NANCY SCHNEIDER: FOREVER IN JEANS
 Kate Maier
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(8/27/2008) For the month of August, it’s been all about the jeans at Nancy and Company on Newtown Lane in East Hampton, where a promotion cooked up by the company’s publicity team has drawn women of all shapes and sizes into the store for expert fittings on fashion’s biggest basic.
Nancy Schneider, the owner of the small chain with stores in Manhattan, East Hampton, and Southampton, has put her 40 years of experience in the fashion business to good use by coaching her customers on the dos and don’ts of fitting, a process she likes to call “jeans therapy.”
According to a press release, every woman should have a minimum of five pairs in their “must-have jeans wardrobe,” including “one perfectly fitted blue ‘dress’ jean, white jeans, black jeans, a soft pastel in cords or velvet (in new fall colors), and a casual, comfy pair of denim.”
“Whether it’s jeans or not, we’re always going to help fit them,” the raspy-voiced fashion veteran said last week. She opened her first store on Madison Avenue in 1968, and has been watching trends in women’s clothing reincarnate ever since.
In 1969, she fitted Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis for hot pants. “It made the headlines of every newspaper,” she recalled. “Jackie O was actually a good customer. It was a fabulous time, I’d like to get back to those days,” she said.
“I was the first one to have designer clothing on Madison Avenue.” The way that vintage is selling these days, “I should have kept my stuff — I could have retired on it,” she said.
In the late 1960s, patchwork jeans, made in Paris and selling for almost $200 a pair, were made out of used Levi’s shipped over from the United States and then back across the Atlantic after they were sewn. Only a few years before, Ms. Schneider was calling them dungarees and rolling them up — another trend that has resurfaced.
“Oh, I want those days back! Bell-bottoms we were dragging on the floor . . . I wish I kept my patched-up jeans,” she said.
Now, the recycled patchwork trend has moved on to cashmere. Ms. Schneider has several striking examples of the new concept in her store made by Burning Torch, a design company based in Los Angeles. Cashmere sweaters start around $650, but other equally flattering knit sweaters cost around $125.
Despite an astounding selection of denim, corduroy, and twill, including the super-comfy Dead Sexy line — “not only are they fabulous, they come in a palette of 40 colors” — there’s plenty more to shop for at Nancy and Company. Tops, scarves, shoes and accessories are all lovingly picked out by Ms. Schneider.
“I love the needles in the haystacks — that’s my quest — the little things in the corner that nobody knows. I love the search for something new,” she said.
As for jeans, “for a while, you couldn’t even sell them,” she said. “Jeans were dead. But more and more people now, as you know, are wearing jeans, even wearing jeans with formal tops, things I would have sold for a wedding. We love to wardrobe people, we put it together,” she said.
Ms. Schneider, who carries a spectrum of fashion for women of all ages, isn’t the type to dress someone up like a fool to make an extra buck. “We take care of fitting them properly so they want to come back,” she said.
Linda Webb, one of Ms. Schneider’s stylists, was wearing a pair of silver Avenue Montaigne skinny pants with a tapered leg — a look Ms. Schneider would not recommend for a customer without Ms. Webb’s body type.
“A lot of customers have stayed with us, and my customers are getting older with me. I don’t want the mothers to look like the daughters. You want to be hip at your level, but you want to be age appropriate,” she explained.
For fittings, Ms. Schneider is pretty well versed in eyeballing a customer’s size, and will guide them in the direction of the most flattering cut. Where the jeans sit on the waist is crucial. “Low-rise jeans are usually for teens while high-rise screams ‘mom jeans!’ ”
Vitamina Jeans, imported from Milan, tend to be skinny and stretchy. “You can’t have heavy calves with jeans like this,” Ms. Schneider explained on a walk-through of her store.
“Christopher Blue is a little bigger around the hips,” which is very flattering for shorter women with curves but “baggy around the butt on the tall and thin ones,” she said. “Someone who wears Christopher Blue doesn’t wear Vitamina or Avenue Montaigne.”
After many years at the same location in New York City, Ms. Schneider relocated in March from Madison to Lexington Avenue between 80th and 81st Streets. She’s happy about the bigger space and about being part of “a real neighborhood” with more foot traffic. She’s had the store in Southampton since 1978.
As for East Hampton, where she set up shop in 1987, “we’re like the last of the mom and pops. It’s been 21 years here. No one’s been around that long,” and with rents going up and more fashion competition, “it’s harder now than it was, there’s no doubt about it.”
Ms. Schneider has no plans to decamp. The store “just evolved after so many years,” she said, adding that she still loves every second of her job. “I’ll probably die on the floor, but why not?”