MORGAN’S MOMENT

Standing on the counter of her Lambertville store, Morgan Grabarz is a vision in white tulle and high-heeled, high-top black Converse sneakers as she fits a mannequin with a feather-trimmed bolero. When she hears the door chime, she leaps off the counter with such grace you could imagine that leaping is her default mode—which, maybe, it is. Opening the store, in 2024, that bears her name and carries the clothes she designs certainly entailed a leap of faith, given that she was just 24 at the time. Networking her designs into multiple New York Fashion Week shows in 2019—and then again in 2024—was a similar leap.

No surprise, though: She’s been designing for most of her life. A photo that hangs in the store, taken at Raven’s Run Art Camp in New Hope, depicts Grabarz at 7 years old, holding a sign that reads, “My dream is to be a clotes desiner”—a testament to her surprisingly long and upward trajectory in fashion (if not her acumen for spelling). Her first designs were for her Barbies, and her inaugural flagship store was in a cardboard-box construction assembled by her father.

By the time she was 12, Grabarz was creating what she remembers as “elaborate, crazy dresses” and held her first runway show as an eighth grader at New Hope–Solebury Middle School. She was studying sewing with a private teacher at home and fashion illustration at Philadelphia’s Moore College of Art and Design, thanks to a scholarship secured by her middle school art teacher. In 2022 she got a BFA in fashion design from New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology, having received not one but two $10,000 Jim Hamilton Memorial ShadFest Scholarships, funded by the Lambertville art and business community through proceeds from the annual ShadFest poster auction.

Amy Coss, owner of the Lambertville shop Sojourner, was on the scholarship selection committee. “When Morgan walked down the street pushing her clothing rack to the interview and then handed us a completed press kit,” Coss says, “it was clear that this was a young woman who had a dream and she was going to pursue it.” In 2023 Grabarz earned an MBA in luxury and retail from New York University’s Stern School of Business, where she was the youngest in her class.

The one crimp in her trajectory was delivered by the pandemic, which forced her to leave New York in 2020 and study remotely from her family home in New Hope. “I was so sad,” she says. “I missed the creativity because I truly felt I’d found my people in New York.” Sewing was balm to her sorrow, and she’d soon amassed enough mesh-and-fabric T-shirts to launch her brand, selling them online and at Sojourner.

Grabarz decided to open her own store in Lambertville, funded with money earned waitressing at Cock ’n Bull in Peddler’s Village, because she knew the town, a magnet for tourists, could support it. “I would sew all day and waitress all night,” she remembers, “and I saved all my money and waited for the right opportunity.” It arrived in October 2024 in the form of a shared storefront on North Union Street. She moved into her current space, just down the block, six months later.

Her eponymous store is 1,000 square feet of color and sparkle, the incarnation of Grabarz’s effervescent personality and unfettered imagination. “I love pink. I love ruffles,” she says. “My style is glamorous but a little bit edgy—there’s no quiet luxury happening over here.” It’s no surprise, then, that her favorite designers are Versace and Mosquino, both known for their boundary-expanding fashions. But while city glamour is an obvious inspiration, so is her home turf. She often inserts River Towns references into the fabrics she designs, as in her Comic Tee, which, next to a rendering of the Empire State Building, includes an image of her Lambertville storefront.

The front half of the store showcases her designs. The back half, fully open to the public, is her workshop, where she, along with four employees and a handful of interns, spin her dreams into ready-to-wear. Although FIT trained her in the traditional method of dress design—journal, find swatches, illustrate, create a pattern, make muslins, make test garments, make the final garment—she’s abandoned it in favor of a more intuitive approach. “I can see it in my head,” she says. “Sometimes I get visions. I rarely illustrate anymore.”

In addition to ready-to-wear, Grabarz creates custom designs for formal events like weddings and proms. She gifted the actor Frankie Grande with a jacket adorned with red-sequined lips during his appearance in The Rocky Horror Show, just across the river at the Bucks County Playhouse. “He brought the whole cast here, and we ended up doing the Time Warp together,” she says, still delighted by the memory.

While she plans to continue with custom work, she’s hoping soon to factory-produce her bestsellers—such as her body-hugging Villa Dress in a fabric depicting European-style villas on romantic hillsides—and sell them in boutiques across the country.

Fabrics, in fact, are a major inspiration: To help unleash her imagination, she scouts New York’s fabric district and frequents high-fashion closeouts to source fabric and lace for her designs, as she did with a gossamer seafoam gown featuring a triangular bodice of feathers and sequins. “The reason that the dress is this shape,” Grabarz explains, “is because the feather piece was cut in a triangle already.”

You might think that her clothes, dramatic and adventurous as they are, would appeal only to younger shoppers, but Grabarz says her most frequent buyers are “mature and stylish” women. “Women are too hard on themselves,” she says. “They come in and say, ‘I can’t wear any of this,’ then they try it on and love it.” Customers often text her to relay the compliments they’ve received. “My mission is to stop the self-hate,” she says, “and create fun clothing that makes women feel different and beautiful.”

That dovetails with her brand’s tagline: Take your moment. The phrase arose when she was living in New York and routinely snuck into high-end fashion shows. In a pink tulle cheetah-print dress, she faked her way into Fendi’s 2022 anniversary show. Afterward, she could have exited with the crowd but decided instead to leave by the celebrity exit, beyond which Escalades idled and paparazzi swarmed. When she hesitated—I was a college student, unfit to be walking out behind Kim Kardashian, she remembers thinking—the friend who’d accompanied her said, “Take your moment, Morgan.”

She’s been taking it ever since.

Leslie Garisto Pfaff is a regular contributor to River Towns. She wrote about the Tinicum Arts Festival, which celebrated its seventy-fifth year in July, in the Summer issue.