Oh, Rolo, how I've missed you so.

There's been a hole in my heart since Rolo Downtown closed its Stockton Street doors and moved to much larger digs in SoMa this past fall. I was driving up 9th Street, near Howard today when I decided to pull over and check out the new store. Rolo, you see, is the mecca for Japanese tourists with fat checkbooks, Academy of Art fashion design students, and the pretty hipster boys of the Castro. It was the one place in the financial district where I could get my Miss Sixty fix. If things at work were going especially bad, I'd sneak out during coffee breaks to peruse the latest shipments of items from various up-and-coming indie designers (Mon Petit Oiseau, Daryl K., Tom Nguyen, Collette Dinnegan, Fornarina, Sharagano, Catherine Malandrino and so forth). Somehow, Rolo managed to avoid carrying products from Bernard Arnault's behemoth conglomerate, LVMH, at least when it came to women's clothes (although I do adore Arnault's prize pupil, Mr. Wunderkind himself, Marc Jacobs). Many of the super-hip and trendy clothes I see today were first carried by Rolo more than two years ago, like Seven jeans and Juicy Couture tracksuits. And the jeans! They always had a great selection of jeans - Earl, Helmut Lang, Joe's, Paper, Frankie B, Red Engine, G-Star and of course, Seven, Diesel, Levis, Juicy and and Miss Sixty. My biggest beef with Rolo is that it's very hard on the pocketbook (it's actually a little bit of a boon that they moved so far from my office), and their return policy sucks. Luckily, the store on Howard is only half a block away from the Rolo outlet. However, I escaped unscathed from both stores today. Now, if only they'd start carrying Habitual jeans, Zac Posen, Benjamin Cho and Imitation of Christ...