the emotion. It was always the stimulation, more than having a big, beautiful store. I mean, Barney's did their thing, and it’s sad that they're not around, because people need to see different images of big and small. Would you say that your primary customer respects you and stays with you over all this time because they know the amount of work that it takes? Is it trial and error? Alan: I think they're committed to us because they feel that the staff has the same allegiance [to them] as the designer has to us. You know, we're family on both sides. We're family to the designer, and family to our staff, and the consumer reads that. The people who shop here all the time, they see the same stability. Bê: We have customers who have been shopping here for 30 years. You know, a customer from Boston, she went through a very hard time health-wise. Our staff after work would go and visit her, on their time. Then they come here, the customer comes here and we treat them with respect and the consideration of, you know, their advice. It's something that you can’t have in department [stores], it's very difficult to cultivate that. Yeah, sustainability, right? Bê: Talking about the time when Boston was so hot, that’s when we decided to ask Jean-Paul Gaultier to do a fashion show in Boston. That was very special. Jean-Paul came in at that time, he gave carte blanche to do the whole thing on our own. He shipped the collection, and he flew from Tokyo to Boston that day to come to the show. Alan: That was a great time. Bê: Back in those days, we could do those things. It was very interesting.
So how's the evolution in your eyes, from since you opened the store until now? What's your overall feeling about the whole fashion world?Alan: I think people are very interested. I think the new generation is very, very conscious of how they look. I think there's always going to be, even if you're on your phone all day long, I think people are still very, very interested… There's an evolution, though. Bê: There was a gap at one point, that the young generation, I mean what we call the young, was not as interested. But then now is the rebirth of young people, but really young– 17, 18– who are really passionate about real fashion. Alan: Yeah, it was a little stop gap there. Bê: The gap was because that generation was so focused on social media that they lost the value of real— the identity of fashion— activity. Alan: That's what happened. That period was very strange. It was almost like a numb period. Everybody was numb with social media. Bê: And then the real creativity kind of was numb, too. Now it's like a rebirth. The energy in music, in fashion, in sport, in everything, is so new.People are realizing they need to touch more than visualize the product. Alan: Well, they're just getting through the massage of COVID.Bê: We just hired a young girl who graduated from university. She's 24, 25, and she said to me at the interview that she wished she didn’t have social media anymore. She wanted to cancel her account. She said it invaded her life, and she doesn't want that anymore. Well, you know, like my son, he wants to invest in archival products, like the camera, [and the] fashion. And it's the same thing for music collectors. They want to get the vinyl records. The same thing. They want to see the history. Alan: They want to go back and really trace where this whole thing came from. They want to know, they want to understand. They can't even believe that we're still using Macintosh and JBL speakers. We're like from goddamn, the cave land. They go, ‘is that what's playing this music?’ Because everybody's synthetic. There's no depth in what we really see in people.
