Prince & Princess

The storefront sits low on the west side of Wisconsin Avenue, between M Street and P Street, where the blocks thicken with foot traffic on weekend afternoons. A wall of sneakers faces the window. Racks of tracksuits run toward the back. The shop occupies a modest rectangle, roughly the size of a generous living room, and everything inside it is positioned to be seen: the shoes on their shelves, the track pants folded by color, the hats arranged at eye level above the register. It does not feel like a boutique. It feels like a store, the real kind, where people come in knowing what they want and usually find it.

Parviz Mizrahi and his sister Lida Solmen have run Prince and Princess together for decades, building the business their family started on Wisconsin Avenue in 1981. They came as immigrants and opened in Georgetown when the neighborhood was already a commercial draw, and they stayed through every cycle of retail fashion that followed. That longevity is not accidental. Mizrahi learned early that selection wins customers in a way that curation cannot. When other DC shops were carrying two or three New Balance models in the early 1980s, he began stocking many. Word spread. The store became the place people sent their friends.

The New Balance inventory remains the anchor. Mizrahi carries what the brand calls its classic gray colorways, the 99x series, the 1400, and a range of models that most urban shoe chains do not bother with. Alongside the sneakers, the store stocks Fila, Sergio Tacchini, and Adidas tracksuits that read less as throwback novelty than as actual clothes for people who wear them. Timberland boots share floor space with Sperry and Converse. The North Face appears on a rack near the rear. The selection does not chase trends so much as maintain a consistent vocabulary of athletic and street-ready clothing, updated season to season without dramatic pivots.

Prince and Princess opened before Georgetown was a destination for restaurant tourists, when Wisconsin Avenue was still largely a neighborhood retail strip. Filmmaker Jacob Garibay, making a documentary about New Balance culture in DC, interviewed longtime residents who described buying their first pair of 990s at the store as teenagers. The shop appeared in DECADES, a WHUT mini-docuseries on DC institutions, in January 2024. That kind of attention tends to arrive after forty-plus years of showing up, not because of a rebrand.

The store keeps regular hours, Monday through Saturday from eleven to seven, Sunday from noon to six. There is no website beyond an Instagram feed. Parking on Wisconsin Avenue can be scarce on weekend afternoons, and the M Street garage a block away is often the easier option. First-time visitors tend to walk past without stopping, drawn toward the louder storefronts south on M. That is their loss. The selection inside rewards the detour, and anyone who asks Mizrahi about a specific New Balance model is likely to hear an answer that takes the question seriously.