”Menswear Needs to Be Very Precise”: Why This Swiss Store Defines Good Taste
It’s a cliché to say a store reflects the life of its founder. In the case of Opia, the Zürich-based boutique bringing together Evan Kinori, Comoli, Ludwig Reiter and COMME des GARÇONS under one roof, it also happens to be true.
Claudia Desax, who began Opia in 2008 with her husband Op Pangkhamuan, grew up in a mountain village in the Swiss Alps, thinking and dreaming in Romansh, a minority language spoken by just 60,000 people. “It was a beautiful place but also very isolated and lonely. Being a black sheep there, which I definitely was, wasn’t easy,” Desax says.
The occasional glimpse of the wider world came from the snowboarding scene at nearby ski resorts in Flims and Laax. Desax still remembers young Japanese snowboarders coming down the slopes in hugely oversized pants and coats. “It was then and there that I realized I was interested in clothes,” she says.
Before turning clothes into her profession, Desax worked for Swissair. At 20, she was flying across the globe, far from her native Graubünden region. “This was in the early 2000s, so being away really meant being away.” To this day, Desax has vivid memories of driving into Manhattan in the crew bus. “For me, it felt like entering a completely unknown reality.”
A next formative experience came when, instead of going to fashion school — “I didn’t have the patience,” Desax says — she decided to study scenography, which took her to Bangkok for an exchange term. “Nowadays the city is extremely cool, but back then it was just wild. Everything seemed possible. People would hunt for clothes, start a business and sell them, all within a week.” The DIY approach opened her eyes to another route into fashion.
Desax began buying clothes at Bangkok’s famous Chatuchak Weekend Market and bringing them to Switzerland for friends and family. Back home, she reached out to a couple of Thai designers she liked. Within months, she was selling their collections from a space in Zürich’s former red-light district she rented with a small loan from the city. “A side hustle became a main hustle, which is how Opia began.”
For the first few years, Opia was known for carrying Thai and other Asian labels rarely found abroad. Then, around 2012, Desax brought COMME des GARÇONS on board. “It was a long process,” she recalls. “At first, they kept us on hold, and we weren’t invited to the showrooms. But I’m a Capricorn and quite persistent, so I just kept trying until it finally worked out.”
It’s a reminder of the tightly negotiated relationships between stores and brands. “Often, brands want to sit next to similar brands, whereas stores like ours want to carry a brand because it’s different from others,” Desax says. “What brands seem to forget is that they can reach new customers by sitting on the same rack as a small brand with a different audience. Of course,” she continues, “there’s the promise of rapid growth when selling through larger multi-brand stores. But I always tell them that, in doing so, they risk losing their aura.”
With COMME des GARÇONS on board, Opia gradually transformed from “a local store into an international player,” as Desax puts it. Today, it carries around 60 labels, from niche and emerging to well-established. Petrosolaum sits next to Lemaire, Stephanie Schneider next to Namacheko and Sono next to Rier. Or so it was until recently: last November, Opia expanded into two separate stores. One is close to the famous Bahnhofstrasse, bringing together A.PRESSE, Auralee and Jacques Marie Mage; the other is “very nerdy,” located not far from where Opia started, mixing Evan Kinori, Jan-Jan Van Essche and Seya.
When speaking of how she has built Opia’s impressive roster, Desax returns to her childhood in rural Switzerland. “I learned the taste of real apples, the smell of freshly cut herbs from the garden, the texture of stones and wood. Looking back, it was all about being in touch with realness.” That grounded sensibility still helps her cut through layers of fashion to see clothes for what they are. Incidentally, it’s also why Desax prefers menswear over womenswear. “Whereas womenswear often relies on frills or decorative elements, menswear needs to be very precise to make things work, which makes it much more interesting to me,” she says.
Desax began Opia by selling to friends, friends of friends and neighbors. Today, with two stores full of buzzy labels, her approach to buying remains remarkably grounded. When she first saw Salon C. Lundman, the Stockholm-based label known for its precise, understated clothing, she immediately thought of “at least ten customers” who would love it as much as she does.
The designers Desax works with recognize this human, down-to-earth quality in her, too. Keiko Seya, founder of Tokyo-based slow-fashion label Seya, fondly calls her a “simple person.” Desax, she says, “doesn’t have fashion people’s snobbism, maybe because she’s from the mountains. She appreciates clothes for fabric and craft. Having traveled the world, she also has an open spirit, which enables her to really understand a brand’s perspective.”
Jan Jan Van Essche, designer of the eponymous Belgian label, echoes this impression. He first met Desax in 2020, in his Paris showroom, which he shares with jewelry maker Stephanie Schneider, another label Opia stocks. “Claudia is no-nonsense yet warm, intuitive yet considerate,” Van Essche says. “From the start, our collaboration has felt very open, very personal.”
Desax’s alpine roots even inform her affinity for e-commerce, which Opia started as early as 2008. “I don’t really like selling online. It’s just that, when I was young, [the] internet was my portal to different worlds. This has made me aware that there are people out there for whom our clothes are out of reach — literally.”
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