New Yorker

New Yorker is a German fast-fashion retailer founded in 1971 in Flensburg as a single jeans shop and now run from Braunschweig, where it trades as New Yorker SE. It sells cheap, trend-driven clothing for teenagers and people in their twenties through more than 1,300 stores in over 45 countries. For a museum of lingerie, the interesting part is a small one: New Yorker keeps its underwear and swimwear under a house label called censored, and it sells that label the way it sells everything else, fast, cheap and close to the till.

A Flensburg jeans shop, 1971

The company began with two partners, Tilmar Hansen and Michael Simson, who opened a jeans store in Flensburg, the port town on the Danish border. Denim was the youth uniform of the early 1970s, and a shop that did nothing but jeans could make a living in a provincial town.

The person who turned that shop into a chain came in early. Friedrich Knapp already had a jeans business of his own in Braunschweig, trading as Jeans Fritz. He joined the Flensburg founders, and the combined operation took the name SHK-Jeans GmbH. Over the following decades Knapp became the face of New Yorker, and Braunschweig, not Flensburg, became its headquarters.

The founders left in stages. Simson departed in 1990. Hansen exited in 2001. By then New Yorker was Knapp's company in all but the history books.

How New Yorker built a youth chain

New Yorker never tried to be a department store. Its formula was narrow on purpose: young customers, low prices, quick turnover of styles, and most of the stock under labels the company owns. That last point matters. When a chain controls its own labels, it controls margin and speed, and it does not wait for a wholesale brand's calendar.

Fishbone, launched in 1992, was the first label to carry real weight. Others followed. The current roster, as German Wikipedia lists it, splits roughly like this:

Label	Range
fishbone / FSBN, smog, ICONO, Black Squad	menswear
fishbone sister, amisu	womenswear
censored	underwear and swimwear

The store network went abroad in 1994, when New Yorker opened its first shop outside Germany in Linz, Austria. From there it spread across Europe and beyond. By 2025 the company counted more than 1,300 stores in more than 45 countries. In 2024 it reported revenue of about 3.1 billion euros and an average of 25,029 employees. Those numbers put it among the larger privately held fashion retailers in Europe, even though it rarely makes headlines outside the German-speaking press.

censored: underwear on the New Yorker model

Lingerie at New Yorker is a supporting act, and the company does not pretend otherwise. censored covers the underwear and swimwear side of the business. The museum has not checked the label's range style by style, but the shapes any youth chain of this kind relies on are easy to name: the molded push-up bra, the soft bralette, briefs and thongs, and bikini separates for summer. At New Yorker the pricing sits at the bottom of the market, and the label's job is to match whatever the womenswear floor is selling that season.

That puts New Yorker in a different category from a specialist like Hunkemöller, which competes in many of the same European shopping streets. Hunkemöller sells fit and range in its own stores. New Yorker sells underwear as part of an outfit, a basic picked up on the way to the checkout along with a top and a pair of jeans. Neither approach is better. They answer different questions.

The museum archive holds 16 product records under the New Yorker name. They are entered for reference, as an example of how mass youth retail handles intimates, and they are not shown publicly.

Ownership, privacy and controversy

New Yorker is not listed on any stock exchange, and for most of its life it said very little about itself. The company's legal form today is a Societas Europaea, the European company structure, registered as New Yorker SE.

Its record is not spotless. In 2015 the Frankfurter Rundschau reported on alleged anti-union activity at the company. In 2017 the Paradise Papers leak showed that aircraft used by the business were run through an offshore arrangement in the Cayman Islands. Both episodes are documented on German Wikipedia with references to the original reporting.

Knapp's company also reached outside retail. In 2011 it acquired FFC Sportmanagement, the business behind an American football team, which put the New Yorker name in front of a sports audience that never shops for fishbone jeans.

After Friedrich Knapp

Friedrich Knapp died in November 2024. Ownership of the company now sits in equal shares with his three daughters. The chain he built from a Braunschweig jeans shop and a Flensburg partnership remains private, still sells most of its stock under its own labels, and still keeps its bras and briefs on the censored rail near the front of the store.

Last updated October 28, 2026