Is Anne Fontaine a real person?
Yeah, she’s French, about 34 years old, very young. She was a biologist and met a man at a party, married him, and inherited his family’s shirt factories.
You sell only black and white tops. Does that get boring?
I happen to like white shirts. I’m young, but not terribly trendy. I live in the Bronx, so my look stands out there—and even more so at NYU. People there make their own clothes or whatever.
How do you wear a white blouse?
Push-up bra, buttoned down really low. You want to turn heads, not shock people. I wear my collars up for sassiness, flair.
Who do you trust to clean them?
Certainly not the dry cleaners; they’re careless. You should do a gentle-cycle machine-wash in a thinly woven, mesh-fiber laundry bag, so the shirt can’t snag or get mangled.
You wrap the shirts in a graceful, methodical way.
It’s the same ritual in all the stores, as far as Israel and Japan. We wrap the shirt very carefully, tie the ribbon, cut the tissue paper, spray it with Anne’s “White Soul” perfume. At first, I was like, “Oh, my God, is all this necessary?” Now if I send a client away without spraying their package, I feel like I cheated them.