It hasn't been down too long, I was looking at it only a couple of weeks back.

Went down Sunday evening. Thursday night, I bought 3 madras shirts for next year in the sale and they arrived Monday AM. Unbelievable work.

That t-shirt I would wear. Everything else is gonna have to be a hard no.

in all seriousness I really do hope J. Press finds its way back, I wish them well with their forthcoming US website, their highly anticipated new store at the Yale Club of New York, and eventually their permanent new American flagship store in New Haven, I'd like to see them regain their former position as a reliable, dependable purveyor of hardcore traditional Ivy campus and Madison Avenue 1952-66-style American and Trans-Atlantic clothing made in the USA, England, Scotland, and Ireland for people in the academic, legal, and diplomatic professions, for businessmen, executives, people in government and the intelligence services, and anybody else who enjoys the look, including good old preppy students of every kind.

their decade-plus-long lack of direction and puzzling missteps with McNairy and the Ovadias, their bad luck with the condemnation and then the destruction of the historic old York Street building, the loss of the lease for the New York store, the disastrous York Street fashion line aimed at skinny twenty-somethings, the outsourcing, the alpha-sizing, the Canadian square shoulders fiascos, all of it has been sad to witness, maybe everything will magically be alright with them again and we'll have our old place back ......

/\  ay caramba Beebs, sad but true .... hard to accept .... I wish J. Press well ... Ametora my foot ........

Last edited by Horace (2017-10-18 05:20:00)

"Esp. if he's starting out in his 20's and he wants to make a career of it." - I want to respond to a lot more in your posts later, Horace, because you're dissecting all of this excellently - but this caught my eye... No point in making  career of it now. Back then it was worthwhile because you were a guru, as a "salesman" you had the knowledge you mention, you held the keys, you built a consistent customer base and you got love and respect because of what you were able to do for them. Now there are many, many fewer things for a salesman to do at Brooks or a Brooks-like institution, because a) there isn't a whole lot more you can do at 99% of Brooks stores that the customer couldn't do themselves by just going to the website, and b) because of culture change, people don't know the knowledge and seek it out or want it anyway (as you say). It's the same with many different industries, I think, and you're right that the problem is especially bad outside of major cities. Not just men's shops but wine shops, auto shops, etc... It ties into a larger shift in craftmanship as something to aspire to, and then the availability of products that you can be a craftsman of. There are less old-style skilled mechanics now because cars are all computers now - you can argue the same for Brooks Brothers.

Edit: c is not the letter that comes after a. I'm still working on this whole alphabet thing...

Due to aforementioned length, I'm not going to quote any of the prior, excellent, posts. But I do feel that my two cents may add somewhat to Beeb's post above.

Uneasy though it makes me feel to admit, I am, at the end of the day, a card carrying hipster, in the vein that Beeb outlined above. I worked for Vice in my teens, back when they scarcely had two pennies to rub together, and often wound up paying me for contract work in piles of streetwear. I went to art school. Very few of these experiences are directly connected to the man I am today - I did a lot of work to polish the rough edges of my character and image for the corporate world, starting right around the time I began cohabiting with a (much better) artist, and decided that a non-ramen meal from time to time would be nice. Looking for a role model to try and shape myself after, I looked to my old man, who worked in NY and HK in the 80s, and became quite the snappy dresser in his own right.

I think there is a subset of person for whom there is a need to bridge the gap between hipsterdom and adulthood - in much the same way that many of the hippies of the 60s became the Madison Ave men of the 70s-80s. It's unfortunate that most of the creatives at an agency in our time wear something close to pyjamas to work. But, I like the idea of a 1-stop shop, in which your Hypebeast stuff sits next to your clothing for grown men. Where forums play their role, and where brands can do better is in fostering connoisseurship. Many people who wear the Japanese aesthetic are connoisseurs, albeit oftentimes misguided ones. I'd like to think that the right retailer would be able to harness that otaku (obsessive/maniacal) energy, and redirect it towards Ivy; even if only a piece at a time.

But then, I'm far from the nattiest guy here, and am prone to punctuating my bleak pessimism with occasional bouts of maniacal optimism, so who knows?

Last edited by mhalat (2017-10-18 14:41:44)