Reports of the death of ‘proper’ clothes are premature
Gloom and doom on Planet Fashion this week. First the announcement that Jenna Lyons, the charismatic executive creative director of J.Crew, is leaving the American behemoth, by (here comes the enigmatic part) “mutual agreement”. Bolted on to this was news that J.Crew’s revenues have fallen 5 per cent in the past year – the latest milestone on a seemingly long-term downward trajectory. Was Lyons’s carefully considered kook-style – much emulated by fashionistas across the globe – being sidelined by lazy slob style? Seemed so. Consider a headline earlier in the week on businessinsider.com: “The retail apocalypse is killing fashion as we know it, as a new dress code takes hold in America”. True, athleisure, that ugly sounding (and, some would argue, ugly looking) assimilation of athletic aesthetics into everyday dress codes, has all the hallmarks of being a revolution, rather than a trend. According to Simon Jersey, a company specialising in workwear (by which it means WORK-wear, such as medical scrubs, wait-staff uniforms and not “workwear” as the catwalks might have it), only 24 per cent of the 2,000-strong sample audience they asked described their employer’s dress code as “smart” and 36 per cent said their employer had introduced a “smart-casual” workwear policy. Let’s not panic quite yet. These terms often get snarled up in semantics. Your smartcasual is my “what-a-palaver”. Also, on closer inspection, many of the people vox pop- ed on the streets of New York by businessinsider.com turned out to be yoga teachers or on their way to a workout. Unamazingly, they were wearing gym gear. As for those tumbling revenues at J.Crew, I have one word: overpriced. When a mass market player starts charging £765 for a stripy sequined pencil skirt (now, unsurprisingly, in the sale and available in every size), you know someone, somewhere has lost touch with reality. Admittedly, that was from their “runway range”, but even the “basics” are pricy (£108 for a cold-shoulder top).
Their own website is daubed with reviews from fans complaining the cashmere is too expensive for the quality – and they’re paying in dollars. That’s another gripe: long before the pound tanked, J.Crew charged the same in sterling as it did in dollars – sometimes more. It’s great stuff. I even like the cashmere for the colours and featherweights (why can’t British chains match this?). But those of us who love it wait for the sales.
That said, it still sold $2.43 billion of merchandise in 2016. So all is not lost for clothes as we know them. As for Lyons, she’s such an innate fashionista, her kidneys are probably a perfectly judged splicing of sequins and stripes and she’s bound to crop up in a major role somewhere else. I doubt that the desire to wear animal-print with army fatigues will fade from fashion’s purview just because she’s not in her J.Crew studio. The catwalks have already intimated that athleisure is on the way out. Give it a year or three and those leggings and hoodies might have mutated into something much smarter.