Totally Modern Vintage (The Girlie Version)

This is another great example of making a vintage coat look updated and not too retro. I love the rust coat, green glove, and blue shoe color combo.

Designers spend a lot of time trying to design the three armed jacket but if they spent half that time on creating great color combinations for the runway it would almost certainly and positively effect their retail sales.

Dries Van Noten is great with shape (both modern and ethnic) but can you really think of any other designer that is better at mixing patterns and color? His soccer field size retail space at Barneys 5th floor is a testament to the validity of this concept or maybe it is just because he is a genius.

If You Thought Short Pants Were Shocking! Jay Kos Offers Spring Clothing During - The Spring!!

Jay Kos marches to the beat of his own drummer.

The fact that he carries absolutely beautiful suits is well known, but he also offers a very nice hat selection (any selection at all is getting hard to find in NYC) and he also devotes a surprising amount of space in his Lexington Ave. store to children's wear.

What Jay does, though, that is really unheard of is offering season appropriate clothing that actually reflects the weather outside.

Each season designers ship (at the request of stores) their collections earlier and earlier, to the point that you can bet the coldest day of the year will see the new Spring collection hitting the sales floor. I'm all for keeping stores looking fresh with new merchandise but the whole system is now out of whack. Some price-points have figured out how to do this well (like women's designer bridge collections) by shipping 11 or 12 months of the year but even they are really too early with a lot of styles.

In menswear this usually works in our favor, If you can just hold off on that seersucker suit that you first saw in January, you could buy it on sale (May 25th) before it is ever warm enough to actually wear it.

I give Jay credit; stores have always told me that competitive store markdowns really test customer loyalty .
I think it speaks to the power of offering unique products and strong customer service in keeping customer loyal while markdowns are everywhere.

So what do you think?
Do you like buying shorts in a snowstorm?

Such Great Old Man Style For Such A Young Man

Thom Browne, Part 2

By complete coincidence today, I ran into a young man wearing a Thom Browne suit( i could just tell) instead of the actual Thom Browne.

There has been so much discussion about the length of Thom's pants and the snug fit of his jacket but here is his work on a real person. The fit of the jacket is no more snug, nor the pants that much shorter than the guys I shot at Kiton.

On The Street.... In The Wild West Village

The Italian Version Of Casual Friday

It Can Now Be Revealed

After receiving a slew of emails questioning the objects on Robert Burke's tie, I sent the photo over to the lab that use to do a lot of work for Quincy,M.E. (I'm dating myself). It can now be revealed, Rats!

In related news, I heard a lot of comments that this was the first time most of us had seen a horizontally striped shirt work really well.

"On The Street".......Juliette Longuet, Designer

Adam Derrick Of To Boot Plans Growth Of His Company Through (gasp!) "Trust"

I had coffee today with Adam Derrick of To Boot (which most Sartorialists know as the best shoe store in New York which just happens to be nestled inside the best clothing store in New York, Bergdorf Goodman). Of course we spent most of the time talking about shoes we own, shoes we want to own and shoes we used to own. It was really funny listening to him talk about the horrors of a fine shoe fanatic trying to find a sneaker to work out in. Needless to say it ran along the lines of "do these make my butt look big?" jean shopping stories every woman can relate to.

I asked him about his business which he admits is growing at a very strong but manageable rate. Of course my next question was "what's next? " I can't tell you how many times I've heard first hand or have read about these huge completely unrealistic expansion plans; New stores, more ads, new product lines, blah,blah, blah. Adam on the other hand, without a second's hesitation, says to me "build more trust with my existing accounts." So simple, so effective and so achievable a plan.

Adam confesses to not knowing all the minutiae of every door of Nordstrom or Saks or speciality stores that he is in but he does know he customer, no matter where they are in the country. By focusing on building trust, Adam has been able to get his buyers to literally "buy into" his vision of what is right for the To Boot customer in their store. If you have ever dealt with store owners or buyers it sounds like an easy thing to do but it really is not. With how the balance of power is in the business though right now, it is brilliant to focus on this because he will have to answer for it at the dreaded end-of-season gross margin meeting anyway. It is just refreshing to see someone putting their focus where it really matters, the customers they already have.

Start Saving Your Money Now For The New Michael Bastian Collection

Have you ever had one of those friends that is really passionate about something and when their onto something good they just glow, Robert Burke is one of those people.

I met with Robert (the outgoing Fashion Director and VP of Public Relations for Bergdorf Goodman) today to talk about his new consulting venture. He must have recently met with Michael Bastian (Mr. Bastian will be one of Robert's first consulting clients) because he could not wait to talk about his collection. As he was telling me about the design concept and the prices ($1200 for a jacket, $300ish for a shirt, etc) Robert had this small smile ,a smirk really, and the distant gaze of someone trying carefully to choose just the right words to express just how excited they are about a new project.

Michael Bastians collection will be big for a debut effort ,140 samples, and encompass all the categories a Sartorialist needs to face the world. Bergdorf is ,of course, very interested in carrying the line but the price points are at a level that will not make it restrictive to store all around the United States and abroad. A lot of the details are still under wraps but as soon as the samples are available in the U.S. (through my Sartorialist friend Massimo Caronna) I will be there with my camera to bring you a preview.

As for Robert's other clients, I'm sworn to secrecy, but suffice to say it will probably include at least one very important young designer collection besides Michael Bastian, several other design/merchandising consulting assignments for both large and small, mens and womens, designer brands and consulting with a few very major investment firms on potential investments in the luxury market. Not to be pigeonholed Robert is also entertaining offers from such diverse sectors as entertainment, food and wine, and mass consumer goods, basically anything that could benefit from Robert's finely tuned aesthetic and commercial sensibilities. Ok, basically he took my dream job, but I'm not bitter, I just made him look shorter in this photo than he real is,oops.