FORT GREENE — Fulton Street’s Coup de Coeur, which sells family-made Senegalese designs as well as club-ready minidresses and accessories, will close Aug. 31 after 8 years in business.
Shop owner Momar Diagne, 45, said he is shuttering the shop because he and his wife decided to move back to Senegal to raise their two children, ages 8 and 4. He has shut down five of the six Coup de Coeur shops he had built in the city and New Jersey since last year, and sold his Hoboken location.
Diagne said he would have liked to keep the Fort Greene shop, his favorite, open from afar. But the rise of internet shopping and the neighborhood’s changed racial demographics slowed business over the years, he said.
Diagne said many of his regular customers — most of whom are African American — no longer live in the neighborhood, replaced by white newcomers who he's noticed prefer casual threads to his more glamourous look.
“They buy from thrift shops,” Diagne told DNAinfo Tuesday, “They don't dress up. If the ones who moved to this neighborhood, if they were patronizing us, we would have done much better. But they don’t patronize us.”
“They don’t have the same sense of style,” he added.
Coup de Coeur sells Diagne-designed structured cocktail dresses, long skirts, and loose pants using West African wax fabric. His wife’s brothers and sisters make the clothes in Senegal. They also make accessories like bracelets and clutches from the bright patterned cloth. The wax print designs will still be available online.
The store also sells stretchy, boldly colored party dresses, jeans, rings and earrings.
On Tuesday, the shop was buzzing with visitors, including Shani Roberts, 30, who lives in Canarsie and said she often visits Fort Greene to see her doctor.
“Every time I come, I pop in,” Roberts said. “I love the accessories.”
Her friend Toni Groves, 44, of Far Roackaway, emerged from the dressing room with a stack of new outfits to buy.
“We love color,” Robert said.
Diagne said he and other local entrepreneurs fear the area’s black-owned businesses are in trouble. “We as business people, we know,” Diagne said. “All this black business is going to be gone.”
Diagne first visited Fort Greene when he came to meet friends at Keur N’Deye, a Senegalese restaurant on Fulton Street that closed soon after his visit.
On Monday and Tuesday, Janet Jackson’s “That’s the Way Love Goes” played on the store’s speakers.
“I love this location,” Diagne said. “That’s why it’s the last one to close.”
