Founder of J. Crew Cinader dies at 90

Business sought to sell to niche, not the masses

Arthur Cinader, who built a pastel-colored, turtlenecked fashion empire as the founder of J. Crew, popularizing a preppy aesthetic in the 1980s and ’90s through meticulously produced catalogues and sleek, wood-paneled stores, died Oct. 11 at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico. He was 90.

The cause was complications from a fall, his family said.

Cinader created a company whose identity is neatly encapsulated in its name — inspired not by any ancestral James or Julia Crew but by the sport of rowing, which Cinader never played but favored for its Ivy League associations. He added a J. to the Crew because he thought the letter looked nice on the page.

Established in 1983 as a slightly downscale version of Ralph Lauren, the family-run business soon sold jeans, hats, sweaters, jackets and suits through glossy mail-order catalogs, delivered to several million doorsteps some 14 times each year.

Cinader’s daughter Emily, then in her 20s, oversaw the clothing’s design, expanding the company’s early lineup of moderately priced sportswear to garments such as rollneck sweaters and “barn jacket” outerwear. Cinader, who had previously succeeded his father as head of a successful catalog clothing business, was chairman and ran the business operations of what became known as the J. Crew Group.

He could be obsessive about details, reportedly sending one employee’s reports back because the staples were crooked.

On another occasion, he ended a meeting because an employee used the wrong abbreviation for the season “spring.” (Cinader preferred his spring reports to be titled SPR, rather than SP.)

He demanded a similar level of precision in the production of the company’s catalogs, which advertised the promise of a casually elegant lifestyle as well as stonewashed oxford shirts and “petal”-colored dresses.

Thousands of rolls of film were shot each year for the glossies, and Cinader personally penned much of the copy, extolling a J. Crew sensibility from “Campobello to Cape May.”

It was, he admitted, a look that would not fit every closet or pocketbook, though he sought to win over potential customers each time he hit the slopes of Vail or Davos, where he performed what he called “my skilift research.”

He estimated that fewer than 10 percent of Americans could be convinced to buy and wear J. Crew apparel, and, indeed, the company became a powerful brand but never a financial juggernaut.