The Lower East Side Fabric Store That Helped Outfit ‘Bridgerton’

Step behind the unassuming facade of Mendel Goldberg Fabrics on Manhattan’s Lower East Side and you’ll suddenly find yourself surrounded by an array of gorgeous fabrics on its floor-to-ceiling shelves: bolts and neatly folded stacks of fine cottons, silks, satins, taffetas and lace as well as more opulent materials, from bubble-gum pink metallic brocade to apple green silk satin jacquard and shimmery pleated navy chiffon. There are fabrics woven with gold thread or glittering with Swarovski crystals. And there is Chanel-style wool bouclé in pale pink, or black and white woven with little ribbons and pearls. The material is as luxuriously textured as a lamb’s coat. I want it.

I don’t sew. I haven’t got the DNA (no one in my family did). I’ve never really paid attention to the world of bespoke clothing or the fabrics a designer might use, not until a few months ago, when I went to Hester Street — a street once jammed with pushcarts and now crowded with delivery bikes — and walked into Mendel Goldberg, where, feeling as if I’d wandered into a psychedelic dreamscape, I coveted everything.

Presiding over the shop from her usual perch, above a large wooden table where she measures out the fabric, was proprietor Alice Goldberg, wearing a fitted white blouse, a narrow beige skirt with a zipper up the back and black flats. Goldberg is the fourth generation of her family to run the store since her great-grandfather Mendel founded it. Alongside Luis Ortega, the Goldbergs’ aide-de-camp since 1989, Alice has witnessed a few memorable shopping sprees, including the time a few years back when a group of Saudi princesses spent about 30 minutes in the store, “buying like crazy,” and the day seven bridesmaids purchased beaded sky blue tulle for their dresses.

Costume designers are also frequent customers. Among them is John Glaser, who oversaw the wardrobe for season one of Netflix’s “Bridgerton” (along with Ellen Mirojnick) as well as that for the upcoming season three. “You can get things here you can’t get anywhere else, like certain very rich and expensive over-embroidered or beaded material,” Glaser says. He’s used Mendel Goldberg’s fabrics for a number of the costumes for the Regency-era period drama, including a sheer white frock in laser cut silk chiffon, a fabric that “we used inside out,” Glaser adds. “There was also a dress for Lady Bridgerton made of pale blue silk jacquard that reminded me of an 18th-century…