Philly Mag’s former style editor on Ann Gitter, the iconic owner of longtime womenswear boutique Knit Wit, who died on April 14th
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Ann Gitter
I first met Ann Gitter about 15 years ago, back when I was the shopping and fashion editor of Philadelphia magazine. I met a lot of shop owners during my tenure, and I liked them all, but I fell in love with Ann.
Ann was off-beat, kooky, singular. She wore all black, all the time, and had been doing so since 1970. But it wasn’t a uniform. Ann’s closet was filled with black clothes, all different shades and shapes and styles and textures, organized with the same militant precision you’d expect from a woman who’d been running a high-end, fashion-forward womenswear boutique in Philly, Knit Wit, since the late 1960s. Ann had 50 different pairs of black pants, and she knew each one by heart — how they fit, how they moved, how they felt.
But of course she would know them all. Fashion was her life. After growing up in Elkins Park and graduating with a bachelor’s degree in business administration from Temple in the late 1960s, Ann began working as a buyer and store manager at Knit Wit, a snappy boutique that specialized in knitwear separates. When the shop’s owner sold the business to entrepreneurs Don Davidow and Bob Brandt in 1970, they quickly brought on Ann as a partner.
The trio would go on to transform Knit Wit into a buzzy, high-style cornerstone of Philadelphia fashion, with Ann at its helm. She was the friendly face of the store and the brains behind the buying; her keen eye brought then-fledgling designers like Betsey Johnson to the city. She was one of Philly’s pioneering fashion forces, part of the new wave of independent boutique owners — Joan Shepp and Toby Lerner among them — who were following in the footsteps of Philly stalwarts like Nan Duskin and Sophy Curson.
The business would shape-shift over the years — hopscotching from Chestnut to Walnut and back again, and swelling to include a sister store, Plage Tahiti, and additional locations in Bryn Mawr and Margate. (Plage Tahiti closed in 2014 after 32 years in business; Knit Wit shuttered its Center City and Main Line outposts in 2017 and 2020, respectively. Its Margate location is still open.)
But what this list of openings and closings doesn’t tell you is this: Ann carried her cell phone in a small cross-body bag, and when it rang — during a meeting, during lunch, during a peaceful walk down Chestnut Street together — it sounded like a flying saucer was landing, the ringtone a sort of sci-fi, alien whistle. Ann’s laugh was warm and throaty, like a hug. Ann collected antique biscuit tins, and teeny-tiny antique chairs that she lined up in antique glass-fronted cabinets, and antique pitchers, and jewelry, and sunglasses, and, of course, clothes.
Ann Gitter’s closet, photographed for Philly Mag in 2016 / Photograph by Christopher Leaman
Everyone knew that Ann had razor-sharp bangs, and straight hair that was somewhere between blonde and white, which she braided into a single plait that swept down her back like a ribbon. But no one knew that once, years after I was the style editor, Ann gave me an antique wrought-iron bed — I forget where or why she had it — because I told her that I was moving into a new house and didn’t have a lot of furniture. She even had her own movers drive it up to Bucks County for me.
Or that once, when we were at her home — a circa-1860 carriage house in Rittenhouse — to photograph it for a magazine feature in 2011, Ann paused the shoot to take our longtime stylist, Lauren Kozakiewicz, into her private fashion archives. “My daughter was around 12 years old at the time, and I was telling Ann about how she loved Betsey Johnson,” says Kozakiewicz. “And in the middle of the shoot, Ann took me up to her archives and gifted me two pieces of vintage Betsey Johnson for her. That’s the kind of person she was.” Kozakiewicz’s daughter, now in her mid-twenties, still wears them.
I have a few pieces that Ann gave me over the years, all from this perfectly archived collection of treasures — a vintage Comme des Garçons scarf, a few chunky silver rings, a pair of delicate gold earrings shaped like peacocks, a 1970s clutch shaped like a folded-up magazine. And I still have some items that I bought from her stores over the years, too — like a boxy, cream-colored leather vest with a silver patch by the shoulder, and a cozy wool coat with leather sleeves. They remind me of a period of my life when my job was to shop in all the boutiques of Philly, to get to know the people who owned them, these creatives who were walking a path carved by luminaries like Ann. But if my closet held a few stories, Ann’s was an entire library.
We went to lunch, often at Zama in Rittenhouse Square, talking about our husbands — she was married to Stephen Gitter for 56 years — and our families. We talked about my writing, and about her early years in the fashion industry. We fell out of touch several years ago, after I had my son and went freelance, writing stories from my home in Yardley. But I thought of her often, because how couldn’t I? Her rings are on my fingers all the time, chunky, funky silver pieces that clink together when I move my hands. They are clinking together now, as I write this.
When I wrote the story about her house in 2011, she told me that they’d bought it in 2001 — a dark, old structure that still had dirt floors where the stables had been — and then gutted it, turning it into a beautiful space that mixed modernism with Philadelphia history. They loved the process; everything for Ann was about design and art and beauty. The only problem: They adored the house so much that they couldn’t imagine ever leaving it, which meant they likely wouldn’t get to experience another renovation project. “We love it so much, we can’t move,” Ann said at the time. “My saddest thing is that we’re so happy here.”
And now, Ann, I guess my saddest thing is that you have moved on, hopefully happily, to somewhere else. But we’re still here.