Kai Avent-deLeon has received an ungodly amount of press since she opened her cult fashion, jewelry, and housewares boutique Sincerely, Tommy in 2014, and it’s easy to make snap assumptions about why — the store’s off-the-beaten-path location in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, the fact that she’s only 27, the fact that she used to work for Chanel. One look at her popular Instagram account, though, and it’s immediately clear why she’s so sought-after: Her aesthetic is just. so. right. If there were an Instagram we could live inside, it would be hers, from the travel photos, to the abstract art, to the vintage beige interiors, to the carefully styled pairings of muted 80s vases with little marble sculptures. Avent-deLeon is simply one of the most stylish women out there now, and it’s impossible not to get sucked into the lifestyle that Sincerely, Tommy embodies.
Hence we couldn’t help but jump on the bandwagon and put together our own profile the store, yet rather than focusing on its clothing, we wanted to focus on Avent-deLeon’s intuitive skill at contrasting textures, shapes, and eras — a sensibility she says she owes in part to her grandmother, whose brownstone she now lives in, down the street from the store. “She had a very signature style,” says Avent-deLeon, who grew up in Bed-Stuy. “Every year she’d do these art shows at her house, and hire this eccentric interior designer to dress her house in the craziest designs I’d ever seen. It wasn’t my taste, but it was fun to see what kind of textures and materials he’d put together. I think that influenced my eye and my ability to mix and match.”
In the shop, that means pairing avant-garde clothing from little-known emerging fashion lines with a rotating cast of objects and accessories she finds at markets on her travels, then adding in things like art she sources from Etsy and from her friends, vintage housewares from the Berkeley shop Mono-Ha, and chairs she designed after going down a Donald Judd rabbit hole on Pinterest a few years back. “My taste is to go for a lot of nudes or neutral colors, but maybe do a really plush chair, or flowers,” she says. “If I had to pick an era, I’d probably say the late ’70s, in L.A., with the mid-century furniture and those terra cotta houses, or the ’90s because there were a lot of beautiful pastels. My favorite house is Casa Luis Barragán in Mexico City — I think he perfected having a personal touch in a very minimal, well-curated space, where every corner had a story to tell.” We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.
Avent-deLeon founded Sincerely, Tommy, three years ago — at a staggeringly young 24 years old — after she realized how hard it was to find unknown clothing brands in the surprisingly homogenous New York boutique scene. “I decided that I was going to be that place for the emerging lines that weren’t carried in other stores,” she recently told Nylon magazine.
Yet the store has since become known not just for its clothing selection, but for the consistently on-point lifestyle it embodies, from its popular Instagram feed to the impeccably styled object tableaux found throughout the store.
The store’s appeal also has to do with the fact that it feels intensely personal: In addition to scouting vintage housewares and furnishings, bringing back her travel finds, and showcasing the artwork of her friends, Avent-deLeon designed the Judd-inspired chairs pictured at right, and hopes to create more pieces in the future. (She also has a growing in-house clothing line.)
A good example: A pair of Percival Lafer chairs Avent-deLeon hunted down for a year, paired with two drawings she commissioned from the store’s former coffee barista Adrienne White — AKA Dinosaur Dust — and a beige marble table she found on Etsy. “I was looking for a coffee table for awhile that wasn’t white Carrara marble,” she says. “I’m big on not having too much of the same material in one space.”
Carrara marble being the material she used to create the Sincerely, Tommy coffee bar that greets visitors at the front of the store. “I designed the counter to be within the space but not overwhelming the space,” she says. “I like the clean line.” The stools are by Brooklyn designer Ben Erickson, while the drawings hanging above it are by the New Zealand artist Marta Buda. All of the art in the store, of course, is for sale.
A donut-shaped glass vase that’s part of an ongoing collaboration with Lauren Ardis’s cult Berkeley vintage shop Mono-Ha. It started as a mini pop-up, but Avent-deLeon and Ardis had so much aesthetic synergy that Ardis now regularly sends any pieces that are a fit for Sincerely, Tommy. “I love the opening on the side,” says Avent-deLeon. “There’s so much you can do with it, like sticking a plant or flower in so the stem goes all the way around the circle.”
Finds from Avent-deLeon’s favorite Mexico City market, La Cuidadela: A wooden bowl and cup, and a marble pyramid “from this man’s stand who makes everything you can imagine out of stone,” she says. When she finds something she likes while traveling, “I usually just buy one,” she says. “I like that they’re one-offs. If you’re able to get it then you’re the only person who has it, unless you go to the place on your own. I like to have things like this constantly rotating in and out of the store.”
Avent-deLeon purchased these fur and woven slippers at a market on her first trip to Morocco, in 2014, but they got so much attention in her store that she decided to have her own furry slipper series manufactured in Morocco last spring, with outdoor-friendly soles. They’ve since nearly sold out. “They’re so unique,” she says. “Though honestly it became something of a trend this past fall and winter, with every major line doing their own version of this slide. It’s just so easy to wear, and is something new in terms of silhouette. The stool is from the Ivory Coast.”
Avent-deLeon first spotted these sculptures at her friend Laila Gohar’s house — they’re by Gohar’s sister Nadia. “I was like oh my god, who made them?!” she says. “They’re just painted wood, but I love the shapes. Nadia plays around with different forms and makes whatever she wants out of them.”
A plaster sculpture by Oakland artist Sophie Lourdes Knight, whom Avent-deLeon discovered on Instagram. “I really love the unfinished feeling,” she says. “Sometimes I feel like with the store there’s an aspect that’s very curated, very put together. And I like that if you pay close attention, you’ll see things that have a bit more ruggedness, and that aren’t so put together.”
The vase Avent-deLeon got from a Maryam Nassir Zadeh warehouse sale. “I thought it was cool because each piece comes off and is its own sculpture, so it’s three pieces in one,” she says. The green marble bookend she found at a flea market while on a road trip through Texas.
One of our favorite pieces in the store: A vintage Dorothy Thorpe spiral Lucite umbrella stand that Avent-deLeon has repurposed as a vase. “I first started going to the vintage show at the Javits when I was 19,” she says. “This woman who had everything lucite had one of these, but I was 19 and didn’t feel the need to buy it. Now I can actually buy it and have somewhere to put it. I found another woman at a market who saw me looking at a Lucite table stand, walked by me, and said I have five of these Dorothy Thorpe spirals at my house in the Lower East Side. It was a borderline hoarder situation, but I got this for a steal.”
Avent-deLeon says that Faris — also one of our faves — is the store’s best-selling jewelry line. “Faris takes a lot of influence from same designers we take influence from, like Elsa Peretti, and Matisse,” she says. “I love her obscure and Art Deco–inspired shapes. Her stuff has a very sophisticated vibe and is different from a lot of what I’m seeing.”
UK-based Rejina Pyo, who designed this painted-suede skirt, is “really new,” says Avent-deLeon. “This was her second or third collection. The skirt is reversible, so on the other side is a regular leather. I like the hand painted feel — it looks like an art piece, literally. I think you can see some consistency between this and the rest of the store, too, with these weird shapes.”
We featured the artists and jewelry designers Cave Collective last year; this necklace is part of a selection available at Sincerely, Tommy. “I love seeing pieces like this on a clean white t-shirt with maybe some jeans and sandals,” says Avent-deLeon. “It adds another layer to a simple outfit. The vintage leather chair I found at a flea market in the city.”
This colorblocked shirt by Arthur Arbesser — whose sleeves are dramatically arced, though you can’t see it in this photo — exemplifies Avent-deLeon’s interest in the intersection between modern, sculptural lines and a look that’s “really funky and eccentric,” she says. “Most women might think the sleeves are unflattering because they think about how clothing items accentuate parts of their body, whereas he just has fun with his shapes without paying as much attention to fit. I like that. I personally prefer to wear statement pieces.”
We come here every day to tell you about our favorite things — so for our last round-up of 2015, it seemed only fair that we spread the love! We asked seven of our favorite design insiders to reflect on their best design moments of the past year — an experience they had, an exhibition they saw, a discovery they made, an interior they fell in love with — as well as offer the one thing they're most looking forward to in 2016. Enjoy, and see you back here next Monday!
A weekly Saturday recap to share with you our favorite links, discoveries, exhibitions, and more from the past seven days. This week: very on-trend iridescent flatware and terrazzo coasters, gorgeous oil-slick vases from a recent RISD grad, and the debut of the booksleeve (pictured above), an innovation we never realized we needed until now.
“I sometimes think I wear too many hats,” says Julia Leonard, the Los Angeles–based artist, interior designer, curator, gallery owner, and shopkeeper, whose backyard retail venture Either Way LA — an every Sunday sale of thrifted or commissioned pieces — has recently become a hit via Instagram and word of mouth. Since moving from San Francisco a little more than four years ago, LA has offered her the chance, as it does to so many, to start over. In San Francisco, where she had studied, worked, and lived for over a decade, she had been teaching alongside her art practice. However Los Angles marked the opportunity to focus on her art, giving her a fresh perspective: “I even dress differently,” she admits wryly.
