How trying to be cool ruined a great British fashion brand
LIZ JONES laments the demise of Jaeger
WHEN I visited Jaeger on London’s Regent Street in January, I was confronted by row upon row of unappealing, overpriced clothes. There were sludge-coloured opera jackets, £ 180 cashmere sweaters, mumsy pinafore dresses, £299 snakeskin shift dresses and lots of boxy tailoring.
So it was with little surprise — but much sadness — I heard the news yesterday that the 128-yearold British brand has been sold to a faceless investment group called Better Capital.
Owner Harold Tillman, surely the most charismatic, dandyish man in fashion today, now retains only 10 per cent of what was one of few truly British, family-owned brands. An era is definitely over.
It is all rather ghastly. A home-grown brand that was trying to invest in new design, that was once famous for dressing the Duchess of Windsor and Audrey Hepburn in merino wool, alpaca and camel hair, has foundered. There may be many reasons for this collapse. The continuing recession. The mild winter, which means we’ve not been buying expensive, heavy coats, a Jaeger staple.
And the fact that the brand had, in many ways, abandoned its core customers: middle-aged women from Middle England.
Yet what has befallen Jaeger seems sudden, given my conversation with Tillman in January, when I called him after Jaeger published figures showing profits had fallen by two-thirds.
While admitting ‘ times are challenging, we won’t see profit this year’, Tillman was bullish about his beloved brand, and said that the dire figures were because the company had been investing heavily, particularly in Aquascutum.
When I asked why some branches had closed, such as my local store in Taunton, Somerset, he said it was because they were too small. That was a mistake: overlooking the provincial, well-heeled woman (the traditional brand’s most loyal customer) in favour of huge stores with high footfall, in places like the Westfield shopping centres in London.
But while putting on a brave face, Tillman admitted his customers had been struggling, and that he had decided to put winter stock on sale in November — instead of waiting until after Christmas, as usual. Of course, the recession wasn’t the only problem the brand has faced.
The company was founded in 1884 by Dr Gustav Jaeger, who believed wearing wool and other natural fabrics next to the skin improved health. It briefly had a heyday in the Seventies, with flared trousers and capes and coats, but fell out of fashion. Shortly afterwards, in 1982, Jaeger sadly abandoned manufacturing in the UK, and now mostly makes its clothes in China.
Tillman, who began his career on Savile Row with tailors Kilgour French and Stanbury, then bought Jaeger when it faced closure in 2003.
At the time, it had a reputation for dowdy tweed and pleated skirts — an image Tillman has been trying to shake off. Yet various attempts to launch trendier sub-brands haven’t quite worked: Jaeger Black, Jaeger London, the cheaper (some would say desperate) Jaeger Boutique.
The nub of the problem is that Jaeger’s prices (£560 for a winter coat from Jaeger London) are too high for a brand that is not a Prada or a Marni or a Vuitton. Next door to Jaeger on Regent Street, in the much cheaper Banana Republic, you can snap up well made, gorgeous, grown-up pieces for a fraction of the price. To sum up: the competition got an awful lot fiercer.
And no matter what the brand’s chief executive, Belinda Earl, tried to do, the label didn’t quite manage to attain that all-important ‘cool’, although it had its fair share of shoots in Vogue magazine.
THE truth is, and it pains me to write this, Jaeger sorely needed an Alexa Chung, someone to do what she did for Mulberry: wear it, love it, sling it around and party in it. Make us hyperventilate for, if not the evening dress or the coat or the bag, at least a wallet or the new scent.
Jaeger tried to be all things to all women. It tried to modernise without alienating the customer who wants an outfit for her daughter’s wedding or the office, yet didn’t (or doesn’t — it’s still operating and no plans to close stores have been mooted) have the