Hamptons Mainstay Henry Lehr Evolves Under the Next Generation
As warmer weather brings Manhattanites back to the Hamptons, Henry Lehr — a five-door retail fixture in the summer hot spot — is ready with its blend of elevated casual looks for the rush.
The chain has always been a family affair, founded by Henry Lehr and his wife, Toni.
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Now it’s their daughter Christina who’s overseeing the business and giving it her own fashion stamp.
But Henry, who died in 2020 after contracting COVID-19, lives on in the business — on the nameplate and through the sensibilities of the store and his daughter, who like her father has moved from designer to retailer.
Born in Austria, Henry Lehr was an Olympic ski coach in Spain when he caught the fashion bug, trading leather and suede jackets with tourists to keep him busy in the off season, Christina said.
That led to a leather and suede-heavy store in London catering to the ’70s rocker crowd. “London was fun because we were younger and we went out a lot and fashion was fun,” said Toni, who was married to Henry for 54 years.
In 1975, they moved to New York, where they established both a growing retail operation that eventually included stores in Manhattan and Connecticut and a growing family that included Christina.
Toni ran the Connecticut stores, including outposts in Greenwich, Westport and New Canaan, while Henry oversaw the New York locations.
Christina remembers spending hours in the back of the Henry Lehr store at Third Avenue and 63rd Street, where the Rolling Stones, Jerry Hall and Cher all shopped.
“After school I’d sit in the back and he’d have me rhinestone T-shirts,” Christina said. “I grew up in the stock room, basically.”
She followed in his footsteps and started her own line, Christina Lehr, in 2003.
“I didn’t go to design school or anything like that,” she said. “My dad was like, ‘You need to learn from the bottom up. You need to know how to sew. You need to know the grit of it, how difficult it really is.’ So he sent me to one of his sample factories that he had been using in New Jersey, and I worked as a line sewer for six months and really understood how unglamorous fashion really is.”
The line grew and was eventually sold in a couple hundred small boutiques, but Christina got the retail bug too, licensing out her collection and joining her dad.
“He and I were buying together,” she said. “He was teaching me everything from the backend and the books and the reports and the analyzing and all of that to his philosophies and his buying strategies. On the creative side of it, we were doing little capsule collections together and things like that. It brought me closer to him working hands-on every day for a year. And then it was like, boom, he was gone.”
Now Christina is running the five-door Henry Lehr chain, which includes women’s stores in East Hampton, Southampton, Sag Harbor and Amagansett, N.Y., where the operation also has a men’s store.
The stores carry Henry Lehr branded knits for men and Christina Lehr styles for women in addition to looks from Adriano Goldschmied, Birkenstock, Citizens of Humanity, Golden Goose, White & Warren and many others.
“It’s like a lot of basic products,” Christina said. “And then in between we work with small artists. We have such a captive audience and such a very specific clientele. I would really love to start in a kind of pop-up capacity going into the different areas, whether it be Aspen or Palm Beach or Malibu in California.”
Clearly, the retail bug has passed from father to daughter.
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