Join the club. Part of the Nick & Nora sleepwear line created by Linda Rae Tepper, 47, and Steven Mark Abrams, 50 (available at stores like Nordstrom's and in the Victoria's Secret catalog), the $69 brushed-cotton flannel jammies have become a Hollywood sleeper. Versions have shown up in Friends and Cybill as well as in gift boxes for Sylvester Stallone and Clint Eastwood. "I just love the bold patterns and the fuzziness," says songwriter Allee Willis (the Friends theme). Tepper isn't surprised. "I knew if I designed a line with fun prints, people would buy them," she says. "We feel responsible for bringing back pajamas."
Now she and Abrams—she designs, he takes care of business—are expanding. This summer the firm will introduce a line of Polarfleece bathrobes ($90-95) and cotton flannel sheets ($28-65). "I want to design for people to have fun," says Tepper. "I don't want to be too serious."
The couple has had their fill of that. Since January 1995, Abrams has been battling non-Hodgkin's lymphoma. Told he had a 50-50 chance of surviving, he spent a month in a New York City hospital undergoing a stem-cell transplant and, in characteristically feisty fashion, wowed the staff with his Nick & Nora duds. "People would stop me in the halls and ask where I got my pajamas," he says. "I could have opened a pj bar in the hospital." Sadly, the transplant didn't go over as well as his togs. Last year, doctors found the cancer had spread. "It's been our worst time and our best time," says Abrams, whose treatment now combines vitamin therapy and chemotherapy. "It's made us more focused on each other and what we do at Nick & Nora."
Both Brooklyn natives, Tepper and Abrams began dating in 1973 after Abrams, who was managing a photo studio, let his married boss's girlfriend, a pal of Tepper's, crash at his apartment. Soon Tepper was staying over instead. "He got tired of me wearing his clothes the next day," she kids, "so I moved in." In 1975, after two years spent collecting vintage clothing for a friend's Long Island boutique, they opened the Ruby Slippers, an antique clothing shop in Manhattan. Fourteen years later, they launched Nick & Nora, specializing in updated retrowear.
They're still looking back. The couple has filled their two-bedroom Greenwich Village apartment (plus their garment district showroom and 1922 cottage in Southampton, N.Y.) with vintage flea market wares. And, true to their '60s ideals, they haven't married. But they are devoted. "We made a commitment early on," says Abrams. "There is no paper, no pre-nuptial." Instead, he jokes, "we have a business."
Jeremy Helligar
Lisa Kay Greissinger in New York City
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- Lisa Kay Greissinger.
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