Trends
It’s a while ago now, I was in Arnie Roberti’s office at Adrian Jules, the esteemed custom-made menswear maker in Rochester, overhearing Arnie’s phone conversation with a client, a retailer, like me. Apparently the retail guy was asking about his client’s fit preferences, and it came down to the shoulder width, what we call the point-to-point measurement. The customer wanted the smallest possible shoulder, I gather, and I remember Arnie saying something like, “You can’t have a seventeen-and-a-half-inch point-to-point on a size forty-four chest!” and hearing this I had a flash of realization. The preference men had for tight-fitting clothing had reached the point of foolishness; now tailors would begin to advise their clients to loosen up. The pendulum of fit in menswear had reached its apogee and would soon begin its 20-year trajectory back to Big. This was a challenging and a frightening notion, as these swings of style can frequently wreak some havoc. Lines that epitomize a trend are frequently casualties when the trend shifts – victims of their earlier successes.
In my early years in the business the big news was the arrival of the Paris-inspired, slim, “designer” menswear lines, Pierre Cardin, Yves St. Laurent, Christian Dior. Store windows on Fifth Avenue showcasing trim, hourglass-shaped suits with four-inch lapels and angular shoulders and low-rise, tight-thigh, flared-bottom pants. American Ralph Lauren reinvented “traditional” with his version: a small jacket with a shapely fit (which followed, incidentally, his success with extrordinarily wide neckties.)
In the nineties Giorgio Armani’s tailored collection, styled after the oversized clothes of depression-era American men, was the invading force: Tailored clothing that felt truly comfortable, with full, pleated, higher-rise pants, jackets with wide shoulders, easy chest and waist measurements all made from new kinds of textiles. Biellese weavers Loro Piana, Vitale Barberis and Ermenegildo Zegna took advantage of ever finer grades of Australian Merino and improved spinning technology to produce lighter weight, more luxurious fabrics, and thus did they do to the English woolen trade what Armani did to American manufacturers.
Then, at the new millenium, the pendulum headed back down, this time epitomized by Thom Browne who became known for his unique silhouette: shorter, trimmer, smaller. Suddenly Peewee Herman was a fashion icon. And then, maybe twelve years later the tide began to turn and there I was in Arnie’s office, listening to him argue against making an impossibly small shoulder for a pretty typical American man. Sure enough, here in the summer of 2022 there are visions of a new fit mentality in the pages and websites of men’s fashion, perhaps the result of a PR agent’s bold assertion that Balenciaga or some other contender might be the icon of the age by introducing unbelievably big clothing. You will find this harbinger of enormity in the few menswear publications that still exist. It’s one more instance of the media’s habit of turning off men of taste everywhere by filling their “advertorial” pages with clothing that not even the boldest dandy would dare to wear.
In the nineties Giorgio Armani’s tailored collection, styled after the oversized clothes of depression-era and jazz-age American men, was the invading force:... Tailored clothing waswas made to feel truly comfortable, with full, pleated, higher-rise pants, jackets with wide shoulders, easy chest and waist measurements all made from new kinds of textiles. The narrow-shouldered tweed jackets and flannel suits of the Ivy League look, brands with a “traditional” image became old news. In the foothills of the Italian Alps, Biellese weavers Loro Piana, Vitale Barberis and Ermenegildo Zegna took advantage of ever finer grades of Australian Merino and improved spinning technology to produce lighter weight, more luxurious fabrics, and thus did they do to the English woolen trade what Armani did to American manufacturers.
Experience tells me that these tides take twenty years to change, which means we are about half way through the latest age of small, and that in about a decade men will be moving – albeit slowly at first – to easier, softer, more comfortable fit. You can imagine what this means for a retailer, in terms of opportunities and pitfalls in merchandising, investment, reputation, credibility and conscience. I bought some pleated pants a couple of seasons ago. I am wearing one of them as I write this. Really comfortable. The guys I tried to talk into buying them , the guys who I thought would be most likely, the fashion-aware fellows, the ones who got on the skinny pants bandwagon in maybe 2005 or so, weren’t having it. “Too baggy.” Or: “What’s with the drawstring?” And finally, most painful: “But you were the one who talked me out of pleated pants!”
In our town the four men’s stores that thrived along Nassau Street in the 1960s and 70s, doing an aggregate estimated total of over $4000000 in business, were all gone by the 1990s. The trend away from Ivy League, small-shouldered 3-button jackets and button-down oxfords left these guys unable to preach a new style gospel to their existing customers or to shift their image to attract a new client. So by advocating against change they became unable to exist.
Changes in fit, detail and fabric are the energy of our business. To ignore or deny them is to cut off the circulation, to become stagnant, and eventually obsolete. The design trends that some outrageously well-funded brands advertise as the tides begin to turn will signal the need for men to update their wardrobes. Were it not so we’d still be wearing togas, or codpieces. The stuff of good retailing is to interpret the trend, to reduce the rococo extremes to mere suggestions, to blend the innovative with the expected in subtle but definite ways. Style changes are welcome tidal shifts, not tsunamis; this is what constitutes good taste.
