Molly Prince, 37, is wearing a striped sweater thrown loosely over her shoulders, a dark-blonde side-parted bob, and sensible white sneakers. Along with what appear to be half the women who live uptown and love a ruffled hem as much as the next girl, Prince has been waiting over an hour to get into the new Tuckernuck store — a well-appointed Wasp’s nest on the Upper East Side.
It’s just after 10 a.m. on Friday morning, and a line filled with women in Prince’s age and sartorial demographics — around 30 and up, dressed in Lilly Pulitzer shift dresses, Madewell denim, at least one Hill House nap dress, and perhaps every stripe pattern and frill configuration known to man — has formed down Madison Avenue and around the corner onto 83rd Street for the store’s opening day. Founded as an online direct-to-consumer clothing boutique in 2012, Tuckernuck has built a devoted following among Capitol Hill staffers, Southern Conference graduates, and corporate moms alike. Named for an island off Nantucket, where the co-founders grew up summering, Tuckernuck specializes in what CEO Jocelyn Gailliot calls “classic with a twist”: floral dresses with bell sleeves and drop waists, patchwork fleece zip-ups, and brown suede satchels, typically in the $80-to-$300 price range.
Photo: Mary Kang
For girls who grew up wearing chinos from J.Crew and boat shoes from Sperry, it’s a dream come true. Subtle, tailored, and inoffensive, it’s clothing someone might wear to the office or to meet her boyfriend’s parents for the first time — or, for that matter, to meet her son’s girlfriend. “What I love about Tuckernuck is that it’s ageless,” Prince tells me at the front of the line. “You see women who are in their 20s all the way into their 70s and 80s wearing Tuckernuck.”
Gailliot; her sister, Maddy Grayson; and Grayson’s best friend, September Votta, started the label out of the sisters’ parents’ garage soon after the latter two finished college. Apart from an initial round of funding from friends and family, Gailliot tells me they have not taken on any outside investors. At the time, the trio felt there was a gap in the market for women looking for something more luxe than J.Crew but with a kinder price point than Prada. Originally a marketplace for other brands — Farm Rio, Ralph Lauren, and Simkhai — Tuckernuck added an eponymous in-house label in 2019. Most of its private-label garments are reverse engineered based on what the founders feel women, including the three of them, may want: comfortable heels, like their popular Margots, to walk to work in, a dress for a family Christmas party, mid-price tennis and pickleball garments that won’t break the bank.
Photo: Mary Kang
Photo: Mary Kang
According to a brand representative, Tuckernuck surpassed $100 million in sales in 2021 and achieved 53 percent year-over-year growth from 2023 to 2024 with a projected 25 percent growth this year. As the gospel of Tuckernuck spread organically (it first hired a PR team only four years ago), the label has attracted fans outside of the East Coast … and, naturally, some haters, too. Women in the “over 30” Reddit thread are asking for Tuckernuck dupes, while their younger counterparts in major cities are discovering the brand and either posting try-ons for their followers or begging their algorithm to hide its ads. Those working on the Hill in D.C., already familiar with Tuckernuck, either revere or rebuke the brand, debating whether its popular Jackie tweed shift dress is an inherently Republican thing to wear to the office.
@sarameierr Granny’s concern about being too hot 🥺😂. She cracks me up! Dress is linked in my LTK app 🥰 @tuckernuck tuckernuck tuckernucking grandmillennial coastalgrandmother preppy vacationoutfit fashiontok grandma wife pov bluedress preppydress
This is Tuckernuck’s second brick-and-mortar after its flagship in Georgetown. (The founders hope to open stores in Dallas, Atlanta, Chicago, Boston, and Connecticut in the near future.) Modeled after an Upper East Side brownstone and around the corner from the Met museum, it’s an East Coast prepster’s dream. In the entryway, I’m greeted by plush tawny carpeting, a pastoral wallpaper printed in tall green reeds, and a dark-marble credenza topped with household items for sale: an emerald-toned glass jewelry case for $2,590 and a small yellow vase for $550. A label-free candle burning next to both smells like a garden in bloom.
Photo: Mary Kang
Each room beyond the foyer has a household-inspired name and a purpose. There’s the library, a wood-paneled room where Tuckernuck showcases its best for the season, a mix of third-party brands and the in-house private label. The scullery, a mint-colored series of cabinets and shelves evocative of your wealthy friend’s pantry growing up, is where woven and crystalline knickknacks, like a $550 chunk of decorative white coral or a $400 wicker-pattern table lighter, live. And there’s the conservatory, inspired by the dining room in Gailliot’s former Georgetown home (she’s now based blocks from the New York location, while Grayson and Votta still live in D.C.), where Tuckernuck displays its more outdoorsy items, such as riding boots, dog-themed linen napkins, and quilted jackets the brand designed in collaboration with Barbour. Free private styling is available in the floral-drenched stylist’s lounge to customers who book an appointment.
Photo: Mary Kang
The co-founders have collectively had 12 children since the company’s launch, and Tuckernuck, Gailliot notes, has gone to great lengths to make it a friendlier-than-average place for working moms. It offers free in-house child care (a day care attached to the D.C. office) to all its employees. “We haven’t lost any women after maternity leave,” says Gailliot, a mother of five. “Our retention is 100 percent so far.” The D.C. flagship also offers stroller parking, and the New York location features a secret free candy and toy counter for children.
Sydney Cavanagh, a 31-year-old shopping the store on opening day for an engagement-party dress, says she loves the “feminine,” “polished” nature of the brand, but her shopping partner and mom, Lori, a 60-year-old Tuckernuck devotee who traveled up from Florida for the weekend, shies away from calling it traditional.
“It’s upscale and not too trendy,” Lori says. “They very much keep current, but I don’t feel like I’m going to buy something and feel like I can’t wear it in a year.”
Photo: Mary Kang
Tuckernuck is taking up residence in NYC at a time when much of the fashion world looks to be embracing conservatism. The cowboy boots I’d wear growing up in Kansas now click-clack on the heels of girls going out for martinis in the West Village, while cotton milkmaid dresses billow on Williamsburg shoppers over 2,000 miles from Ballerina Farm. And at Fashion Week, brands like LoveShackFancy, Alice + Olivia, and, of course, Ralph Lauren, sold different versions of Americana, the former two displaying massive flags and one a girlbossified version of the Constitution — this is approaching post-9/11 levels of patriotism at a point when the American flag symbolizes either freedom or authoritarianism, depending on whom you ask. When Tuckernuck launched in Obama’s America, I might have seen someone walking down Prince Street in the brand’s $198 Americana cotton roll-neck sweater and thought, How Cape Cod coded. Now, I’m more likely to wonder if you’ve got a MAGA hat at home. Tuckernuck is the lucky beneficiary of our present cultural divide: Whether you’re wearing that shift dress to look like Jackie Kennedy or Ivanka Trump, you can buy it at Tuckernuck.
Gailliot rejects the notion that the brand is meant for people of specific political leanings. “My favorite article that was written on us recently said, ‘The only bipartisan thing D.C. can agree on is Tuckernuck,’” Gailliot reports. “We want to build something that puts positive energy out there and makes people happy, of all types and backgrounds, and not even think more about that.” And while the co-founder and CEO acknowledges the brand’s current momentum, she says her goal is to continue to make Tuckernuck feel like a safe space of sorts, “a place that customers can come and have someone that tries to make their life a little bit easier.” (Still, some fans online can’t help but speculate about the staff’s own political leanings, reading their social-media posts — such as a stylist touring Biden’s White House in a kelly-green Jackie dress in 2023 — as if they were tea leaves.) When I ask about the debate on where the brand falls on the political aesthetic spectrum, Gailliot tells me she’s not sure its customers would even want it to wade into those waters: “They want to know what the next travel adventure is that they could find, or what the new vintage item is in our store, or something that will make them feel really confident as they go from a boardroom to a curriculum night at school.”
Photo: Mary Kang
After making it through the line, shoppers with voluminous blowouts (one with her hair still in big rollers) and pastel blouses zip across the floor from room to room, seeking those very things — reaching for billowy pin-striped tunics, cream cable-knit sweaters, and soft butter-yellow cardigans. Dutiful employees tend to the whims of their revved-up customers. One woman in a floral scarf scolds an employee outside the fitting rooms, livid that the $100 gift cards promised for the first 100 guests have run out: “I paid $100 for parking and waited an hour. You should really tell people you’re out of the gift cards!” She finds another Tuckernuck team member in the family room and is offered a free floral-trimmed L.L.Bean tote as a placation. Across the room, another customer grills a sales associate over a tiny glass container. “Is this a vase?” she asks, to which the employee replies, “It’s technically classified as an object, but you could probably put flowers in it.” Seemingly agitated, the customer peppers her: “What do you mean? Is it glass? It’s glass. So it’s a vase.” Defeated, the employee deflates: “Sure, I don’t see why not.”
In the coiffed chaos, I spot Chelsea McGuire, a 35-year-old who stands out in a sea of prep. In low-rise thrifted pants, a cropped black shirt, and a vintage cadet hat, she’s a far throw from the typical Tuckernuck shopper but had agreed to meet a friend at the store. “I saw a pair of loafers that are a total dupe for the YSL ones,” she tells me. “That’s when I realized I could be a Tuckernuck girl.” Like McGuire, I’m typically averse to shift dresses and tweed, but I found myself gravitating toward brushed-wool leopard-print crop tops and black leather knee-high boots, wondering how they might look in my own closet and thinking the same thing. Maybe, despite my downtown sensibilities, I’m also actually a Tuckernuck girl. If the brand’s aspiration to be the preeminent mid-price line for women across the country is to be realized, millions of others like me and McGuire will have to board that proverbial ferry to Tuckernuck too.
