Walmart Makes Its Fashion Week Debut

The latest pop-up boutique in New York’s Meatpacking District is exactly what you’d expect from the chic retailers that inhabit the neighbourhood. There’s curated racks of sleek, well-tailored tops, dresses and jackets set against minimal fixtures and wood-panelled walls; each style displayed is a sample (more stock is in the back) as to not clutter the sales floor.

But one glance at a price tag will shatter the illusion: This pop-up, which ran for two days this past weekend during New York Fashion Week, is not for some buzzy new premium label but big box chain Walmart and two of its in-house brands, Scoop and Free Assembly. Most pieces, from blouses to shoes, cost between $30 to $40. A striped boxy T-shirt is $9; a faux patent leather trench is $54. And the decorative hedges outside were painted with Walmart’s yellow star logo, albeit subtly.

The pop-up marked the first time that Walmart has opened a public retail space dedicated to fashion in New York City (save for Bonobos stores, which Walmart once owned), the only place in America where residents don’t have local access to a Walmart store. (The closest location sits just across the Queens border, east of John F. Kennedy Airport.) It’s also the first time the retailer has publicly participated in New York Fashion Week, signalling to the industry that after various failed attempts throughout the years to become a fashion destination, it has finally arrived.

Walmart, the largest retailer in the US by sales, has long driven growth via its groceries and essentials businesses — that is, until its recent quarter, when general merchandise, the category includes apparel and appliances, grew for the first time in 11 consecutive quarters. The retailer does not break out apparel sales in its earnings reports, but has cited fashion as a bright spot in recent seasons.

“These are the kind of things that we want to do more often so that we can continue to be in front of the customers to show them we’re here,” said Denise Incandela, executive vice president of fashion for Walmart US. The ultimate goal? To become the “number one destination for fashion,” Incandela told BoF.

It’s certainly a lofty objective, but Incandela, alongside designer Brandon Maxwell, who was named creative director of Scoop and Free Assembly in 2021, have made great strides in the past three years. For one, Scoop and Free Assembly sales have tripled since 2021, the company said.

They’re hardly its biggest fashion offerings. Within Walmart’s stable of about a dozen private lines, six generate more than $1 billion in annual sales, including its intimates brand Joyspun and activewear line Athletics Works.

While neither Scoop nor Free Assembly are on that list, their pop-up in New York represents the culmination of Walmart’s recent efforts to convince shoppers, who typically stop by their local store to pick up produce and household products, to peruse its fashion assortment too.

Incandela has led this initiative with a three-pronged approach: improve the product assortment, transform the shopping experience, and — perhaps the most difficult — change consumer perception.

Since 2021, when Incandela was promoted to be the head of fashion at Walmart, she has built a design and product team based in New York City from the ground up. The retailer has hired fashion talent who have worked at the likes of Urban Outfitters and Abercrombie & Fitch, it said, and most recently relaunched its No Boundaries line, which targets young customers. Before, the retailer relied on their factory partners to dictate the style of apparel products, said Incandela.

To match the design potential, Walmart has also invested in a new network of suppliers and manufacturers, she added.

“A part of Brandon’s role as creative director for [Scoop and Free Assembly] has been dictating, ‘Okay, what is the vision for the season?,’” Incandela said. “Bringing those details in, and still commanding an extraordinary price point, is something we’ve not done in the past.”

In addition to revamping private labels, Incandela has expanded Walmart’s fashion offering to include hundreds of recognisable third-party brands, such as Levi’s and Reebok. Last week, sneaker resale platform StockX announced it will be Walmart’s latest partner on its revamped online marketplace.

Meanwhile, the retailer is rolling out a “store of the future” format where the fashion selling floor now features wider aisles, more enticing lighting and a new approach to visual merchandising with fewer products and more frequent refreshes. Five hundred stores have been updated, with hundreds more on queue.

Trying to change consumer perception is where the pop-up comes in, said Incandela. As part of its entire New York Fashion Week activation, Walmart for the first time officially sponsored Maxwell’s runway show, which took place in the loft space right next to the pop-up Friday afternoon. Showgoers were ushered to exit through the pop-up and encouraged to stay to shop.

For Maxwell, a stylist-turned-designer known for his structural occasion wear, the collision of his two worlds signifies a high point in his career — a melding of his life’s work rather than a confrontation of contradictions.

“It’s a very different experience to be able to walk to get a coffee and see someone wearing a dress that you had a hand in at Walmart,” Maxwell told BoF ahead of his show. “I don’t necessarily always get that experience with Brandon Maxwell.”

Designing for Walmart has informed his personal line, he added, pointing to the inclusion of more casual pieces in his collections. In his spring 2025 line, for instance, there are ribbed henley shirts paired with long skirts in the same knit material — perhaps a nod to loungewear, a popular category for Scoop, that’s still within his usual range of event dressing.

The joy of working for Walmart, the designer said, is its reach. “There used to be this idea that fashion is an exclusive thing and I just don’t subscribe to that,” he added.

But even those with access to exclusive fashion, including the stylish women of Manhattan, could be enticed by Maxwell’s lines for Walmart. That was precisely the experiment of the pop-up, and the results were promising.

The most familiar refrain among shoppers Saturday afternoon? “This is actually really cute,” multiple women remarked as they respectively tried on a quilted coat, the patent leather trench and a long denim dress.