Brooks Brothers, RIP?
I won't regurgitate all the history and personal observations of the honorable @Nut_Sac_Bandit in his illuminating post here. So if you want a capsule history of the downfall of this great American brand, go read his piece. It's the familiar tale: the storied brand found it hard to compete against cheaper, imported brands, so they outsourced their production, sold to an overseas company, were sold again to private equity, and finally to another foreign company who decided to "modernize" it with a heaping helping of au courant sexual politics that drove away its customer base, including me. But I come to praise Brooks Brothers, for what they were to me and what they could yet be.
As a tail-end Gen X'er, I grew up in the first generation after the unholy Boomers had begun the process of cultural collapse, in particular standards of behavior and personal manners. Surely I was raised with these things myself, the child of good, decent parents who had lost the culture war of the 60's and 70's but acted to us like they hadn't. My father still wore a suit in his professional life as a salesman and entrepreneur and I grew up expecting to do the same.
But as a teenager who got caught up in the original Dot Com bubble, the late 90's, all of those expectations quickly fell away. We were supposed to be "nerds" who ate Cheetos and drank Mountain Dew and lived like absolute slobs while conquering the world with their software. So although I personally always tried to wear at least a button down shirt and a pair of khakis, most of my fellow coworkers did not. So I was stuck between the social expectations (slob) and my personal convictions (not slob). My closet was a jumble of cheap, mismatched button down-shirts of various pattern, khakis and jeans and polo shirts that never really fit right.
This middle ground is almost impossible to pull off. The casual-not-casual program simply doesn't work, at least for men's clothing. And worst of all, it was extremely hard to find off the rack clothing that actually fit me properly. Small, medium, large and extra large aren't really sized for anybody, and particularly not my body. Shirts were too billowy or tight across the shoulders, pants were too loose in the thighs or too tight in the waist. A person might describe my style at the time as "ill fitting, wrinkled and haphazard", which was the truth.
In my early 30's, I stopped at a Brooks Brothers store in the local mall. I bought a pair of non-iron chinos and a dress shirt, and to my amazement they fit me perfectly. While costing much more than my usual clothing, they wore to my shape and looked much better than anything else in my closet. They were dressier than what I usually wore, too, and I liked that.
In fact, I had a minor epiphany at that time. I was a reasonable successful adult with a wife and several kids, and a mortgage and cars and all the rest, and why can't I just dress like one? Brooks Brothers started to get a lot of business from me.
Brooks Brothers has a fairly intelligent approach to sizes. There are different cuts (how loose the shirts and slacks are) and then by measure. Once I figured out that my cut was Madison and my shirt size was 16 1/2 x 34, I could order clothes online and I knew they would fit perfectly. After I lost a bit of weight, my cut changed to Regent, my shirt size shrunk half a point, and my waist dropped two sizes, and I could order exactly the right clothes from Brooks Brothers. I would mostly buy dress slacks that I would have a local tailor hem to my exact size, although the pre-hemmed 32 inseam trousers were pretty close to perfection. Now I have fewer, but better, articles of clothing that work for most of my professional and social activities.
Sure, there's a lot of strange garbage in BB's catalog. The metrosexualization of men's fashion has touched BB for sure. But many of the classics are there if that's what you want. Until their disgraceful alignment with the radical left, I could ignore most of this stuff.
Brooks Brothers has filed chapter 11 and its future is uncertain. It seems that nobody thinks there is a traditional men's clothing brand to exist, that sells clothing for adults who prefer the tried and true to whatever ghastly novelty our masters are foisting on us this year.
My dream would be for someone like Tom Kartsotis, of the Shinola company, to buy BB and remake it into the American classic is once was. Raise prices, bring production back to the US, and trade big time on the company's storied heritage. Invite the President to come to their brand new clothing factory in Ohio- after all, Brooks Brothers has clothed almost every president since Abraham Lincoln. I'd love to continue shopping with Brooks Brothers, and I'd love the company to be around so that when my own sons are grown, they know where they can get good quality, adult clothes from an American company.
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