Trends

What goes around…

Armani 1985

I was in Arnie Roberti’s office at Adrian Jules, the esteemed custom manufacturer. A retailer was asking about his client’s point-to-point measurement. The customer wanted the smallest possible shoulder. I remember Arnie saying, “You can’t have a seventeen-and-a-half-inch point-to-point on a size forty-four chest!”

I had a flash of realization. The tight-fit trend in 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 zenith and would now head back from small to big. This was a challenging and 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 success.       

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 smaller, shapelier fit (which followed, incidentally, his success with extraordinarily wide neckties.)

In the nineties Giorgio Armani and Donna Karan, copying the oversized clothes of depression-era American men, brought in the new, easier fit standard. Comfortable, with full, pleated, higher-rise pants, wide shoulders, easy chest and waist, and made from new kinds of textiles created with improved spinning technology to produce lighter weight, more luxurious fabrics.

Then, at the new millennium, Thom Browne broke into the market with a new silhouette: shorter, trimmer, smaller. Suddenly Peewee Herman was a fashion icon. This has been the trend for twenty years and now the tide is turning.

Sure enough, there are visions of a new fit mentality in the pages and websites of men’s fashion. As in the past, the bellwethers of a new style are exaggerated to the point of being ridiculous. What you see in “Men’s Fashion” sections exhibit mass 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. Three-foot wide shoulders, sleeves that hide fingers, knee-length jackets and huge, shapeless pants. Good luck selling that.

These tides take twenty years to change completely. So by that reckoning in about a decade men will be moving en masse to easier, softer, more comfortable clothes. 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 from White Sand. I am wearing 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 in the 60s and 70s the sales in men’s stores on Nassau Street totaled over $4,000,000. All four closed up in the 1990s. The trend away from Ivy League, small-shouldered 3-button jackets, slim plain-front pants and button-down oxfords left these guys out of it, unable to turn the corner, to understand, let alone present the new style mentality to customers, to shift their image, or to attract new clients. Unable to readapt, they became unable to exist. Their business was generic, not organic.

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. Design trends that 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.


Always and everywhere

nick@hiltonsprinceton.com

A fourth-generation eldest son, proprietor and merchant with fifty years of experience of his own, Nick Hilton is passionate about quality and style in clothing and textiles, and about serving ladies and gentlemen the way they expect and deserve. 

http://hiltonsprinceton.com
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