COUTURE DE FORCE AT J. CREW
How Jenna Lyons got too big for their britches
FOR more than a decade, she was the most influential force in fashion — “the woman who dressed America,” said the New York Times. At 6 feet tall with her thick black eyeglass frames, deep-parted ponytail and orange-red lipstick, Jenna Lyons cultivated a signature look, iconic as Karl Lagerfeld’s black-andwhite Victoriana suits or Anna Wintour’s immovable bob.
Lyons, however, wasn’t the industry’s typical star; she was running a catalogue-company-cum-chain store, and she made it feel glossy and aspirational. But her departure from J. Crew, announced last Monday, marks a much larger, sadder trend: Culturally and commercially, fashion is losing relevance.
“The industry has lacked iconic figures for a very long time,” says veteran fashion consultant Carlos Cabrera. “People like Ralph Lauren, Donna Karan — they belong to another generation. What Jenna Lyons has done for American fashion has been fantastic.”
LYONS, 48, came to J. Crew fresh out of Parsons in 1990, as the brand was steadily devolving into a confused mix of khakis, rugby shirts and cheap cardigans. Profit margins tanked and there was little direction from the top. “We were lost soldiers working away, following orders,” Lyons told New York magazine in 2011. “I was shell-shocked and burned out from what was going on. Fried.”
In 2003, Mickey Drexler, known in retail as “The Merchant Prince” who turned around the Gap, was hired to fix J. Crew. A colleague told Drexler that Lyons would be key to his success.
“Jenna was a great designer, she looks like a model, and then she talks like the best salesperson you ever met,” designer Todd Snyder told Fast Company. “I think she’s the most talented person he’s ever worked with in design.”
As J. Crew lore has it, Drexler told staffers they’d be re-interviewing for their jobs, and asked Lyons what she thought of the current womenswear collection. Piece by piece, she critiqued items she loathed — pilly sweaters, cheap cashmere, boxy T-shirts — and, at Drexler’s urging, threw them on the floor.
She was terrified, but also exhausted by how rote the overall design had become. Her job was no longer inspiring. “I didn’t know if I was going to be fired,” Lyons told Fast Company in 2013. “I was so confused, and I was scared, but I was also a little bit excited, because all the things I liked and that I thought were brand-right he was leaving up on the wall. And I was like, Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know.”
It was very good. Lyons and Drexler had a curious chemistry, one that would not just reinvent J. Crew but dominate fashion through much of the millennium. Profile after profile, in fashion and financial pages, explored this odd couple’s dynamic: Drexler, the older, infamous micromanager with a lightning-quick temper; Lyons, the young, laid-back visionary who injected her own brand of downtown chic into old-school prep. Her genius wasn’t revolutionary; it was in mixing prints with stripes, with making bright colors as cool as bohemian black, in showing models with fresh skin and flyaway hair. There was no Kardashianlevel contouring, no overt sexiness, no sense of trying too hard. Sleeves were rolled up, shirts half-tucked, widelegged denim paired with leopard-print heels and sequined jackets worn with Army-green pants. Jenna Lyons taught American women how to dress without intimidating them or relying on the fashion industry’s No. 1 trick — making your consumer feel less than. It was the perfect formula for the times: authen- tic, honest, cool. And that was Drexler’s Achilles’ heel.
“Mickey wants to be cool so bad,” one former employee told Fast Company. “Jenna is confident and cool and human and comfortable with herself and gives him the credibility he needs to be on fire.” Yet Drexler was secure enough to relinquish control, at least where Lyons was concerned. “Mickey has given her enough runway so she can really make of it what she wants,” Snyder said. “They should just call it Jenna Crew.”
That wasn’t hyperbole. In Drexler and Lyons’s first 10 years together, revenue tripled. In 2009, after Michelle, Malia and Sasha Obama wore J. Crew to Barack Obama’s first inauguration, Lyons reportedly got a substantial bonus.
As the brand succeeded commercially, the decision was made to edge Lyons into the forefront — to make her the face of J. Crew. It was another way they could stand out among competitors like the Gap and Banana Republic, and Lyons, with her humble origin story, sent a signal to all her potential customers: Her world, her idea of fashion and beauty, was inclusive. There were no barriers to entry. All were welcome, because she knew what it was like to feel excluded.
SHE was born Judith Lyons, in Boston, and moved with her parents to Rancho Palos Verdes, Calif., when she was 4. She spoke openly of suffering from a genetic disorder called incontinentia pigmenti, which left her as a young girl with bad skin, bald spots, and missing teeth. To this day she wears dentures, and she often speaks of how much her childhood shaped her vision.
“It’s amazing how cruel kids can be and super-judgmental and really just downright mean,” Lyons said in 2013. “I felt a huge drive to make clothes that everybody could have because I felt ostracized by that world of beauty and fashion.”
Her work ethic, like Drexler’s, was rooted in childhood poverty; her parents divorced when she was in junior high, and she carried one defining moment: “I’ll never forget my mother standing in the tuna fish aisle, thinking, ‘ Are we going to get tuna fish this week?’ Feeling like I never wanted to rely on a man. I was like, ‘I gotta work my ass off.’ ”
Confident and cool and human and comfortable with herself . . . They should just call it Jenna Crew. — an ex-J. Crew staffer on designer Jenna Lyons
Lyons grew up to have it all: the multimillion-dollar townhouse in Brooklyn, the supportive artist husband, the beautiful little boy, plus a vintage Mercedes and a yoga teacher who made house calls. But she was careful to remain self-deprecating, telling Harper’s Bazaar that she got facials because, “genetically, I was not blessed with good skin,” and that “to unwind, I usually drink one too many cocktails.”
LIKE her fashion sense, Lyons’ confessionals were high-low: She did Goop-like cleanses, but only if her pants were too tight. She gorged on ice cream, cookies and chocolate, but washed it all down with rosé Champagne — a fashionista’s Holly Golightly touch. In a reality-TV culture, she was accidentally famous — but now that she was here, why fight it?
“She was the girl next door,” says a longtime industry insider. “Humble in a way. But there was a time she was in every magazine, and I think she grew into it.”
Lyons became a Page Six presence in 2013, when she left her artist husband Vincent Mazeau for a woman, Courtney Crangi. But it never affected Lyons’ career. What did begin to chafe, inside the company and reportedly with Drexler, was how quickly Lyons adapted to her new fame: She began styling models in her own image and likeness, down to the chunky eyewear and orangered lip. She played a demanding boss in a three-episode arc on HBO’s “Girls.” She was at Solange Knowles’ wedding, the Met Gala and in the music video for Jay Z’s “Picasso Baby.”
Drexler reportedly told Lyons to end the self-promotion. While she was expanding her personal brand, J. Crew was faltering. Sales began slipping in 2012; Lyons’ design focus had become so narrow and self-reflective that customers were complaining that they couldn’t find the J. Crew basics they loved. Her public image didn’t always square with the private one.
“She’s very difficult to work for or with,” says one industry insider, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. “The ‘Jenna styling’ — that would be a manifestation of the difficult personality.”
“Designing is very personal,” says veteran consultant Cabrera. “You try to bring an element of your vision to the product. It doesn’t always work.”
“Jenna brought in more of this Williamsburg hipster look to the product,” says Craig Johnson, president of retail consulting firm Customer Growth Partners. “The problem is, that’s relevant to 7 percent of people. Classic J. Crew loyalists left in droves.”
Lyons and J. Crew declined to comment for this story.
By 2014, the company was posting alarming deficits, and last year reported $607.8 million in losses. J. Crew’s clothes no longer reflected the fit, style and quality Jenna Lyons taught her customers to demand.
WHILE Lyons’ J. Crew had its in-house problems, it’s also suffering from forces beyond its control. Retail in general has been decimated by the economy and e-commerce. Anyone who isn’t a luxury consumer knows to wait for 30-40 percent off sale notices to arrive in their inbox — multiples per day.
Apparel now accounts for only 3 percent of annual consumer spending, and it’s easy to see why. Nearly every decade of the 20th century brought seismic shifts in fashion: the flapper, Dior’s New Look, hippie, bohemian, mod, punk, new wave, power dressing. Grunge in the ’ 90s was the last of it, and since then the onus has been on fashion to make the consumer want.
“There are very few must-have items,” Johnson says. “People are looking for value. If they’re going to pay, they’re looking for some- thing unique.”
Drexler, who joined J. Crew after being fired from the Gap due, ironically, to declining sales, is safe for now. He has reassured J. Crew’s customers that the brand will get back to basics, and has hired Somsack Sikhounmuong, formerly creative director of sister brand Madewell, to replace Lyons.
“We have taken important steps to improve our performance and are confident that the team in place will continue these efforts,” Drexler said in a statement.
As for Lyons, it was reported on Friday that she’s leaving with a $1 million parachute through this year and, depending on her employment status, the next. Insiders who spoke to The Post said Lyons could do anything, from heading the Gap to a true fashion house to starting her own magazine or fashion line.
“Her talent didn’t just disappear,” Cabrera says. “I’d love to see her do her own brand and take it to another level. She’s a visionary.”