There is a shop on Elizabeth Street that is not laid out like a shop.
There is a café in it, and the coffee is free. There is a florist’s bench. There are rooms rather than departments, and furniture that looks like somebody chose it for a flat rather than a floorplan. The brand calls it L’Appartement, which is exactly what it is pretending to be.
254 Elizabeth Street is Sézane’s New York apartment, and when it opened in 2017 it was the French label’s first permanent address in America.
A brand that started with other people’s clothes
Sézane is the work of Morgane Sezalory, and it did not begin as a label at all.
It started in 2008 as an online shop selling vintage pieces she had sourced herself, one at a time. The name is a compression of her own. What grew out of it was first customised vintage, then original designs, then one of the first French labels to build a proper business without a shop at all.
The first physical Sézane opened in Paris in 2015, seven years after the business began. They called it L’Appartement and furnished it like a flat. That decision, more than any garment, is what the brand is now known for.
Opening on Elizabeth Street
The New York L’Appartement opened at eleven in the morning on Thursday 7 September 2017.
Sezalory was direct about why it was here rather than anywhere else. “Elizabeth Street is so charming, I fell in love with it immediately,” she said at the time, adding that she had loved New York since first coming to the city at thirteen.
The choice of street was a statement in itself. A French brand arriving in New York in 2017 with money behind it would ordinarily have gone to Soho proper, or Madison Avenue, or Wooster Street. Sézane went to a Nolita block of nineteenth-century walk-ups with awnings and front windows and no flagship logic to it whatsoever.
The building itself dates from around 1900.
What is inside
The interiors were done by Talbot & Yoon.
- Ready-to-wear and accessories, curated rather than racked
- A café serving complimentary drinks, originally supplied by the French bakery Marman
- Florist workshops run by Flower Girl NYC, who also did the shop’s own arrangements
- Rooms arranged as rooms, with books and objects, rather than as retail zones
The free coffee is the detail everybody mentions and it is not an accident. A shop that gives you a reason to sit down is a shop you stay in, and a shop you stay in is one you come back to without needing a reason.
Why it mattered
It is easy to forget how unusual this was in 2017. The received wisdom that year was that physical retail was finished and that a digital brand opening a shop was a brand that had lost its nerve.
Sézane went the other way and treated the shop as the thing the internet could not do. Not a showroom, not a collection point, not a branded box. A room with coffee in it and somebody arranging flowers.
Half of independent retail has since copied some version of it, usually badly, usually by adding a coffee machine and hoping. The part most people miss is that the apartment format only works if the shop is small enough to feel like one. 254 Elizabeth Street is small. That is the point.
There is a longer joke in the address, too. Sézane sells clothes on a street whose southern end spent most of the twentieth century actually making them, in loft buildings like 41 Elizabeth Street, which went up in 1920 as a sewing factory. Half a mile apart, a century apart, same trade.
Where Sézane is in New York now
The Nolita shop is no longer the only one. There is a Williamsburg L’Appartement, and in October 2026 a third opened on the Upper East Side at 1045 Madison Avenue, in a street-level unit of The Benson.
Madison Avenue is a long way from a Nolita walk-up in every sense, which makes the original more interesting rather than less. Nine years on, the Elizabeth Street shop is still trading, and it is still the one that reads like the brand.
Visiting
254 Elizabeth Street sits between Prince and Houston, a short walk north of Elizabeth Street Garden and at the top end of a street that runs a mile south into Chinatown.
Hours have moved since the opening announcement, so check before a special journey. Weekday mornings are the version of the shop worth seeing. At the weekend it fills up and the apartment illusion collapses into an ordinary queue.
Do take the coffee. It is genuinely free, and refusing it misses the entire design.
Frequently asked questions
Where is Sézane in New York?
The original L’Appartement is at 254 Elizabeth Street in Nolita. There is also a Williamsburg shop and, since October 2026, one at 1045 Madison Avenue.
When did Sézane open on Elizabeth Street?
7 September 2017. It was the brand’s first US flagship.
Who founded Sézane?
Morgane Sezalory, who began the business in 2008 selling hand-sourced vintage online and opened the first physical L’Appartement in Paris in 2015.
Is the coffee at Sézane really free?
Yes. The café has served complimentary drinks since the shop opened.
A last thought
The best shops have always understood that they are selling a version of a life rather than a rail of clothes, and most of them are too embarrassed to admit it.
Sézane put the admission in the name. It is called the apartment because it is pretending to be one, and the pretence is the product. Nine years and two more New York shops later, the small one on Elizabeth Street is still the one that does it best.
