Plus BKLYN’s Pop-Up Brings Plus-Size Vintage Fashion to Broadway
June 22, 2026
Plus BKLYN: Bigger in Manhattan is part of the Downtown Alliance’s RE:Store program, which is bringing six pop-ups to Lower Manhattan for the summer. Learn more about the program here.
When Alexis Krase, the founder of Plus BKLYN, heard about the Downtown Alliance’s RE:Store program, the opportunity to bring her unique and much-needed business model to Manhattan was immediately appealing. “I saw the synopsis of the program via the Locavore, and thought, what a cool opportunity,” she said. “I applied without any singular expectation and I was pretty happily surprised — shocked — when we got it.” And this summer, Lower Manhattanites can find curated inclusive fashion at the Plus BKLYN pop-up at 2 Broadway.
That Krase’s store was picked to be a part of this program is no real surprise. Plus BKLYN is a vintage and resale store that differentiates itself from the myriad other vintage stores in New York City because of its clientele. Krase’s store is a secondhand and resale store that caters to plus-size women, where the smallest size sold is a 12. The store exists because of Krase’s “lived experience,” she says. As a plus-size woman herself, Krase was intimately familiar with the lack of options on the market. “We do our best to serve a community that has largely been on the fringes of fashion, a marginalized group of people who have less access to clothing,” she said. “I had an inkling that if I built it, they would come. And they did.”
It’s worth noting that Plus BKLYN is the only brick and mortar small business in New York City that specializes in plus-size clothing, so for Krase, bringing her wares to a different audience made sense. “There’s a lot of tourism in Lower Manhattan,” she said. “A lot of people think of Lower Manhattan just as a financial epicenter, but if you go to our location, you’re a stone’s throw away from the Smithsonian Institute and the Bull and it’s just really bustling and alive with people.”
The original store is located in Greenpoint, and Krase hopes the Manhattan location will make her store more easily accessible for the many tourists that will certainly descend upon the borough as summer unfolds. “For a lot of people who are visiting from Europe or another state, they look at Brooklyn, where our headquarters are, and think it’s a schlep,” she says. “We’re kind of on an island, in a way.”
What appeals to Krase the most about the location is the sense of possibility and the chance to build community. Over the summer, the store will host a series of workshops on everything from clothesmending to jewelry making, as well as shop and sips and Pride programming. But above all, a temporary relocation to the actual island of Manhattan is a chance for Krase to show people that there is supply to meet the demand for cute, non-matronly clothing for the average American woman. “When we opened, I was happy to see that there was fanfare and an audience,” she said. “There was a community of people who really needed what we were here to offer.”
Plus BKLYN: Bigger in Manhattan is open Wednesday through Sunday from 12 p.m. – 8 p.m.
Megan C. Reynolds is a writer, editor, and author. She lives in Brooklyn.
photo: courtesy Plus BKLYN
