shabby chic is back - as if anyone knew it was gone

Reported yesterday in the NY Times, the company started by Rachel Ashwell, has come back from the brink of bankruptcy. Saved by an investment and marketing company, Shabby Chioc has reopened in their original Santa Monica store, New York and London.

Marian Salzman, president of Euro RSCG Worldwide, a global marketing agency, described Shabby Chic’s psychographic space as “a safe place, a battening-down of the hatches.”

For her part, Ms. Ashwell acknowledged that a rest would have been nice, but “even though it was looking to the public like I was walking into the sunset, that was never the idea.” Target, she points out, is its own business, undiminished or affected by her company’s bankruptcy. And along with her “new” stores, and new business plan, she has a new book, “Shabby Chic Interiors: My Rooms, Treasures and Trinkets,” a book that looks, well, pretty much like all her others: there are the same unmade beds and the same chipped white furniture, and there’s Ms. Ashwell in her trademark blue jeans, looking not a day over 30 (even though she's 50).