There’s Something About Bela Shehu

Bela Shehu in her Rittenhouse studio. | Photograph by Matt Zugale.

“Oh my God, A6! Why don’t I have A6 in my life?” says the girl in the crop top as she stares, transfixed, at her iPhone. Her name is Jean, and she’s a fresh-faced 30-something copywriter for Urban Outfitters.

“Yes, the whites are very white, you see? The F2 filter, the whites get a little blue, cold,” the woman sitting next to her says in a lolling, almost singsong purr. This is Bela Shehu, a striking brunette fashion designer who is presiding over an impromptu Instagram class in her Rittenhouse atelier. There are three of us here, crammed knee-to-knee on a low-slung chaise that’s not even particularly comfortable (Bela painted it white a few weeks ago in a sudden fit of inspiration; it crackles faintly when you move), sipping wine as we listen to Bela explain how she uses VSCOcam, a photo-editing app, to transform grainy selfies into pictures worthy of a place in her carefully curated Instagram feed.

Jean came here to pick up a custom onesie Bela made for her. (“Wear it with big rain boots to walk the dog!” Bela tells her, as if it’s not unheard-of for people to wear onesies to walk the dog.) Now we’re a glass of wine in, and Bela has finally settled into her perch on the couch after buzzing around the studio like a firefly, ducking into the back room to find fabric swatches she’s using for her next collection, flicking through the minimal racks to find garments that we must try on, explaining a new silhouette she’s considering: shorts over pants. “I’m going to try it on for you, because it’s very bizarre. Now, these pants have a shorter inseam than usual, so imagine that they’ll hover a little bit over the ankle in a weird, awkward flare, and then this is your outerwear, the shorts. I’m still selling myself on it.” Pause, look in mirror, head tilt, scrunched lip, thoughtful. “Yes. I kind of like it.”

It’s this endearing transparency that’s earned Bela such a cult following in Philadelphia. In fact, Jean, with her high-waisted jeans, crop top, and bleach-blond bun that shoots like a smushed doughnut from the top of her head, is hardly the core customer — or “collector,” as Bela prefers it — of NINObrand, Bela’s four-and-a-half-year-old fashion line. NINObrand’s default demographic ranges in age from 45 to 70, and the client list reads like a Philly who’s who: Sharon Pinkenson, Ann Gitter, Nina Tinari (a younger collector), Elena Brennan.

Ask around town, and people know Bela, age 36, either from her style — a magpie mix of stark solid colors (mostly black), odd proportions and origami-like layers that make her petite, willowy frame seem more like a canvas — or because she’s worked with them. Her fingerprints are all over the city, in Commonwealth Proper, the bespoke menswear line she helped launch; in Duke & Winston, the Philly-centric lifestyle brand with the unmistakable bulldog logo (Bela lent a hand in designing the company’s first collection of graphic tees and created prototypes for its upcoming line of dog beds); in Lithe Method’s in-house workout-wear line, which she helped develop and produce; in League Collegiate Outfitters, a 24-year-old apparel company that hired her to guide its rebrand.

Bela has become the unlikely nucleus of Philly’s creative class, a connector who seems to know everyone, or who knows someone who knows someone, which in this city is usually just as good. There’s her friend “Dame” (that’s Damon Dash, former CEO of Roc-A-Fella Records and Jay Z business partner); she’s been close with him since they worked together on a clothing line several years ago. There’s Steve (Brown, one of the ShopRite heirs and her business mentor). And there’s Larry (Rosenblum, owner of Spread Bagelry, whom Bela knows from back when he was president of Nylon; she worked on editorials for the magazine). Part of the reason for her success is her uncanny ability to connect with people — and then to connect them — so that her network is a celeb-studded string of smart, creative, forward-thinking folks. She tries to explain why people seem to want to brush up against her with words and phrases like “commonology” and “cultural experience” and “symbiotic approach,” but it really all boils down to this: Bela is cool. And you feel cool, cooler, when you’re with her.

But here’s the paradox: Bela, one of Philly’s most inspiring creatives, grew up in a place completely devoid of inspiration.

BELA SHEHU WAS born in Albania, a country slivered between Greece and Kosovo that in 1979, the year Bela was born, was still in the throes of a Communist dictatorship — no spirituality, no free press, no personal cars, no toilet paper. The youngest of three children, she grew up in a one-bedroom apartment in a spare, soulless building, all gray concrete and tiny windows. In winter, an already intimate life grew even tighter as her family of five crowded, knee-to-knee, around a single heating source.

“It was difficult because we were five in a space of three and a half,” says Linda, Bela’s older sister, who now lives in Montreal. As Bela describes it, she lived a sheltered, utilitarian existence, hardly a breeding ground for creativity. They certainly weren’t folding swaths of techno-jersey into hooded city trench coats.

“When people say, ‘Did you make the doll’s clothes?,’ I say, ‘Well, I made the doll first.’” They made other things, too, anything they consumed: spirits, butter, liqueurs, jams. She learned to crochet, knit, embroider. She still remembers how to make nail polish. Then, 1989: Bela was 10, the Berlin Wall came down, and they got television. And not just the nightly news programs, all propaganda, but real foreign television, dubbed in Italian. Her dad rigged a makeshift antenna so they could watch. Suddenly the living room became larger. And here is where the gears started turning for Bela. Here is where she got that spark.

Here is where she discovered Beverly Hills 90210.

“I started watching 90210 and I was like, I. Want. To. Go. There. I wanted to go to California,” she says, then corrects herself. “Actually, no. I wanted to go to America. To me, America was 90210.” Out came the map. And Bela’s dad said the thing that took Bela’s spark and set it aflame: “All right. How can we get you there?”

The answer was a student exchange program. It cost $8,000, which might as well have been eight million. “Eighty million. Eight billion,” Bela says, laughing. Who knew how much things were worth? Her father borrowed the money to get her in the program, and she was placed … in Iowa. Back out came the map. “We located it, and Iowa was pretty central. Where I come from, everything central, it’s the best, it’s the center. So we’re like, Iowa!”

Iowa.

And so, expecting palm trees, sunshine, the glow of wealth in the shadow of the Hollywood sign and all the shiny spoils of capitalism, a 17-year-old Bela arrived in Iowa, in a pinprick of a town in the middle of nowhere. There was no school nearby, no grocery store. People ordered food from a catalog, and it was delivered in huge freezer-
lined trucks.

“I wanted to die,” Bela says, somehow still seeming less angry about Communism’s oppressive stranglehold than she is about the great Brandon Walsh farce. “That was not 90210. During Communism we were told, ‘Capitalist countries, they’re bloodsuckers, everybody works, only the rich live, and everything you see on TV is made up.’ It’s like Truman Show, right? Then walls come down and you’re like, dude, we’ve been lied to. And then I come to Iowa. I wrote to everyone I knew — they all wanted news back — and told them No! We were NOT lied to. That is a MOVIE. This does NOT look like it.”

Disillusioned with her decidedly non-Beverly Hills life, Bela was ready to go home. Screw capitalism. She’d been dumped in a crappy town with a backpack and a tenuous grasp of the English language, and she was sick of it. “It was traumatic. I don’t know what I’m saying and all these people are talking to me and I have to learn American history and American government because it’s our senior-year subject. I don’t even know what it says, forget what it means. So that was my introduction to this new life,” she says. Then she pauses for a moment, mulling it all over, or maybe just trying to find the right way to phrase it.

She settles on this: “It’s like a newborn, you know? But with a complete sense of conscious. I know now what a newborn goes through. They’re like, what the fuck’s everybody doing around me?”

Bela didn’t know this yet, but going home wasn’t an option. Six months after she left, a civil war broiled in Albania, ignited by the country’s involvement in a series of devastating pyramid schemes that cost citizens more than a billion dollars and crippled the post-Communist economy. It was 1997, and Albanians, most of them now destitute, were desperate. They revolted, looting and stockpiling arms from massive military depots.

“Everybody got a gun,” Bela says. “Shit hit the fan.” Her father’s bakery was robbed at gunpoint. They took supplies, flour, and the paltry sum of money in the cash register. After ransacking the place, they took Bela’s brother-in-law — Linda’s husband — for ransom. “You could not ask for help from the police, because the police was almost nonexistent at this time,” says Linda. Her family scrounged funds to pay the ransom and then fled to Albania’s capital. Under no circumstances, they told Bela, was she to come back. Make it work, they said.

So Bela flew to New York City, where she skipped her connecting flight home and hopped a shuttle to Philadelphia to stay with family friends. Then, a flurry of firsts: Her first job was waitressing at Byblos; her first apartment, a $350-a-month nook above a Middle Eastern restaurant in Queen Village; her first day of college (she enrolled in community college for six months to extend her visa, then transferred to Temple, where she studied accounting; numbers were easier for her to nail down than filmy concepts like philosophy or social studies); and her first big break, which came as she shopped at local boutique Charlie’s Jeans. Her style caught the eye of the owner, Sebastian McCall, who also happened to be a successful denim designer. He asked about her clothes, the ones she’d taught herself to make, and placed a few orders with her: 10 shirts here, 15 dresses there. The only problem: While she could create one-off pieces, she didn’t know how to make a pattern, so every garment she delivered to McCall bore the small inconsistencies of an at-home hobby sewer. Still, they were good. Really good. “She has such a strong passion for design,” McCall says. “I said to her, ‘You should have your own boutique.’”

In what would become one of the many major turning points of Bela’s life, he encouraged Bela to use the money he had paid her for her clothes to take pattern-making and draping courses at Moore. She was hooked from day one. From there, the rest of her story unfurls quickly.

Part of it was timing. It was the early aughts, pre-online shopping, pre-2008 crash — something of a golden age for boutiques and indie designers. Bela got herself into a trade show, took a ton of orders, was completely unprepared and yet still unfazed. “She’s got a little pair of testicles, has a little testosterone going,” says her friend Damon Dash. Bela cops to this: “I’ve always been a little bit confident, because I don’t know things and I feel like everything is doable. Then once you do your research, you find out that it’s a whole lot more challenging. But I’m already in at that point.”

She was in then, up to her ears, with a flurry of orders and no way to fulfill them. Bela went to Korean and Baptist churches around town and hung notes everywhere: I need sewers. And it worked. “I delivered,” she says. “We started cutting and sewing, and in three months, it was shipped.”

After that, NINObrand took off. There were growing pains, of course: Bela’s first foray into brick-and-mortars, an eponymous boutique on 13th Street, closed after a three-year run. Now, though, her fashion line is enjoying steady growth, fueled by accessible prices — her collection ranges from $130 to $590 — and a fiercely loyal clientele of women who have a few years on her, a lot of connections and, well, money. (Ironically, women her own age, Bela says, have a muddy perception of quality, thanks to flash-sale sites like Groupon and Gilt. She puts Rue La La in this mix, but then backtracks. After all, she knows the owner.)

“There’s something special about her,” says Knit Wit’s Ann Gitter, who has hosted several NINObrand trunk shows at her stores. “She pushes the envelope — I feel that she’s in the spirit of Japanese or Belgian designers — but she also uses very interesting, technologically advanced fabrics.” Bela’s experimentation with wicking jerseys and weatherproof nylons is inspired by her adopted city and what she describes as Philly’s core style belief: comfort. “Natural fabrics are fragile,” she says, pronouncing that last word so that it rhymes with “mile.” “They’re dainty, they’re temperamental to life, sweat, water. And we don’t have a dainty life. We live in a gritty, polluted world, so [my fabrics] have to give a woman a kind of protection, an armor, even if it looks dainty.”

But though her clothes are Jetsons-level modern, her manufacturing hasn’t changed all that much. “I haven’t looked back since,” says Bela of her seamstress-recruitment days. “It’s still the same. Allison here is from church,” she nods to a woman in the back room who’s sewing prototypes of the fall collection. “The old methods work. It’s a community.” And, apparently, another full-circle paradox: After Bela fled a strictly utilitarian life for slick American modernism, her road to success is paved with back-to-basics hard work. Even today, Bela often does cut-and-sew one-offs, in cases where a size runs out or someone really, really wants a custom black onesie. You know, to walk the dog.

“SHE’S MADE FOR TV,” says Seun Olubodun, the owner of Duke & Winston. “I’ve always told her she belongs on Project Runway. She’s too-cool-for-school Bela, until you get to meet her. She’s very
down-to-earth, kind of a hippie.”

That’s the other thing about Bela. From afar, her exceedingly deliberate mannerisms, offbeat style and pursed, closed-mouth smile can read as affectations. But they’re not. She speaks softly and slowly because she learned the language on the fly, in a baptism-
by-fire sort of way, in the middle of Iowa, where no one understood just what she was. When she’s quiet, she’s not judging. She’s simply taking it all in, as if she’s still thirsty for inspiration and stimulation and now it’s all here in blazing Technicolor.

“I remember in Albania, we used to save Coca-Cola bottles, the plastic bottles, because they were something interesting,” she recalls. “We’d reuse them over and over again. It was just fantastic. Now, here, I’m impressed by every proportion, every design. I’m still impressed.”

Soon, if things go as planned, Bela’s fingerprints will be all over the country: Atlanta, somewhere in North Carolina, Naples, Northern and Southern California, Miami. Her mission is simple: A handful of private stylists will work on commission in a direct-sales business model, selling merchandise in clients’ homes, via trunk shows and swanky private events (sort of like Cutco, but instead of knives, we’re talking $300 drop-crotch pants).

“She’s done her homework,” says Ellen Shepp, co-owner of high-end Rittenhouse boutique Joan Shepp. “It’s a very forward way of thinking — there are major cities around the country, but the majority of the women all over the country don’t have a city nearby, so there’s a bigger audience that has no place to go and may not be Internet shoppers. I think it’s brilliant. She could go to one prime location that’s off the beaten track a little, far enough away from a city — oh my God, there could be lines out the door.” A location, maybe, like Iowa.

Then Shepp says what we’re all thinking when we visit Bela in her studio, our adopted It Girl, the designer who seems too cool until you meet her and listen to her tell her wild and wonderful — and sometimes slightly unbelievable — story. It’s why I’m sitting in her studio, which from the street glows like a spark in the dusk, talking about VSCOcam filters on a beautiful night in Rittenhouse.

“She’s a Philly girl,” Shepp says. “This is her place. She really could go wherever. But she’s a Philly girl.”

Published as “There’s Something About ” in the November 2015 issue of Philadelphia magazine.