Rollneck Sweaters and ‘The Delicate Brine of a Clambake’

The Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew: A Fashionable History

Not long ago, print subscribers to the New York Times received a special advertising insert with their newspaper: The first page featured a striking white background with a full-page photo of the ageless, gorgeous, uber-WASPY-looking model Carolyn Murphy in a white mini-skirt and polo shirt, clasping a gingham sun hat and insouciantly looking off into the middle distance as if searching for a tray of canapés. “J.CREWFORTY” was emblazoned at the top of the page, and the ensuing photos on the inside pages featured younger models in brighter colors wearing rugby shirts, trench coats, chinos, striped T-shirts, and other popular J.Crew styles.

A Timeless Strategy

The advertisement is part of a strategy to reintroduce J.Crew, which turns 40 this year and has only recently emerged from bankruptcy, to a new generation of consumers. A J.Crew executive told the fashion website Glossy that the company’s marketing theme this year is “timelessness.” The ad copy in the anniversary insert plays up the theme: “Thank you for saving your old catalogues and Rollneck sweaters for generations to come. … Thank you for loving stripes and dogs as much as we do. Without you, there would be no J.Crew.”

The Birth of Preppy Fashion

Without J.Crew, there would also never have been a mass-market for preppy fashion, or so argues Maggie Bullock in The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J.Crew. The fact that the “J.Crew style” is so easily identifiable even after 40 years is not an accident, and Bullock, a longtime contributor to Elle magazine, is a charming guide through what is fundamentally a business history. Luckily for the reader, Bullock enlivens the story by telling it through the lives of J.Crew’s founder, Arthur Cinader, his daughter, Emily, and the company’s two later leaders, or “cults of personality” as she describes them: former Gap CEO Mickey Drexler and Jenna Lyons, who rose through the ranks of J.Crew to become its undisputed creative force in the 2000s and 2010s.

The Allure of Aspirational Dressing

According to Bullock, J.Crew managed for a time to dominate the mass market for aspirational dressing, which she describes as invoking “the delicate brine of a clambake wafting in the air; the particular romance of a misty morning at a rustic lakehouse.” She captures well a particular moment in fashion in the 1980s, when Lisa Birnbach’s satire, The Official Preppy Handbook, became a bestseller and inexplicably morphed into a kind of lifestyle Bible for the masses, with its descriptions of the “Tretorn sneakers, signet rings, ribbon belts. Shocking-pink Lilly Pulitzer bikinis. Popped-collar Lacoste shirts” that defined preppy style. “Preppy” was a kind of unofficial uniform that signaled its wearer’s status as having made it, “all part of a nonchalance about wealth,” Bullock notes.

The End of an Era

As with all things fashionable, trends change. Jenna’s much-copied style grew stale, and customer interest shifted. Bullock quotes a copywriter who dispensed harsh wisdom about the new, younger consumer, who increasingly bought clothes online: She “doesn’t want to read an entire fucking essay about how their sweater got its name. … She doesn’t have the attention span for that.”

Bullock gamely covers J.Crew’s foundering in the 2010s and its many causes: “Sale-addicted shoppers. The slow death of the mall. The tractor-beam pull of Amazon.” She astutely notes that the “fancy stuff” promoted during the Lyons era overshadowed the basic clothing that guaranteed the company’s bottom line. “It made people think J.Crew was more expensive than it really was.” Consumers also complained that the quality of the clothing had declined, something J.Crew’s leaders vehemently denied, further alienating its customer base. That customer base was also getting larger in size, if not in number, a fact J.Crew also didn’t accommodate. As Bullock notes, “67 percent of American women could not shop J.Crew clothing at all because they were a size 14 or larger.”

Eventually,

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