Brooks Brothers @ Crossroads (Again)
By Alan Flusser
Brooks Brothers lies lifeless, as if on an operating table waiting for someone to resuscitate it. For months now, observers have pondered whether the right doctor with the right medicine will appear… Or whether the Godfather of American menswear be the victim of yet another well-meaning but ill-qualified owner who, like his predecessors, ends up chipping away at this once mighty fortress of men’s fashion and style.
On September 1, Authentic Brands Group LLC and SPARC Group LLC announced that they’d completed the acquisition of the 202-year-old institution — outfitter of 41 of 45 American presidents and the first retailer in the country to sell ready-made clothing for men. With the matter of a new owner resolved, the question for Brooks Brothers now is, where to from here?
Since the company filed for Chapter 11 in July, Brooks’ future has been the subject of fevered discussion. The most draconian of rumors has it that the majority of the famed retailer’s stores will likely disappear along with its three American factories. Distribution will move down-market to cheaper and more efficient online sales as opposed to the traditional, in-person experience that customers have long relied upon.
In one nightmare scenario, the Brooks Brothers name becomes a commercial brand that competes on price at discount or mall outlets as well on the internet’s high-growth distribution channels. Alternatively, there’s talk of a more upmarket game plan where some stores are retained to anchor the brand’s image and support an expanding presence on the web’s digital commerce platforms. At the moment, it’s all rather vague and to the Brooks faithful, rather glum.
This is not the first time the company has found itself on the chopping block, forced to submit to the predatory machinations of the investment community. In 1988, the British retailer Marks & Spencer purchased the business for $750 million dollars only to cough it up thirteen years later in a fire sale for $200 million, when its current owner Claudio Del Vecchio, the son of a billionaire Italian industrialist, entered the picture. This month, the bankrupt Brooks fetched a reported $325 million in its sale to Authentic Brands / SPARC.
When asked how the iconic brand ended up in bankruptcy court, company executives and industry observers largely attribute the business’s lagging fortunes to upheavals in the marketplace, such as falling store traffic as sales shifted on-line and mounting pressure from the coronavirus pandemic. Other explanations include a failure to adapt to changing trends, such as the rise in business casual and the decline in formal workwear, as well as not keeping in step with the new generation of consumers looking for a more edgy approach to casual dressing.
It is undeniable that over the past 30 years changing market forces have taken their toll, with the casualization of the workplace no doubt outpacing change at the storied brand. It is also true that since the 1980s, the menswear business has largely been driven by designer brands and in the specific case of Brooks Brothers, designer Ralph Lauren having stolen their thunder and monopoly over the preppy, Ivy League strain of American fashion that the retailer originally invented.
However, in the face of all this, I would counter that Brooks Brothers’ supposed slump is less marketplace driven and more merchandise abetted, the result of a gradual distancing from its true fashion legacy — its treasury of authentic pre-war classics and promise of time-tested good taste. Brooks Brothers survived the Great Depression in the 1930s, Carnaby Street and the Peacock revolution in the 1960’s, and the designer explosion in the 1970s by building their merchandise assortments around the extraordinary number of iconic articles of apparel that they either designed, brokered from Europe, or marketed into popular fashion prior to the outbreak of WWII. There was very little in the way of upper-class fashion that the firm not only pioneered but created from within.
Most critics feel that Brooks’ future depends on how well they can renovate their traditional office and haberdashery businesses while addressing the rapidly evolving and here-to-stay demand for more casual workplace and weekend attire. While dress-down fashion is certainly in the driver’s seat, it might be premature to retreat from their trademark clothing business as there will always be a market, albeit smaller, for those tailored classics that continue to invigorate a cosmopolitan’s developing wardrobe.
Why shouldn’t Brooks be the retailer of choice for those men on their way up looking to buy affordable, fashion-resistant, shaped, soft shoulder-inspired clothing? No retailer has more history on its side to corroborate having sired the first soft, comfort-driven clothing for men in this country.
As for casual togs, America has long been recognized as the country that invented sportswear. It’s probably no surprise who history would anoint as that fashion’s original trailblazer and most prolific purveyor. No company has done more to birth and shape the evolution of men’s sportswear than Brooks Brothers. Batik swim trunks to beach coats, button-downs to Bermuda shorts, from the 1920s through the 1960s, Brooks Brothers either designed, imported, or pioneered more shooting, military, riding, outdoor, and sports-minded apparel than anyone else, by a landslide.
For example, when Brooks first proposed tailoring a cheap, wrinkle-appearing cotton fabric worn mostly by poor southerners into a business suit, and then later on, for odd jackets, trousers, and ultimately bathing wear… Seersucker’s future was assured. When Brooks decided to manufacture sport shirts and then sport coats from an inexpensive, hand-woven, colorful cotton plaid import that bled upon washing, offering it later in summer neckties, odd dinner jackets and formal bow ties and cummerbunds, real Indian madras became a menswear fashion stable. The Brothers even designed western clothes, which, looking at the catalogues today, are as rudimentary stylish as any of Ralph Lauren’s RRL classics.
And here’s the good news — almost every article of merchandise that Brooks Brothers of 1818 ever designed, imported, or marketed, along with a trove of customer correspondence and salesmen’s commentaries are memorialized in a special company archives.
In 1982, Brooks decided to transport its century-plus repository of fashion literature from lodgings at 346 Madison Avenue to a storage facility outside Washington, D.C. In one corner of the so-named History Factory sits the most extensive and invaluable collection of menswear memorabilia ever assembled.
Staged on floor-to-ceiling shelving units sit stacks of vintage catalogues, specialized merchandise brochures, dressing manuals, salesmen primers, store history pamphlets, client ledgers, and miniature hand-bound, hard-cover guides on the rules and approved attire for various sports like tennis, golf, sailing, and polo, all arranged according to year. Opening one of their elegant illustrated catalogues from the 1930s is to enter menswear’s Golden Age when periodicals like Apparel Arts and Esquire became bibles and collector’s items of modern fashion education and thinking — starting a sartorial conversation that Brooks had a lot to do with helping to articulate and shape.
It’s hard to imagine an aggregation of anything, no less the original and complete design library of America’s most famous menswear brand, that could better inform or guide a rebranding effort. Any designer or merchant worth his salt would go weak-kneed from the sheer abundance of so much authentic and innovative material found within its pages. If the adage “sometimes looking back lets you know whether or not you are headed in the right direction” holds any truth, that such a treasure actually exists is almost providential, if not miraculous. Or someone looking in from the outside world would have thought so.
Having visited Brooks’ archive twice during the course of researching my various books on men’s style, I remember leaving both times mulling over the same notion. While sowing trust in their unique and rich connection to America’s heritage and culture, having disbursed such a sustained volume of company literature into the popular culture for so many years must have buffered the Brooks’ customer base from the company’s slow downward slide. Any other retail establishment would have succumbed years earlier, unable to maintain the façade of business-as-usual for such a protracted time frame. Until it finally caught up with them.
For anyone familiar with Brooks Brothers vestimental tradition and the merchandise responsible for it, visiting its 346 Madison Avenue fountainhead has been an act of courage for too many for far too long. Back in the 1960s, a devotee entering from either the Madison Avenue or 44th. St portal was akin to a divinity student arriving at the alter of St. Peters in Rome. The floor brimmed with Brooks’ perennials — two different width neckwear, their own make shirts, imported and sized hosiery, dressing gowns, Chesterfield dress coats, exclusive English footwear, hand-made leather goods, odd bits of the latest sportswear and party clothes — all the stuff that Madison Avenue lore was built upon. Brooks Brothers was once credited as the strongest single influence on men’s wear in the United States, a fact which has been borne out by the myriad of American and European fashion designers that have readily acknowledged just that.
The lights began to permanently dim in the late eighties with the retirement of the firm’s esteemed President, Frank T. Reilly, who, instead of giving the expected farewell speech, laced into his surprised audience in a fire and brimstone warning of losing what made Brooks Brothers…. well, Brooks Brothers, along with the prediction of dire things to come. As he correctly foresaw, slowly but inexorably, the merchandise started to lose its “Brooksy” look and with it, it’s reason-to-be. The clothes became facsimiles of what the newest merchandising group imagined Brooks garments were supposed to look like. I say imagined because it had been ages since anyone on the product side had paid much attention to the company’s true source code and de facto road map — its archives.
In the Marks & Spencer era, management decided that the store’s franchise was too old and therefore the company’s image needed re-making in order to attract a younger customer. Anything that might hint of the retailer’s stately past was to be replaced by something sleeker and more modern. At some point, the collective wisdom decreed that the History Factory should destroy the old archives, throw them out, as they were just collecting dust and costing money. In what has to be the most heroic act in all menswear folklore, its owner decided to ignore the executive’s instructions and pay for their preservation himself, in the hope that the next owner might come to his senses.
While Mr. Del Vecchio long took a personal interest in the archives, few of his merchants ever set foot in them, rarely requisitioning anything. This comes as no surprise because of late, the store’s merchandise was not even a copy of a copy of a copy but something all its own and nothing that could be confused with anything singularly Brook Brothers. Having discharged any veteran who might have schooled a new hire in the manufacturing standards associated with the company’s quality-bred culture, in recent years, Brooks Brothers has been virtually unhinged from any connection to its exclusive past.
Can Brooks Brothers be turned around? Can the brand be made to have a credible identity in this digital and social media saturated world? Some feel the brand’s intellectual property still resonates strongly enough to argue for resuscitating it, whether in name and a pared-down selection of core products or in a more curated and limited number of retail outlets or some variation on both. Certainly, an enhanced online experience will be an important component of the larger strategy.
Fortunately, the Millennial and Gen Z generations remain attracted to those heritage brands whose stories are perceived to be legitimate, believable, and different enough that they cannot be made up. While Brooks would have to acknowledge some responsibility for its past transgressions, no company has a more compelling story than America’s longest standing apparel brand in continuous operation.
The key will be the new ownership’s sensibility. Will they be humble enough to recognize what they don’t know? Will they be wise enough to understand that when Brooks Brothers functioned as a viable fashion alternative, firing its creative cylinders was a philosophy of dress and a personality of taste that was as brand specific as that of Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani’s?
A kind of merchant dream team will need assembling, populated by those capable of awakening such a storied lineage and employing it as a lens through which to forge the future. For example, in terms of plumbing the archives, it’s one thing to be able to identify a vintage jacket as inherently stylish and quite another to know how to bring it to life in the present.
No doubt turning around the ship is not going to be easy. Would anyone expect an enterprise of such size and scope to be anything less? But again, on the plus side, providence smiles. Over the past three decades, from worsteds to knitwear, Italy has been hard at work trying to marry tradition with technology out of which has come many new-age fabrics which could modernize the retailer’s exiting canon and motto of “good taste at reasonable prices.” To highlight just a few, spongy stretch-cotton seersucker wovens for sport shirts, knitted herringbone tweeds for sport jackets, and linen-blended jerseys for polos.
Taking a page from the smash Broadway play, Hamilton, Brooks Brothers “deserves its shot.” While there’s certainly risk, trying to save America’s most famous menswear institution seems like a noble endeavour, especially if success means both pride and profit. The project is blessed with its very own tool chest and international consequence.
Hopefully, Brooks’ new proprietors will take some refuge in the advice of America’s most recently departed hero, Senator John Lewis, who exalted in “getting into good trouble.”