Want to shop with the ultra rich? The entry fee is $12,000
NICOLAS BIJAN is a natural-born Yes Man. You want him to custom-upholster your dune buggy? He’ll do it. Dry-clean your pasta-sauce-stained silk jacket? A courier is on the way, sir.
On the desk of his sun-dappled Beverly Hills office sits a plaque that reads: It can be done. “My whole life, I’ve been trained to say yes. Every request, every customer," Bijan says, sitting in his wood-paneled studio just five minutes off Rodeo Drive.
When Bijan heard I was without a car in the public-transportation desert that is Los Angeles, he offered to lend me his own 1971 Porsche for the day. (I declined.) That over-the-top, crash-my-car-please hospitality can only come from someone who has spent roughly half his life catering to the fabulously rich and extremely demanding. This was his birthright: Bijan’s father was Bijan Pakzad, a larger-than-life Iranian immigrant who founded House of Bijan in 1976 as an appointment-only Rodeo Drive temple of $65,000 croc-skin luggage, $15,000 vicuña coats and $120,000 chinchilla bedspreads.
Over nearly four decades, Pakzad built the store into a destination for the ultra-rich. He parked a canary-yellow Rolls-Royce outside and appeared in ads smoking cigars with Michael Jordan and palling around with Bo Derek. House of Bijan developed a reputation for being the “most expensive store in the world," before Pakzad died in 2011 and left it all to his youngest child, a then 19-year-old Nicolas.
Today, the younger Bijan is 33 and trying to slip free from his father’s long shadow with an even more exclusive proposition: a members-only apparel brand. NB44, which he launched in 2021, costs $12,000 a year to join—a fee that doesn’t cover a single item of clothing. The medical world has concierge doctors.
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