Abercrombie’s SoHo flagship blends heritage details with expanded luxury retail

Abercrombie has redrawn its SoHo identity with a store that looks far more country-club polished than mall-rooted. The brand’s first “Heritage Meets Modern” flagship at 520 Broadway spans three levels and 10,000 square feet, more than doubling the 4,000-square-foot unit it replaced at 547 Broadway and signaling a sharper push toward classic American lifestyle retail.

The new space is built to read as a full wardrobe, not just a rack of logoed basics. Womenswear occupies the ground and second floors, menswear sits downstairs, and the assortment stretches across denim, Office Approved, YPB activewear, and select New York City and USA merchandise. For the first time, Abercrombie has also given accessories and footwear their own section, with brands including Sperry and Hunter. Corey Robinson, the company’s chief product officer, said the goal was to serve customers “from head to toe,” and the format is meant to be the brand’s “best expression in the world.”

The visual language is doing as much brand work as the merchandise. At the entrance and stairway, curated archive displays set the tone with a 1911 “Saranac” cord suit and a rare “Rainbow Pond” jacket made exclusively for Abercrombie & Fitch by Willis & Geiger in the late 1960s. The furnishings lean heritage, too, with customized millwork, mosaic tiling, fitting rooms with customizable lighting, and a second-floor activation area inspired by a New York hotel bar. It is a deliberate shift toward the textures and codes of old wealth: built-in woodwork, discreet shine, and an emphasis on rooms rather than retail fixtures.

That image reset matters because Abercrombie is still working against a very recent past. Melissa Worth, managing director of the Americas for A&F, said the opening lands in a place that has been central to the company’s history for more than a century. Yet the broader business story is one of contraction followed by reinvention. About 130 stores, representing around 1 million square feet, were shuttered during the pandemic, bringing the Abercrombie & Fitch store count to about 200 worldwide, and Fran Horowitz said in 2023 that the company was aggressively revamping its fleet.

The timing is savvy. Abercrombie & Fitch Co. reported second-quarter 2025 net sales of $1.2 billion, up 7 percent, and raised its full-year sales outlook to 5 to 7 percent growth. But the numbers also show a split personality: Abercrombie-branded sales fell 5 percent in the quarter while Hollister rose 19 percent. SoHo’s new flagship suggests the company knows exactly what it wants to look like now, even if the deeper question is whether this is true maturation into timeless American style or simply a very expensive makeover.