Fashion designers, store managers and corporate executives tight-lipped
Kyle Lowe/The Collegian
The clothing store Anthropologie, in a secretive advertising campaign to promote their new BHLDN wedding dress collection, released the bridal line Monday to an enthusiastic number of online sales.
BHLDN, pronounced beholden, is an exclusive online collection that does not sell the products in Anthropologie stores.
“BHLDN is an online-only collection,” Annette Espinosa, sales manager of Anthropologie in Fashion Fair Mall, said. “There are 12 dresses ranging from above-the-knee to tea length gowns.”
The modern-but-traditional designs in the collection appeal to brides with a shabby-chic style. Similar to the everyday wear Anthropologie sells, the collection was designed to fit the store’s aesthetic.
“These dresses definitely aren’t your typical wedding dress,” Espinosa said. “The collection embodies the kind of dress you would find in a vintage store. It combines elements of the past and present.”
Exclusivity, a key theme of the collection, made its way into the way the dresses were promoted. Despite the anticipation built up by brides-to-be across the country, the ad campaign was a low-key buildup to the release of the collection itself.
Store managers were extremely tight-lipped about BHLDN, and executives at Anthropologie’s corporate headquarters in Philadelphia were hard to reach.
Multiple attempts to contact Anthropologie executives ended at front desk assistants, who said callers needed specific names to be dispatched to any of the available departments.
Equally tight-lipped were the collection’s designers.
“I reviewed your list of questions and you should probably be contacting Beholden [sic] directly,” Erika Glantz, an account executive to designer Tracy Reese, said in an e-mail.
“Tracy designed some exclusive dresses for them, however she cannot speak to who their customer is and who they specifically target. Tracy Reese has only designed bridal dresses for Beholden and does not collaborate with any other stores/websites for bridal.”
The BHLDN website, which prior to Monday didn’t contain information about the collection, posted information the day the collection was released.
A quiz that allows the website’s visitors to discern what kind of bride they are, along with antique pictures of couples marrying through the ages, are two main features on BHLDN.com.
Questions sent to Tracy Reese’s showroom in New York, one of which was “What was the inspiration behind each of the dresses?” was answered in an email, “Her dresses are for the non traditional [sic] bride that wants to wear something beautiful and special.”
Executives at Urban Outfitters, which owns Anthropologie, could not be reached for comment.
“You have to send in a request to talk to anyone,” a front desk assistant at the Urban Outfitters corporate offices in Philadelphia, said.