“Prep” didn’t start out as an aspirational identity. With the rise of prep fashion, you could dress up like members of the ruling class, even if the looks you mimicked were solely of them dressing down. This was a different temperature of cool from, say, the leather jacket. The class fantasy at the heart of prep style was the prep school, where dress codes offered a way of diminishing the differences among its students. What’s complicated about the mass-marketing of social aspiration, though, is that it’s more about belonging to a group than about standing out as an individual. At its height, Bullock argues, J. Crew embodied the nonchalant, “broken-in cool” that typified prep. More important, it was permeating culture-competitors imitated its catalogues, and, where it had once positioned itself as an affordable alternative to Ralph Lauren, upstart brands now offered themselves as down-market alternatives to J. Crew.Īll of them were trying to replicate the potent yet amorphous sensibility that had captivated Cinader: prep, which the author Maggie Bullock describes as “the bedrock of straightforward, unfettered, ‘American’ style.” Her new book, “ The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J. Crew” (HarperCollins), is a buoyant and persuasive account of how the company’s fluctuating fortunes reflect Americans’ shifting attitudes toward dress, shopping, and identity.Īt the center of Bullock’s story is the malleability of prep, which she depicts as the “leisure uniform of the establishment.” What people consider to be cool changes with time, but coolness always presumes exclusivity and effortlessness. By the mid-nineties, J. Crew, still a family-run business, was opening stores across the country and sending out seventy million catalogues a year. “We never meet a college student who doesn’t know J. Crew very well,” Cinader said. When J. Crew expanded to Boston, Cinader and his colleagues targeted the Chestnut Hill Mall, an accessible distance to at least a dozen colleges. The night of the grand opening, a fire marshal was said to have shown up because of reports of overcrowding. The first J. Crew store was in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, a tourist zone that also happened to be close enough to Wall Street to catch the after-work crowd. But he and his colleagues enlisted catalogue data to make decisions about location. Within half a dozen years, the brand had become synonymous with preppy apparel, and Cinader decided to open its first brick-and-mortar shop-a potentially risky move for a business based on a meticulously conceived catalogue. Read our reviews of notable new fiction and nonfiction, updated every Wednesday. Yet I delighted in wearing it along with my normal clothes, creating a garish mishmash of stolen subcultural valor. I didn’t understand that my new jacket was something one might wear to go boating, or even that people went boating for fun. When it arrived, it clashed with my middle-school wardrobe, a mix of basketball sneakers, my father’s old corduroys, and skate-themed T-shirts. I picked out the most unusual item I could find: an unlined, plaid zip-up jacket. And, because these clothes communicated in an insider’s code, lacking the self-identifying mark of a little swoosh or a tiny guy on a horse, they seemed mysterious, too. (I had no idea that a person could be called a Wasp, other than the Wasp in my comic books.) But we knew that J. Crew was, enticingly, just out of our reach. These garments-among the talismanic offerings of the J. Crew catalogue that somehow appeared in the mailbox-might as well have been for wearing on Mars, and my friends and I, many of us the children of immigrants, were only dimly aware of the heritage that they were inviting us to access. Duck boots, barn coats, and turtleneck sweaters seemed deeply eccentric in the sunny, laid-back suburb of Silicon Valley where I grew up, in the eighties and nineties.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |