Brooks Brothers (Q3963)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
the oldest men's clothier in the United States
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Brooks Brothers |
the oldest men's clothier in the United States |
Statements
sales assistant
2007
collaborator
Brooks Brothers has all the American fashion cred a brand could need: It’s the oldest still-operating retailer in the country, having marked its 200th birthday last year. For spring 2020, the label is staking its claim to Americana with a collection that celebrates all things red, white, and blue. Patchwork tweeds evoke the flag, patriotic ginghams are cut into breezy skirts and dresses, and no less than the White House makes an appearance on a toile. In today’s political climate, this is a pretty potent statement, but both creative director Zac Posen and the brand would like to stay away from any political interpretations. (Brooks is, probably, the rare retailer that wardrobes both sides of the aisle.)Reached over the phone to discuss the collection, Posen instead wanted to talk about all the posh, iconic American summer spots and what to wear there. Southampton, Nantucket, and Palm Beach are all mentioned alongside pale pink Brooks cool suiting, floral-embroidered sundresses, and nautically striped shifts. The silhouettes and flourishes Posen has brought to the label over the past several years have become, now, mainstays that sell and sell and sell. But he’s still up for a little experimentation: Rich pearl and crystal embellishments line the collars and plackets of several pieces. It’s an evolution and an elevation; something I think we’d all like in our wardrobes—and our politics—today.
11 September 2019
Brooks Brothers might be known for its serious business attire, but since taking the helm of its womenswear operation in 2014, Zac Posen has injected it with a sense of fun. Resort might be his most lively offering yet, mixing up groovy ’60s graphics with rainbow-striped Lurex knits. The house’s monogram has been transformed into an interlockedBflower on classic cardigans. Elsewhere petit point embroideries of tiny flowers are scattered about a knit. There’s even a palazzo pant-tunic combo.Still, Posen’s strength at Brooks is to counterbalance his own playfulness with the BB essentials. The first piece in the showroom isn’t leaf green or printed in Pierre Marie florals but traditional: a navy blazer with gold buttons. Posen has elongated the jacket to cut a cooler silhouette. He’s been upgrading Brooks’s shirtdresses since his start; in outsized plaids with bow belts, they’ve become best sellers. Now he’s taking on jackets and outerwear, zhuzhing them to cooler, more relaxed proportion. The navy blazer is an excellent example of the potential for the chillification of Brooks Brothers’s prep.
12 June 2019
Since Zac Posen joined Brooks Brothers in 2015, he’s steered clear of any overt references to British prep. He’s done Nantucket and the Hamptons, sure, but replaced any empire polish with his own sense of artiness. Perhaps it’s that he’s grown comfortable at the helm of Brooks or that sales are on the rise yet again, but Posen is tackling the trappings of British prepsterdom this season, from riding jackets to sharp plaids.The English wit fits nicely within the Brooks look, allowing for Posen to build out a blazer group in tartans and to dare to cut a tux in velvet tartan. He’s leaning in to the richness of it all with a specially treated Loro Piana camel cashmere coat and a sequin minidress in graduated shades of blue. It’s proper enough, with prim blouses and a Fair Isle cardigan, but still thoroughly modern thanks to Posen’s feminine tailoring on sheath dresses and draped cashmere coats. This isn’t a borrowed from the barons look. With a new logo bag and a Japanese-inspired scarf, the sun never sets on this Brooks Brothers collection.
20 February 2019
Ladylike polish was a big theme at New York Fashion Week, where bouffants and sorbet colors trotted out on many of the most influential runways. This posh primness is the core ideology that sustains both Brooks Brothers’s business and its lasting allure. For Spring, Zac Posen and his team started off thinking about images of Jacqueline de Ribes, the poshest of them all, in her garden. What does someone devastatingly fabulous wear in a casual moment? The answer Posen came up with was plenty of peach and pink and pretty separates in high fabrications that evoke the nuance of couture but the ease of Nantucket. Tweeds are flecked with little surprises of neon, seersuckers come in a delicate lavender, and there’s one peach-to-kiwi color-blocked shift that’s a daring step into new mod territories.More than just rehashing those halcyon days of the early ’60s, Posen has offered much for those looking to dress for this era. Check out a large swatch of cherry-print options. Yes, a fruit print was the must-have of summer 2018, but it will likely endure until these items hit stores in springtime. Plus, it already has a vote of confidence from Hollywood. Maya Rudolph’s character in Amazon’s surreal new seriesForeverwears the cherry sweater in an early episode. Expect orders for that piece—and the whimsical shirtdress in the same print—to be high.
18 September 2018
Brooks Brothers is celebrating its 200th anniversary with a Fall collection by Zac Posen that digs into its archives and reimagines the Brooks woman for today. It seems stupidly obvious to explain how fundamentally things have changed for women in the past 200 years, so let’s talk about the fashion pieces that have miraculously stayed the same instead. Take a red riding jacket with gold monogrammed BB buttons. It’s a seam-for-seam re-creation of an archive piece, and perhaps one of the most old-timey, staid, moneyed items seen at New York Fashion Week. And yet with cropped black trousers on the model Aya Jones, it looks covetable and cool. Fashion labels from Vaquera to Helmut Lang have been plumbing the archives—their own and other brands’—and with more and more labels offering subversive takes on prep, it’s smart for Brooks Brothers to reissue some of its more iconic pieces.Elsewhere, Posen has diversified his prints, like a gentle graphic rose, and continued to work with Lurex and shine. There are also tiny black bead embroideries on silk and velvet, and a fun, even kind of funny, leopard-print velvet skirtsuit. In its seasonal lookbooks, Brooks Brothers styles its collection very conservatively—hey, in 200 years, they’ve surely figured out exactly who their customer is—but this season is filled with the kind of fashion-y pieces that, if put in the hands of the right stylist, could seem quite subversive, like that leopard skirtsuit or a slim tuxedo jacket. Their core customer might reach for the waterproof flannel puffer or the ombré sheath, but this time there are plenty of options for the fashion-obsessed kids, too.
16 February 2018
When Brooks Brothers was first founded in 1818, the venue for this 200th-anniversary show, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, already had a history dating back 619 years. Longevity is relative. Yet Brooks Brothers, surely the oldest continuously operating maker of menswear in the U.S., certainly merits its deeply enmeshed place in the fabric of American history. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it was in a Brooks Brothers overcoat. And when JFK was assassinated, he was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt. More cheerily, this company created the button-down oxford and claims to have popularized the blazer (at least in the U.S.), to have invented the polo shirt, and to have introduced ready-to-wear on American soil.So why celebrate the anniversary at Pitti instead of New York? Probably because the current owner, Claudio del Vecchio, is from around these parts—although, there are plans afoot for further celebrations that will continue through the year. As a party-starter, this show proved mixed. The Salone dei Cinquecento is surely one of the most magnificently overblown rooms in the world, and a full orchestra playing “Empire State of Mind,” Muzak-style, only added to the incongruous and fusty grandiosity of a context that was always going to be a struggle for any clothes to complement. Those clothes, when they came, were neither all bad nor especially good. Zac Posen’s womenswear component was on the whole conservatively efficient, with a black notch-lapel executive pantsuit perhaps the purest form of Brooks Brothers’s mass executive function. The menswear was a mutedly expressed walking museum of Brooks Brothers tropes including the tartan, the madras, the polo shirt, and, of course, the suiting.If it had not been for some truly deranged, done-in-the-dark styling that saw cable-knit sweaters worn over tailored jackets, a raincoat worn inside out, a check jacket over a seersucker suit, cardigans over jackets, and plenty more such unimaginatively disruptive gestures, the men’s component would have been okay, too, but, sadly, these interventions undermined the so-so collection.Del Vecchio’s predecessors at the helm of this famous firm include the four original Brooks Brothers, sons of the founder Henry. One of their descendants, Winthrop Brooks, was the last in the family to run it, in the 1940s, and during that time came up with a line that rather finely encapsulates a still very relevant menswear dialectic.
This is how he put it: “Let me say here a word about conservatism. It does not mean a stubborn refusal to discard what is old and outworn, nor an old fogeyish prejudice against innovations of any kind. It really means a determination to retain what has been tried and proven to be good, and to refrain from the exploitation, simply because it is new, of what is essentially cheap and silly.” Winthrop would not have allowed cheap and silly styling to undermine the anniversary of this magnificently storied company.
10 January 2018
Zac Posen has been at this Brooks Brothers thing for four years now. (And, he offered without a question posed that he just re-upped his contract for a couple more.) As a designer whose main collection deals in dreams, rethinking America’s oldest clothier seems a curious task. But to hear Posen tell it as he moves about the showroom in a gray Brooks Brothers suit, there’s nothing he revels in more than the “art of building a business.” He reaches for a slate blue rain jacket, "This does well in Japan." Shirting, suiting, and shirtdresses continue to be big sellers, and he beams with pride as he says, “Business is up 60 percent this year over last.”Posen’s formula for Spring is to continue refining the BB staples while injecting some of his own flights of fancy. A thin plaid suit is made of a special fabrication, “Brooks Cool,” that makes it as thin as a windbreaker but allows it to retain the shape of Posen’s strict tailoring. Think of it as athleisure for those who consider yoga pants a sin. A shift dress comes with an elegant cross-body drape, while a cardigan is embroidered with chiffon for a touch of whimsy. Tropical prints and crisp sailor stripes round out the offering. But if you’re looking for Posen’s favorite pieces, click to the end of the lookbook and linger on the safari suit and dress. A whiff of Yves works well, especially now. Tonight, the documentary about Posen—House of Z—will have its New York premiere. The film tells the story of a young designer with bounds of talent, who is beloved, then scorned, then beloved again by the fashion world—a boy with big dreams, a posh demeanor, and an international flair. Hmm, sound familiar?
8 September 2017
We’ve entered a new phase of Zac Posen. The New Yorkiest of New York designers is without an eponymous brand for the first time in almost 20 years, with Brooks Brothers becoming his sole fashion design outlet for the moment. What that meant for America’s oldest clothier is a collection with a renewed focus on suiting, sporting, and the suave look of the ’70s. On moodboards in Brooks Brothers’ office were images pulled from pages of vintage Vogues, advertisements for Nan Duskin, and Charlotte Rampling in a safari jacket and perfect Left Bank hair. The ’70s were, of course, the time when fashion was Fashion, when one trend could dominate a continent, and when women were trading their infantilizing miniskirts for power flares and mannish blazers. All this played out expertly in Posen’s collection, with just the right balance of rust-colored hunting jackets and Annie Hall-ish plaids.Perfecting the fit of Brooks Brothers’ clothing, or modernizing it, has been one of Posen’s ongoing missions. This season he really shone in that area. In the lookbook here, Sailor Brinkley-Cook proves that even an ivory suit with ladylike scalloping can look cool on a 21-year-old. Ditto a ditsy floral dress, an embroidered sweater, or an emerald slim suit paired with a baseball cap. There’s a for-all-ages, for-all-occasions appeal to what Posen does at Brooks that, perhaps, was what was missing at his nighttime-only eponymous brand. But comparing the two doesn’t really serve. Instead let’s focus on what’s new: A tomato hunting jacket worn over a fuchsia jacquard party dress. The Brooks shopper is definitely going to need both; props to the one that styles them together.
19 January 2020
Brooks Brothers has career women covered. Classic suiting imbued with just the right amount of fashion flair has become the brand’s standard since Zac Posen was named creative director in 2014. For Pre-Fall it comes in nubby tweeds, tomato reds, and Prince of Wales checks. But even the most business-savvy woman needs something to wear off-duty. For that, she should continue to check out the Brooks Brothers racks. There’s a strain of preppy, polished, and slightly Parisian effortlessness that runs through Posen’s blood and is seeping into Brooks Brothers’s ruffled peplum blouses, autumnal scarf prints, and knit shifts with coordinating cardigans.What makes this season a standout in Posen’s oeuvre at Brooks is that it doesn’t choose a side: corporate or contemporary. Styled on model Madison Headrick, the collection is mixed together in fresh ways, cashmere tees polished up with silk scarves and business suiting worn with weekend flats. That little-of-this, little-of-that mentality reflects how real women shop and get dressed—and those loafer flats reflect how comfortable they wish all footwear could be. Next up, leggings, okay, Zac?
9 December 2017
Brooks Brothers is celebrating its 200th anniversary in 2018. That’s led the brand to a certain level of introspection—dig through 200 years and you’re sure to come up with a lot of references worth revisiting. But rather than wax poetic on the past, the womenswear team led by Zac Posen is injecting Brooks classics like gingham, shirting, and that unfettered yacht-club spirit with a newfound sense of play.The jumping off point for Resort was an image of Helen Frankenthaler perched on a sea wall, her head covered in a coral scarf, and another of her on the cover ofTimemagazine, framed by her drip paintings. Her arty influence is apparent in the collection’s palette, with cornflower blues, butter yellows, and tomato reds taken directly from her work. The overall spirit of the collection is livelier—and lovelier. A floral print designed by Pierre Marie has hidden hula girls within floral wreaths, while a nautical knit is intarsia’ed with lovebirds. Lurex makes several shimmering appearances, as does denim as trim on an indigo tweed suit. If a field of floral jacquard feels perfectly proper, Posen and co. have made sure to offer it alongside a pink gingham suit with curved hems that is more Elle Woods than Vivienne Kensington. Neither of thoseLegally Blondeheroines made it to the Brooks Brothers mood board, but they would have fit in nicely. They’re exactly the type of insouciantly proper, Harvard-bred It girls that will become the Brooks Brothers customers of the next 200 years.
14 June 2017
“Easy essentials. Nothing tricky. Nothing too theme-y; that’s not what it’s about here,” said Zac Posen, motioning to his lineup of classically preppy looks for Brooks Brothers’s Fall collection. After more than two years at the brand’s helm, he has amassed enough sales data to know what works inside Brooks’s stores, and that’s unfussy pieces made luxe thanks to his expert tailoring. This season’s offering included a wealth of suiting in navy and Brooks’s signature tartan, as well as plenty of stand-alone blazers in iconically preppy colors like robin’s-egg blue and camel. Navy corduroy pants were paired with tie-neck blouses, and dresses in moody florals always hit mid-knee.Posen is a designer enamored with glamour—see the stunning dresses he does worn by Rihanna, Naomi Campbell, et al., at his namesake line—and he can’t resist adding some to Brooks Brothers’s collections. A skinny tuxedo suit, worn with a crystal-buttoned top, might not be on many Greenwich, Connecticut, wish lists, but it looked fabulous on a model. Ditto a tartan puffer with a metallic sheen and a rich emerald velvet suit. Compared to those items, a zip-front, collarless gray blazer appeared startlingly less than. With everyone questioning the purpose of Fashion Week and some shifting show schedules to better align with delivery time, it seems worth asking whether or not there’s a more concise method for Brooks Brothers to either commit to its commercial pieces or swing the pendulum in favor of Posen’s fashion-girl moments.
16 February 2017
Brooks Brothershas long been a source for the working woman, but withZac Posenat its helm, it’s aspiring to be the source for style-savvy ones, too. Pre-Fall saw Posen produce one of his most concise collections for Brooks yet, nicely marrying the brand’s heritage with the trends of the moment. A navy suit, for example, featured cropped, wide-leg trousers and a double-breasted blazer with a nipped waist and subdued brassy buttons, all of which amounted to a nice, left-of-center corporate ensemble. Elsewhere, thin dresses in blown-up plaids were airy enough for summers on Wall Street or in Westhampton, and a newly expanded range of novelty knits will give Brooks Brothers devotees a reliable way to add some fun into their wardrobes.Those women would be smart to dig into Posen’s flirtier pieces, as well. A striped shirt, knotted at the waist with a portrait neckline, elevates the off-the-shoulder trend, while a full-skirted jacquard cocktail dress in rich shades of berry and pale blue is a smart, even sexy evening choice for the Brooks lady. As yet, cocktailwear is a somewhat untouched territory in Posen’s BB oeuvre. Maybe he’s saving those ideas for his two eponymous labels, but a little flou would do well on the racks of America’s oldest retailer.
16 December 2016
Few designers manage to be both practical and fantastical in fashion—you know, the guy cutting your blazer probably isn’t the same one draping your gown. Unless that guy isZac Posen, whose Spring collection for Brooks Brothers served up some flights of fancy alongside the necessity of a well-made suit for work. To strike this delicate balance, Posen chose as his inspiration posh summer getaways—as seen inCecil Beaton’sphotographs or Valencia-filtered Instagram photos geo-tagged “Montauk, end of the world.” Sure, the moneyed-lady-on-holiday trope is well trod in fashion, but if anyone can lay claim to it, it’s Brooks Brothers, America’s oldest retailer, which has been a part of those Nantucket fantasies since 1818.So what about the clothes? A boxy denim seersucker dress could be lovely on David Geffen’s Ibiza yacht or at the dog park on Sunday morning. That full skirt in a custom pastel Pierre Marie print, well, that’s for strolls through a Miranda Brooks–designed garden or on the sidewalks of Brooklyn. And there was an eyelet shirtdress for a woman hosting a backyard fete or a girl escaping the humidity of a congested city. There’s always some suiting—a standout this time around was an ivory tweed skirtsuit whose jacket kicks out an inch or so at the waist—but this season saw more floaty pieces, like a printed blue top and skirt that Posen dubbed “pajama glamour.”“Making real clothing is really fun and gratifying,” the designer said at the presentation. NearbyKatie Holmeschatted up friends while wearing a Brooks Brothers denim trench, ivory blouse, and jeans—real, and still quite glamorous.
15 September 2016
The ’70s have been a continual touchstone forZac Posen’s Brooks Brothers collections from the beginning. For Resort—technically the first delivery of the brand’s Spring 2017 collection—Posen honed in on Melvin Sokolsky’s Polaroids from that era. Sokolsky’s evocative street scenes of real people in New York City are gritty, raw, and sometimes even unpretty; Posen’s collection is, well, none of those things. Classicism is the word at Brooks Brothers. This season he continued to riff on the three S’s—suiting, shift dresses, and shirting—adding in notes of trendiness in the form of muted ’70s colors and wide floral prints courtesy of repeat collaborator Pierre Marie. When asked who his muse might be he demurred, diplomatically saying that Brooks Brothers, with more than 250 stores internationally, is for all women, but when pressed he admitted that the styling of the lookbook had a certain Catherine Deneuve quality. In python-covered block heels, hair barrel-curled into pristine ringlets, model Elisabeth Erm is a ringer for the ingenue in her heyday. To the Brooks Brothers shopper of a certain age, this will be a delight.But what about the younger customer Brooks Brothers is courting? She will like the ditzy floral dresses with a Laura Ashley spirit, tie-neck blouses, and maybe even the last look, a plissé minidress with wide, bell sleeves. In the lookbook it's shown in cerulean, but there’s also a black option that evokes the vixen charm of the vintage dress fromMad Men’s “Zou Bisou Bisou” scene, worn by Don Draper’s much younger wife in an effort to sex-up their marriage. Much like Mrs. Draper, Posen is a young gun, brimming with zeal and talent, at an old brand—America’s oldest retailer, in fact—looking to add some pep to its shelves. Through this lens, Resort felt a bit like a sidestep. Posen’s first collections managed to hit all of Brooks Brothers’ demographics while still exuding the joy that you associate with the designer; here, though there are great pieces in the collection, that boundless optimism was a bit muted by practicality.
8 June 2016
Ah, there he is. IfZac Posen’s first two collections for Brooks Brothers veered a little everywoman, Fall 2016 was pure Zac at work. Tailoring was king—the result of Posen and co. spending over a year conceptualizing and creating this collection. The culmination of their efforts was the Brooks Brothers’s women’s tuxedo—a fitted black jacket with a high roll shoulder and boot-leg pants with a seamed pleat down the front. The fact that it will find a home in Brooks Brothers stores around the world, some of which are nestled far from fashion hubs, is a lucky treat for women—but will they know to buy it?The rest of Posen’s collection should lead them there. Vaguely East Asian undertones—see a Mandarin-collared silk top in brassy magenta—mixed with a classic autumnal palette to birth a number of options for day and evening. The designer was particularly keen on a reversible shearling/leather coat, a cashmere tracksuit, and the first look out: an olive-green single-breasted suit. Repeat BB customers will like those too, as well as the cropped trousers in tartans and wools, and the snappy patterned dresses with prints designed by Pierre Marie. “I really didn’t want to create a revolution, because that is the antithesis of the brand,” said Posen at the presentation, where he was positively swarmed by photographers. “This season was about an evolution and using Brooks Brothers’s strengths, starting from the fit and doing it better.” Posen has a lot on his plate these days—two namesake brands, a judging gig onProject Runway, and a cookbook due out in 2017—but he’s savvy enough to know that in fashion, as in life, slow and steady wins the race.
15 February 2016
For spring,Zac Posen’s Brooks Brothers woman was vacationing in Nantucket. Come May, when Pre-Fall hits stores, she’ll have packed up her breezy separates and traded the coast for college. “She’s a late ’60s Sarah Lawrence girl,” mused Posen at the Brooks Brothers showroom. Garry Winogrand’s snaps of nonchalantly elegant New Yorkers in the ’70s also served as an inspiration.The new collection, spanning a roomful of racks, is Posen’s second effort since taking the role of creative director at Brooks Brothers in 2014. And though the adage warns that you can’t be all things to all people, Posen and Brooks Brothers are sure going to try. “You have to be directional and you have to design into categories that are necessary,” he said. “And that doesn't feel like a compromise.”This season, the staid Brooks Brothers customer will enjoy many structured day-to-night options in ponte or double-faced wools. For the new prep, a Margot Tenenbaum–ish pleated skirt suit in muted eggplant or a denim trench with rolled belt will serve. Even a bohemian could take a liking to a silk dress in an exclusive Pierre Marie print or a vermilion zebra-print sweater. Most women could find something to like in Posen’s lineup, but the question is how to get the younger, more fashion-savvy customer to consider what was once a bastion of prep-dom and a cool place to shop. Step one is casting model Maria Borges fresh off the Victoria's Secret runway in Brooks Brothers’s lookbook and upcoming campaign.
17 December 2015