“If, during the nineteen-eighties, you wanted your clothes to indicate that you were a) in the know, fashionwise; b) a bit of an intellectual; and c) not afraid of wearing unfinished seams or jackets turned inside out, or other things that might, if not worn with sufficient élan, look like fashion disasters, then you shopped at Charivari,” Rebecca Mead wrote in The New Yorker in 1999, lamenting the company’s declaration of bankruptcy.