Ten years in editorial. One small shop.
I'm Mira. I spent ten years writing about other people's fashion — first as a market editor at a magazine in New York, then as a freelance stylist, then as the woman who picked the clothes for a handful of small, considered brands. I sat in a lot of showrooms. I rejected a lot of clothes. I learned, slowly, what I actually wanted to wear.
When I moved to Asheville in 2017, I missed having somewhere to shop. Not somewhere to buy — somewhere to go, where someone had already done the work of saying no to most of the world. So I opened one. Six hundred square feet on Lexington Avenue, with original wood floors and a west-facing window that goes gold around four.
I want to carry about eighty things. I want to know, by name, the person who made each one. I want to be able to tell you where the wool came from. — Mira, on the shop
Hazel & Hide opened in the autumn of 2019. The cat (Juniper) arrived in 2020, from the parking lot behind the bakery next door. She is in charge of customer greetings and is very good at her job.
What I look for in a maker
I carry clothing from about thirty makers, and I add maybe one or two new ones a season. The things I'm looking for, in roughly this order: that the maker knows, by name, who sewed it. That the fiber has a story I can tell. That the price is fair to the maker, not just to the buyer. That the clothes look better after a season of wear than the day they came home. That they are the kind of thing a person might keep for ten years, mend, and still feel good about.
If a piece doesn't pass all five, it doesn't make the edit. That's why the shop is small. I'd rather have a great sweater and an empty rail than a full rail of fine.
