Aimé Leon Dore, Tuned: How a Fashion House Built a Culture of Listening
By Rafi Mercer
New listing
32 Broadwick Street, Soho, London W1F 8HQ, United Kingdom.
There are brands that sell clothes and brands that sell a feeling. Aimé Leon Dore sells a world: Queens nostalgia and café light, walnut and wool, the kind of New York that only exists if you choose it. But underneath the collegiate sweaters and immaculate tailoring, there’s a quieter instrument at work—the way ALD curates sound. Walk into their London flagship on Broadwick Street and you’ll find it: an intimate sound room, a small sanctuary that plays like a listening bar stitched into the floorplan of a fashion store. It doesn’t scream. It hums. And that’s the point.
Simple fine luxury: London (Credit Aimé Leon Dore)
ALD began as a conversation between old-world taste and downtown ease; Teddy Santis made that dialogue feel inevitable—classic menswear cut with hip-hop memory, sportswear handled like heirloom. The stores are showcases, yes, but they’re also stage sets. The coffee is Greek, the wood is warm, the lighting is tender rather than loud. Every material choice sounds like something. In London the flagship brings all of that to a British audience and adds a dedicated sound space to anchor the mood: not a DJ booth tucked in a corner, but a room designed for listening, programming, and presence.
ALD calls it a sound room, which is perfect: precise without being precious. It sits alongside the shop floor and the café; you can drift in with a flat white, hear a selector ease into a set that was chosen for the hour rather than the algorithm, and feel a day slow down for thirty minutes. The point isn’t to turn retail into a club. The point is to give the clothes and the crowd a soundtrack that belongs to the place. The London flagship features this intimate sound room alongside a Greek-inspired café—an architectural thesis about how people actually move through a space when they’re comfortable.
The sound rooms in New York and London aren’t just fixtures; they’re the engines behind SOUND, ALD’s monthly content series: hour-long DJ sets recorded in those spaces and released as living mood boards. This isn’t merch; it’s media. The series codifies the brand’s ear—hip-hop and R&B through gospel warmth, jazz that knows when to breathe, electronic selections with the high-low sensibility ALD brings to clothes. London’s entries have included curators like AAA, explicitly tagged to the Broadwick Street address—proof that the room is not just a backdrop but a character in the story.
What makes the project land is restraint. The mixes don’t shout brand. They speak place. A city set becomes a postcard, a way to hear how the flagship intends to feel on a Thursday after work, on a slow winter afternoon, on a Saturday when the café line runs out the door. The curation is good enough to live on its own—and subtle enough to push you back toward the room it came from.
If you’ve ever sat in the café at 214 Mulberry in New York, you know ALD builds hospitality like it cuts a blazer: familiar until you notice the details. The London shop keeps the same grammar—Greek deserts and coffees, a place to pause, and the sound room just close enough to tint the air. The café is how they slow your heartbeat; the sound room is how they hold your attention. Together, they make a shop feel like a neighbourhood.
Call it what it is: a disguised listening bar. No door policy, no decibels chasing conversation into the street. Instead you get intention—selections that respect the room, volume that flatters fabric and voice, and the calm confidence of a brand that knows curation is a competitive edge. Plenty of labels have tried to graft a playlist onto a store; ALD built a program, a room, and a release cadence.
Crucially, the listening lives on the internet and in the space. The SOUND page publishes sets by city and selector; the London entries point right back to Broadwick Street. You discover the music online and suddenly feel like visiting; you visit, and you hear the city arranged for you; you leave wanting the set that matches the hour you were there. That loop—room to stream to room again—is what most brand playlists miss entirely.
ALD’s YouTube presence is another pillar—short films and longer cuts that treat product like prop work and mood as the main character. It’s not an afterthought. It’s a house style: documentary-quiet camera, handheld patience, music that feels hand-picked rather than licensed from a royalty-free bin. The official channel is a clean archive of that tone and an obvious home for SOUND sets, campaign films, and drop-adjacent stories. It’s also how the listening room’s logic scales: the same curation, reframed for a screen without losing the physical origin of the sound.
What does the London room actually sound like? If you’ve paid attention to the published sets, you get a constellation: US and UK hip-hop that keeps tempo without crowding the floor, alternative R&B that makes sense of the wood and the light, gospel and jazz used like seasoning rather than spectacle, electronics that warm rather than clang. That range isn’t random. It matches the way ALD mixes references in clothes—classic forms tuned for the present, subculture filtered through tailoring. The sound room translates that idea sonically.
And because the room sits inside the shop, the stakes are different. Loud is lazy. The job is intimacy—tracks that let conversation exist without turning music into wallpaper. The volumes are honest enough that a hi-hat still tastes clean; the bass is shaped so a sweatshirt still feels like a garment rather than a wind machine. It’s hospitality as audio engineering.
If you strip the logo off, what’s left? With ALD, the answer is always culture: café rituals, small-run print, film, and now a listening infrastructure that makes a store behave like a venue in soft focus. The London flagship is a clean essay on that thesis. The address matters—32 Broadwick Street, Soho, London—but what matters more is the idea that a brand can build a place you want to be, not just a place you go to buy.
SOUND formalizes the instinct; the sound room gives it architecture; the café makes it social; the clothes tie it all to a daily uniform. You leave with a cardigan and a track stuck in your head, and neither feels accidental.
There’s a version of this that turns cynical: slap a pair of big speakers in a store, push a playlist, call it a day. ALD didn’t take the shortcut. They built rooms, commissioned sets, and let the music lead the mood. In a decade where “experience” gets flogged within an inch of its meaning, the Broadwick Street listening room is rare because it’s quiet about its ambition. It doesn’t announce itself. It earns your attention one well-timed record at a time.
The best listening spaces don’t demand silence, they create it. The ALD sound room does exactly that. You step in meaning to browse and find yourself staying for the last 90 seconds of a song you’ve heard a hundred times. Not because of nostalgia, but because the room reveals a detail you’ve never noticed—air around a vocal, a bass line built like a staircase, the way a Rhodes chord softens the corners of a winter afternoon.
That’s not retail. That’s listening.
Rafi Mercer writes about the spaces where music matters. For more stories from the Tracks & Tales, subscribe, or click here to read more.
