Trinity Place is a Long Hop Down in the Financial District

Because of the storm, hours for stores in the financial district may be disrupted.

TO gather conclusive evidence that the pinstriped, meat-and-potatoes glory days of the financial district are over, one need only survey the area’s retail landscape.

Brooks Brothers, that erstwhile bastion of testosterone, is now a glassy emporium selling skinny pants and deracinated tartans: preppy in quotation marks. Syms, the time-honored source of good Republican cloth coats at democratic discounts, is out of business. And across the street from its fading signage, Trinity Place has arrived, a mysterious department store with a faint international flavor whose departments, thus far, are all for women.

Not the hard-charging lady raiders of Wall Street, or even “Working Girl,” but maybe, weirdly, the young women of Williamsburg? Could Lena Dunham’s aesthetic already have been sucked up by corporate boardrooms and sent out for reproduction in foreign factories? Or is she just drawing from what is already out there?

Either way, I could easily imagine the costume director of Ms. Dunham’s hit HBO show having a field day here with such flighty perplexities as a polka-dot jumpsuit (very Jemima Kirke), a pointed-collar blouse with shoulder cutouts or a studded velvet bustier marked, with peculiar precision, at $84.76.

The stock of Trinity Place is unpredictable and often, to my happy surprise, quite charming. Who could resist $90 totes with trompe l’oeil renderings of the Chanel, Balenciaga and Hermès It-bag hits of the gaudy Aughts? Or a cozy oversize sweater printed with dice?

But the décor feels somewhat wearily influenced by Anthropologie, the fauxhemian mall behemoth owned by Urban Outfitters and much reviled by the Tumblr generation. Used books, doubtless bought by the yard, scattered here and there. An old globe; a blue-tinted wineglass; a rattan trunk. Dried hydrangea poking insouciantly out of a granny boot.

JANE BIRKIN and Serge Gainsbourg, or some more chaste combination, were crooning over the sound system as I edged hesitantly around a half-full gumball machine stuck by some leather wing chairs, into an unfinished dressing room with a one-shouldered, red-white-and-blue dress — also polka-dot, in a light cotton. (So far, Trinity Place is displaying little regard for seasonability, as if its target client might be whisked to the tropics by a smitten, adulterous boss at any moment. Since it opens at 8:30 a.m. on weekdays, it’s also a great place to pick up what a former colleague, back in reckless 2000, termed a “morning-after outfit.”)

The dress fit just fine, but I was distracted by an elaborate set of policies posted on the wall that stressed the extreme fragility of the store’s formal-wear: forbidding beverages while trying it on; urging the removal of jewelry and “all body piercing”; and stressing that one must refuse the well-intentioned help of “friends or loved ones” in manipulating its “delicate” zippers. While the shoddy construction of midpriced clothing may be something American customers now take for granted (see the recent, earnest but excellent book “Overdressed,” by Elizabeth L. Cline), demanding that they treat it as precious couture seems a bit much. Why not make the zippers stronger?

Anyhoo, after reinserting my rhinestone navel ring and retrieving my Big Gulp of Dr Pepper, I proceeded to Trinity Place’s shoe corner, which is dominated by a brand called Le Bunny Bleu (whose parent company, Women’s Wear Daily reported, is behind this entire venture, its first in the United States) — also, I learned later, the name of a noted pornographic actress. But the footwear here is not high-heeled Lucite platforms but synthetic-leather loafers, oxfords and multiple iterations of the ballet flat, a style inexplicably beloved by countless would-be Audrey Hepburns across town, though it is a proven ankle-fattener. The signature version has little bunny ears stitched on it and comes in chewing-gum colors — at $49, a cut-rate version of the famous Marc Jacobs Mouse.

Not everything at Trinity Place is so cutesy. I really liked one of those solve-everything zippered black jackets: Yohji Yamamoto in proportion but not price ($120.64). For the Eileen Fisher crowd that might accompany their daughters on a jaunt here after craning their necks at the cranes rebuilding the World Trade Center, there are droopy muddy-colored separates by a Spanish designer named Toni Fransesc, who designs collections with names like Urban Forest. Ms. Cline, meanwhile, might be pleased by the presence of striped socks produced entirely with wind power and fair-trade jewelry strewn across an old armoire.

But most of Trinity Place is pure wanton frivolity, like the red chiffon dress splayed out alongside a candelabra on a smoky glass table near the exit, as if waiting to be ravished. The man in the gray flannel suit has definitively been supplanted, it seems, by a “girl” in a crotch-grazing cocktail dress; the bull usurped, not by a bear but ... a bunny.

 

Trinity Place

61 Broadway (entrance on Trinity Place), (917) 300-1184; trinityplaces.com.

I.P.O. A collection of low-price brands popular in Europe has quietly sprouted up in the battered financial district.

PENNY STOCKS The mood is Depression era: jazz in the background and mostly romantic, fluttery, whimsical clothes, as if to offset the general economic malaise.

HEDGE FUND The staff members are cheerful and helpful but not entirely clued-in; men’s and children’s departments are still to come.