Blog – Nick Hilton – Reflections

What Is Good About Good Service?

November 17, 2014 Nick Hilton

Back before the mega-merger I was partial to United because they went where I went most often: Chicago, Denver, Milano. I had to fly Continental to Charlotte on one occasion; same old routine, hurry up and wait at security, at the gate, stand in line, wait again on the jetway, excuse me, excuse me, jostle down to my seat, search for some overhead, finally sit, fasten the seat belt and look down to see I’ve lost the cufflink from my left sleeve. The Tiffany ones, gold ovals with NH my parents had given me for Christmas. Shoot up from my seat and jostle back through, panicky searching the waiting area. No luck. “We gotta go,” the ground crew is saying. “What happened?” asked a concerned-looking woman crew member as they began to close the plane door behind me. I told her. She said, “Let me call maintenance to see if anyone picked it up, hon.”

The plane revving up, I returned to my seat, despondent, looked up to see this happy-faced attendant coming toward me, holding out the gold cufflink. “Maintenance found it. They’d taken it back to the office, but someone ran it down to the gate and passed it through the window to the captain. And here it is.” This was like a religious experience. I didn’t know you could open plane windows. I was used to “So sorry sir. Nothing we can do.” The experience converted me. It was Continental religion from that moment.

So. What was it made me abandon United Premier and all those frequent flyer miles to become a Continentalist? Of course it was the cufflink episode. The extra effort. But it I think specifically it was the look of happy triumph on that woman’s face as she came down the aisle: happy to help, proud of herself and the company. That happiness erased the barrier between me, the customer and her, server. The lost cufflink was not just my problem, it was Continental Airline’s problem too. We were in it together. Isn’t that the emotional underpinning to any successful relationship? Beyond that, doesn’t this kind of interaction give everybody a feeling of belonging, of being cared about? Don’t we all seek that from our first breath to our last?

That’s the thing. It’s not the maître d’ coming to ask you if your food is OK; it’s not the things you expect to happen happening; not the candy on your pillow or a coupon in the mail; it’s We’re In This Together. When the client has a problem it’s everybody’s problem. It’s a team effort, and everybody’s on the team. In this relationship there is never a conflict of interest. There is no reciting Our Policy. There is just us and the solution. This is nothing new, although the business-book-writing community seems to find it out every couple of decades and make it sound new again, the concept is as old as time. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. This is our policy manual. Not just one page; just one sentence.

Gant and The Button Down Oxford- A History

October 15, 2014 Nick Hilton

In Fall 2014 the Gant collection is the centerpiece of our sportswear offering, and the Swedish-owned company produces the kind of modern-fit, easy, natural styling that our customers love. But the heritage of the name goes way back, and like so many things in our industry, is intertwined with the Hilton name from just about the beginning.

Gant didn’t invent the oxford button down, but they sure popularized it, the way my old man did the natural shoulder sport jacket. My father and Marty Gant shared a showroom at 200 Fifth Avenue, across from Madison Square, in the early days of Ivy-League. This kind of thing was happening all over at the time. Old manufacturing firms were finding new life in the pursuit of this emerging preppy phenomenon. Norman Hilton was sending orders into the sixty-year-old Joseph Hilton business back in Linden and Marty Gant was selling oxford cloth button downs by the hundred-dozen.

Their original name was Gantmacher, and I suppose from this that somebody somewhere along the line had been glove makers back in the old country, but in New Haven, where they’d wound up, the made shirts. Now New Haven, you must understand, was to preppy fashion what Kansas City was to jazz. The likes of Cole Porter and other Eli dandies made the Yale scene synonymous with refined style. An expression at the time, “white shoe at Yale,” summoned an image of a blazer-clad Whiffenpoof in full regalia – finished off with white buckskin shoes, and signified the highest level of sartorial discrimination. Eventually, the in-crowd just said “Shoe!” to describe such to-the-nines dressing, as in, “Look at Jonesey! Definitely shoe.”

All of the tailors and shopkeepers in New Haven at the time were enriched by the aura of what I’ll call pure prep-essence. Langrock’s, a New Haven tailor, opened a store in Princeton to cater to Tiger undergrads. J. Press ventured forth to Cambridge, New York and even far-off San Francisco. But these were modest affairs compared to Gant, who rode this wave into multi-million-dollar, mass-market distribution; the brand became a household word.

A long-gone Scottish textile company once named their four basic weaves after institutions of higher learning; apparently there was once a “Cambridge,” a “Harvard” and a “Yale,” in addition to “Oxford,” which was the only one to really catch on. There is also a basic style of shoes called “Oxfords.” Interesting, right? Perhaps something about the name itself leads to persistent popularity. I can’t think of anything we wear now referred to as a “Yale,” despite the influence New Haven once had. In any case “Oxford” is a type of weave. It is a one-over-one construction, the most basic weave there is. Regular, traditional oxford is kind of heavy, and has a richly firm drape. A later variant of the cloth, called “Pinpoint oxford” is of the same construction, but done with much smaller yarns, so that the cloth is lighter and has more flexibility. Both feel soft and comfortable; both hold their shape and wear well. Regular, heavy oxford, though, looks like nothing else. It’s The Real Thing. Pinpoint is more comfortable around your neck, especially with a tie. The colors, especially blue, are soft and versatile because the vertical or warp yarns alternate color-white-color, and so the overall look of a colored oxford shirt is softer than strictly solid cloth.

Mr. Gant had simply re-packaged a longtime Brooks Brothers staple, the heavy cotton plain-weave “Polo” collar shirt, so-called because it was said to have been invented for players of the sport who sought to avoid having their shirt collars poke them in the eyes when they were leaning over the their ponies’ flying manes, mallets at the ready. Back then there was no Brooks Brothers in the future shopping mall off the as-yet-unbuilt nearby interstate, no 800 number to call, no Brooksbrothers.com; so the market for fifteen dollar (expensive!) Gant button downs was virtually unlimited.

Button-down collar oxford shirts came to be the same kind of thing as jeans. These days a guy can wear a button-down oxford with jeans, khakis, linens, or fine dress trousers; even with shorts. He can wear it with the sleeves rolled up and the two top buttons open for a casual look, or go so far as to put one on with hard finish worsteds and a pattern sport jacket, with grey flannels, a navy blazer, and repp tie.

I’m not much for any dogmatic or doctrinaire approach to dress. People should try occasionally to be creative, to carry off things that are unusual and innovative and personally expressive. So if someone says Thou Shalt or Shalt Not Wear This or That they thwart the creative drive that can make someone able to dress really well. But I will say for the record that most regular guys who wear a button-down collar shirt with a suit look goofy, like they just happened to have a clean one. It used to be done, by newscasters in their Madison Avenue best, in the Natural Shoulder Era, but no more. A suit is a level 4 thing, and a button down shirt is, even worn with a navy blue blazer and a natty tie, always a level 3 item. But… It’s a free country. Be my guest. Have a go. Prove me wrong.

Clothing In Camelot

October 7, 2014 Nick Hilton

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My family had some connections with Joe Kennedy and his sons from early on. My mother’s father, Tom Carens, was the Washington correspondent for the Boston Herald in the Roosevelt years and ultimately returned to Boston as one of the honored sons of Erin, Vice-President of The Boston Edison Company and the president of The Clover Club, a sort of Irish version of The Union League. As such he was courted by Joe and young Jack during the latter’s earlier runs for office.

Later, my dad made some clothes for JFK. Apparently the up-and-coming politico ordered them from one of his accounts in Boston and we made them up. Hard to say which of the thousands of photos of JFK in the White House pictures him in his Norman Hilton grey worsted suit, narrow lapels, easy, undarted expression. But it’s for sure that some of them do.

My father was a true Kennedy man, and not just because of that. He gave me a book called One Brief Shining Moment, a pictorial biography of Jack by William Manchester. You could tell just from the pictures that the family had style.

The Kennedy family was an inspiration to us. Everyone agreed they had style. Maybe it was the influence of the Brits when the old man was our Ambassador to the Court of St. James. The British influence over the American style of the period was considerable. But the Kennedy clan made it their own, gave it the Hollywood glamour. That weathered-shingled, New England Victorian, green lawn by the seaside, wooden-hulled boat style. The smell of money wisely spent. Man, oh man. There’s no photo anywhere of Jack or Jackie looking like “gotcha!” on the cover of Us or People. No trends or fads, just slim-fitting, narrow lapelled custom suits and soft, point-collar shirts with solid dark ties, or khakis, a white shirt and a navy cotton sweater. Simple, not fussy, and classic in color and form. Chanel suits or Dior gowns for her, or a plain cashmere sweater set and a string of pearls.

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Norman kept a photo of Jack walking in the Cape Cod dunes on the shelf behind his desk. No matter where he moved his office, the picture went with him. It was taken from a distance, a panorama of threatening sky, dune grass and sea oats bent in the breeze, and Kennedy walking away wearing slim dark trousers and a grey, long-sleeve knitted sport shirt, holding a jacket in the crook of his elbow, face in profile, alone. As much as it is a definitive photo of the man himself, it is a picture of modern American style. And anyone who wants to know how to look stylish while dressing comfortably should study it.

Jeans in Suburbia — A Personal History

September 19, 2014 Nick Hilton

White Levi’s to 5-pocket Chinos

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I bought my first pair of blue jeans at the Hill School campus store. They were white. Off-white, really. The company called them “White Levi’s.” It was printed right on the tag, though they really were a beige color. Southern kids called them Wheat Jeans. I wore them home to Rumson for Christmas vacation, and to a RHS basketball game. People – girls – asked, “Where’d you get those pants!” White Levi’s hadn’t made it to Red Bank. The experience! My first sartorial thrill, wearing something new, totally cool! An antidote for teen-age angst.

I picked up Louise Winters, my date, and her old man answered the door, Martini in one hand, Marlboro in the other; asked with a withering look, “Where’d you get those pants?” and that completely sealed it. Nasty old drunk, icon of a generation, embarrassing his daughter. His disdain was my merit badge. This guy, in his Hunter green blazer with the golf-club crest, white turtleneck and corduroy pants with the duck embroidery! If this old fogy had a problem with what I was wearing, it meant something. Gave me confidence in my own style. Still have it.

So it was in the 60s, between The Beach Boys and Dylan that the jean made it to suburbia. No longer the attire of beatniks, cowboys and coal miners, it was only a matter of time – thirty-five years or so – until fathers – like me – answering the doors for their daughters’ dates, were wearing jeans. But the ones we’re wearing, “designed” by Europeans and hand-sanded to look worn-out, cost ten times what we paid for our White Levi’s. We may be gullible, but we’re way kinder.

I can’t think of anything that has evolved to such an extent without looking much different. The tricky is how to know what makes the difference between hog-slopping pants and good jeans. Like wines, all jeans kind of look the same; but the more exposed and educated you become the more skill you’ll have in differentiating one from another. You have to know about fabric and fit to appreciate the differences between Army-Navy dungarees and what they call Premium Denim.

Workmen’s pants are made of heavy, strong, and rigid cloth because they are designed to simply to cover the body, to provide protection in a work environment, and to last forever. They are blue simply because Levi Strauss, who invented them, favored indigo dye, which is strange because it is very caustic and not particularly color-fast. Anyhow, as a result of being made of dense and inflexible material they stretch out in places and stay stretched, developing bulges at the knees and a baggy seat – the kind of seat that, above which, you might see a particular type of cleavage. Old fashioned dungarees are designed to fit everybody’s body; (i.e., to have no discernable fit whatsoever.)

Premium Denims are made of technologically sophisticated cloth, spun, woven and dyed to be made into pants that fit in a way that conventional trousers never can. (“Can” is the operative word here.) If you’re going to buy a pair of jeans for two hundred and fifty dollars you can have pretty high expectations. These pants should change your life (or at least your sex life.) No conventional trouser design can hug your butt as much as possible without feeling tight and give a longer, leaner look to your legs and lower body. Unfortunately, however, if you have a waist that measures more than 38 inches around, or if your thighs are unusually big, you may have to give premium denim a pass. In your case the conventional design, longer-rise trouser is most likely more flattering. cheapmonday_fivemiddle_blue_jeans_lg_1

Naturally the distressed, unevenly faded variety will never stand in for a dress trouser, but straight leg jeans (or “5-pocket” pants, as they are known) in the dark, rich colors, from blue, black and gray all the way over to brown, can be a perfect complement to a tailored jacket in any season. It may be hard to actually get the necktie thing right with jeans, the rise being lower.

Better jeans may stretch a little, and they will certainly have been washed before you buy them to achieve a soft, lived-in feel. In fact, the wash technique and the resulting color and drape of the legs is the lion’s share of why they cost so much more.

You’ll see really expensive jeans in stores with holes “worn” into them by dollar-a-day laborers with forks and files and stuff. If you want to pay extra for that, I have a bridge we should discuss. Washing them repeatedly so they’re softer before you wear them is one thing, but trying to look like you wore these jeans to Woodstock is just a fake-out.

FYI “Jean” is the name of a cloth for making sturdy, durable pants, derived from the old English, “jene fustian,” a name for a heavy cotton twill typical of Genoa, Italy (jean-o-a, get it?). And in case that’s not enough information, denim is a modern-day corruption of the French “de Nîmes,” the name they gave to the same fabric the Genoese thought they’d invented. Coke and Pepsi all over again.

Canvas Is Only A Part of the Story

September 3, 2014 Nick HiltonLeave a comment

A little knowledge is a dangerous thing indeed. But in the time-starved, bullet-point world we inhabit, a great deal of knowledge can be much more dangerous, because attempting to share it with others runs the risk of losing the listener part-way through, leaving fragmentary impressions of what it was we were attempting to explain. In the subject of the art and craft of tailoring in men’s clothing, I believe this has happened on a global scale.

So it is that we get frequent inquiries as to whether this-or-that garment is “canvassed,” as if this feature were the sole criterion by which the product might be judged. (Let’s not digress into a discussion of how certain neologisms come to be – “fabrication” for cloth; “coloration” for, yes, color – only to say that, in my experience “canvassing” as a verb has only to do with political vote-getting.)

Creating sufficient body and stability in the front and the lapels of a jacket is what separates tailored clothing from sportswear. The 1970s advent of fusing – stabilizing the front and lapels with heat-activated-adhesive interlinings – saved the average tailored clothing manufacturer a significant amount on labor costs and insulated them from the increasing scarcity of trained tailors. This last part is the real story here, because to create a basted canvas front garment requires real skill. But this skill is required in a half-dozen other critical areas of fit, comfort and durability in the jacket; to judge the product’s overall quality by how the coat front is made is to miss most of the story, like judging a cake by the icing alone.

The first, and probably most threatening fact, is that fine quality tailoring is extremely difficult to recognize. Machinery makers like Kannegiesser of Germany and others have pretty much perfected the materials and processes that go into fused-front tailoring. No more delaminating in the dry-cleaning; no more stiff, rigid feel. In fact, in the store, the fused-front jacket may actually look better. Here we come to a critical fact: if the skill in constructing a canvas-front garment is second- or third-rate, as it will in a world of fewer and fewer crafts-people, the product might be an inferior one. Nothing looks worse than a bush-league canvas front with its attendant puckers, ridges, unwanted fullness, bumps and wrinkles. It’s the end-result that matters, not just the means. Saying it’s “canvassed” is one thing. How does it look?

The construction of the coat front is no more important to the long-term comfort, beauty and durability of the garment than the construction of the collar, shoulders and armholes. It is understandable that the sheep – goat controversy around fused garments vs. canvas-front garments arises from the fact that fusers mostly machine-stitch these areas, and this, my friend, is the heart of it. Ask not “Is it canvassed?” but, “Is it hand-sewn?” If you really want to develop some expertise in this, read on, because here’s the low-down on hand-made.

There are five major operations in making a jacket that, done by hand, result in a superior product. That is to say that these operations have never been improved upon by the invention of machinery, the way the sewing of the straight seam has been improved by the lock-stitch machine, for example. These five operations are responsible for the superior fit, comfort and durability of the “hand-tailored” jacket. All of them are centered in the top of the garment, around the shoulders and collar; and all of them are important in achieving better fit and greater comfort for the same reason: flexibility. A hand stitch is a continuous passage of thread through the cloth; the thread does not “lock” to a bobbin thread as it does in a machine stitch. The thread moves, expands and contracts with motion, remaining supple, creating seams which are at the same time tight, fluid and elastic, such as are needed around the collar and the armhole to give the wearer the most precise fit and ease of motion while retaining the ability to return to their original shape and dimensions. Colluding with the machine-make houses, sewing machinery manufacturers have devised “simulated hand” stitching machines of one sort or another. Take for example the Liba machine, devised to replicate the slip-stitch that holds a necktie together. Most factories now use Columbia or AMF edge-stitch machines to make an industrial replica of the hand-stitched lapel edge and lining seams. All of this is testimony to the ingenuity of machinery manufacturers, but the bitter irony is that, despite their ingenuity and effort, anyone who would recognize the hand work in a garment will also be able to tell fake from real. Whom do they think they’re fooling?

In fact there are only a few places where you can see hand stitches. Most important are those at the seam around the collar and in the lining at the shoulder and around the armhole. You may, with some experience, be able to discern a hand-made buttonhole, and a hand-done edge stitch is nearly unmistakable. Interestingly, the way you can tell that these areas are hand sewn is by the irregularity of the stitches. But strengthening the stress-points and achieving greatest flexibility in a jacket are best done by hand. The true quality of a jacket is achieved by hand operations, most of which are invisible to the layman: 1) attaching the sleeve heads, lining and shoulder pads; 2) creating the collar; 3) attaching the collar; 4) sewing the lining in the shoulder seam; and 5) sewing the lining around the armhole.

Now any truly hand-tailored garment is certain to have other areas of handwork inside, such as the tacking of the vents, sewing on the buttons, fashioning the buttonholes, stitching the lapel- and pocket-edges, attaching the lining at the sleeve cuffs and at the jacket-bottom hems; even the trouser waistband, when sewn to the outer shell by hand, creates a more comfortable and resilient fit and feel. The five critical jacket operations listed above are most important to the wearer is because those areas are where the comfort and stress resistance are most necessary, and where the hand-sewer can follow the elliptical, – rather than straight – curving sections of the cut cloth. The hand stitches follow and reinforce the contours of the collar and the armhole opening, giving strength and flexibility, smoothness and suppleness to those intricate seams.

Do I hear snoring? Are you sleeping? Wake up! I’m trying to help you spend your money wisely. Don’t hold it against me. There are two additional things I will try to say as economically as possible; then you can shut the light.

First, although hand tailoring is expensive in this world of diminishing skill, (there being so few people who are capable of doing it anymore that they can insist on very high wages,) there is still no way that anybody can justify the numbers some of these manufacturers or designers put on the price tags. If the garment takes 20 hours to make and the tailor gets even $50 an hour, you do the math. A $5000 suit is mostly mark-up, is all I’m saying. (Needless, is what I’m implying.) Caveat emptor, buddy.

Second is this. You can’t tell the benefits of hand tailoring until you wear the jacket for a while. You certainly can’t tell in the store. A totally machine-made coat may fit well and look good, but after a while the comfort and durability, the garment’s ability to retain its shape, move with you and conform to your ever-changing dimensions, will be obvious.

American Style

August 19, 2014 Nick Hilton

I’ll risk it right at the start. What’s the foremost influence on men’s style over the seventy years? It’s us. You and me. In the universe of men’s style, Americans rule. This is not some jingoistic notion. It is word.

Since the end of WWII the most profound and pervasive influence on the design of men’s clothing worldwide has been the style of the average American man. Sociologists and historians may refer to the entirety of the 20^th Century as “American,” but since the end of the World War II and the rise of Hollywood – the greatest cultural influencer since the fall of the Roman Empire – it’s been the Jazz Age, Rock ‘n’ Roll, Flower Power, Ivy League, Wall Street, Marlboro Man, grunge. The American style came of age in Harry Truman’s era, was broadcast via the cinema to a world that was starving for entertainment and order. The trend continues today. Think of the influence of “Mad Men;” the recycling of American style redoubling its effect.

We Americans are still “It,” stylistically speaking. Let me know when you hear of a commercially successful apparel trend born in Mumbai, Moscow, Beijing or Shanghai. That will definitely mark the beginning of the end of “The American Century.”

No one talks about this much. Guys who write books about men’s clothes usually pay homage to the English and the Italians. We Americans seldom take credit for our style influence. Maybe we’re embarrassed by all the rest of the commercial, glitzy, unhealthy junk we’ve foisted on the world. We have exported so much consumerist and media junk that we’ve created a backlash – so extreme in the some parts it has engendered terrorism.

I’m sure you’re not surprised to learn that Parisian men do not generally dress like what we see shown in the runway shows that take place there. (Frankly, you have to wonder, who does?) Italian men never wore the oversized clothes we associated with Armani. That was a Hollywood phenomenon. The “European cut” is an imaginary silhouette; in fact it’s humorous. Soft, sloppy, oversized? That’s definitely European! Tight, shaped, rigid, stiff? European cut! Strictly low-level sales pitch material. Often the clothes with European designer labels are licensed products, made in Asia, designed exclusively for the US market and bearing little resemblance to the designer’s actual conception.

The look of men’s clothes for at least the last seventy years has been an American phenomenon. The Japanese are a perfect example. Paul Stuart has something like 60 branches in Japan. The streets of Tokyo are packed with men and women in standard-issue navy blue Brooks Brothers suits, which they wear with Gitman Vintage white button-down collar shirts and J. Press ties. (J. Press is owned by Onward Kashiyama; it is said that they keep the unprofitable, struggling US branches open only to continue the illusion of being authentically American.)

Not to mention the ubiquity of blue jeans.

One day recently I was having coffee and reading my Herald in the Piazza Cavour, Como’s central square, and looked up to see a kid of about seven or eight coming toward me across the piazza, dressed in jeans and a San Francisco 49ers’ logo t-shirt with a NY ball cap and Nike sneakers. Coming out of my reverie, I realized I was not sitting in Palmer Square. I was 3000 miles away, in a “foreign” country. This kid, it struck me, was not just globalization personified; he was the universal child. We are approaching a unitary world, and it looks just like Cincinnati.

I Hear That Pleated Pants Are Coming Back!

August 15, 2014 Nick Hilton

Suzy Menkes, the doyenne of fashion journalism, started it. Writing about fashion for the International Herald Tribune, she tells a world-wide audience who is on and who is off in the latest Paris runway presentations. She’s the Siskel and Ebert of fashion, the first and foremost critic of clothes; she might even pan a designer’s efforts once in a while. She considers designers to be real artists; she conceives the whole women’s clothing industry to be an artistic endeavor, and her opinion is that of an art critic writing for any medium. It is interesting to consider how to distinguish art from commerce; but the modern runway show has blurred the lines. Did the Brand Name world we live in now evolve because of talent, or hype? Rarely do you hear of a fashion product that gained fame by being the proverbial better mouse trap. The extreme cases of this are things like make-up lines with super-model brand names. The more outrageous and extravagant the fashion show, the more “artistic.” The more outlandish the outfits on the runway, the more the fashion press corps saw “art” in the presentation and so justify printing the pictures. That kind of news was sure to be picked up by the Kansas City Star.

So eventually these shows would be done for men’s clothing. The catch, however, was that menswear that actually sells in stores is pretty predictable. Men don’t relate to clothes as artistic. Men are into function, for the most part. Propriety. Practicality. Show a regular citizen of Middletown a picture of a guy in harem pants and a tunic and he’ll think you’re putting him on. No one ever has the chutzpah to say this. In menswear everybody is so respectful. Even the humdrum offerings from the industrial likes of Tommy Hilfiger and Perry Ellis (who’s been dead for decades) get gushing tributes. It’s a combination of fear of damaging fragile egos and the threat of losing ad revenues. No one ever says anything bad. No one knows what would happen if a writer panned a men’s wear show. It’s never happened. It’s The Emperor’s New Clothes with a twist. Because the “newness” in men’s fashion shows is mostly unwearable. Instead of stimulating business, this PR has the opposite effect.

Let’s face it. Menswear design really doesn’t take the kind of talent required to make a gold lamè-trimmed, silk tulle hooded, sleeveless evening gown with slippers, cape and matching Rolls Royce interior. That’s for the geniuses in Avenue Montaigne: the real designers. The editors and journalists who cover menswear want to be the Suzy Menkes of their side of the aisle. They don’t find a pair of grey serge trousers or a blue broadcloth shirt to be of any interest; not even the more obvious news stories, like the disappearance of the “enormous,” or the changing size of shirt collars, gets much attention. All this would amount to little more than a curious characteristic of the fashion journalism business, except for the fact that someone needs to tell men about the tides of change, about the evolution of style. Weird, useless “art” clothes – skirts, kimonos, and the like – in magazines and newspapers don’t help men or help the men’s clothing business. Aside from adding to the notoriety and hype surrounding a designer’s name, aside from the self-congratulation among industry insiders, they leave the average guy, young, old, straight, gay, urban, suburban, hip, callow, all of them, at best uninformed, at worst, turned off completely.

1969 – The Revolution Takes Shape

July 17, 2014 Nick Hilton

Someone could write a book about Alan Abrams. I mean he’s at least as interesting a character as Frank Abagnale, Jr., the Catch Me If You Can guy. Maybe I’ll do it; in my next life. I wonder what happened to him, assuming he ever got out of jail… Because aside from his criminal shenanigans, the man was a personal harbinger of the menswear revolution of the 70s.

Back in the day, before commuting became a pre-dawn survival sport, there were “club” cars – private parlor cars attached to commuter trains that left Red Bank at seven thirty and returned from Penn Station at five-fifteen, delivering the Monmouth County captains of industry to their wives’ waiting station wagons (whence the name, see?) And these suburban titans paid handsomely to ride in a carpeted car with uniformed attendant, plush easy chairs, newspapers, pastries and coffee in the morning, newspapers, card games and a full bar in the evening. They played gin rummy; talked about cars, politics, bond prices; made bets on Yankees and Giants, fights and horses; whispered the latest Rumson gossip. Boy, did they dress well; Don Draper has nothing on these guys. Suits from Huntsman, de Pinna, Meledandri; sportswear from the original Abercrombie’s. Locke hats; Lobb shoes; Charvet shirts; ties from Sulka. The real deal. A guy like Abrams, fellow traveler, who happened to be married to my father’s first cousin, was grist for their mill.

Once in a while my old man asked me to come to the city and help out during market periods, so I got to ride with him on the private car. My lesson in mid-century American Cool. Pocket watches and fobs, pocket hankies, vests and tie-tacks, hats in winter and summer, raincoats, umbrellas. Cuban cigars, Cartier lighters and silver pens, engraved cigarette cases, Peal briefcases, money clips. One old guy named Scudder, who owned the Newark Evening News, wore white linen, three piece suits and panama hats, like a coffee plantation owner.

But nobody did it – any of it – better than old cousin Alan Abrams. Mysterious in the Gatsby-esque way, movie-star-handsome, Prep-School-groomed, world-travelled, debonair, Ivy League, Jewish. (Which, in 60s Rumson, was noteworthy to say the least.) Seeming To The Manner Born, he was a man without a past. Even my family knew nothing about his past. The Manner shone from him like a Hollywood marquis, from the brim of his Borsalino to the tips of his New & Lingwoods, this guy was the shit. So it was somewhat surprising when he was arrested, charged with and convicted of felony forgery and sent to the state lockup, and, with characteristic flourish, when allowed to work on the Department of Corrections farm outside of Trenton, was last seen running toward the waiting station wagon of, not my father’s long-suffering, faithful first cousin, but none other than the daughter of the Rumson mayor, his secret (and secretly pregnant) girlfriend.

Before he got busted Alan was a club car regular. He played Alain Delon to the WASP-y nabobs’ Robert Mitchums; rat-pack panache versus country-club hauteur. The tenor of the conversation would lower as he passed through the car. Envy, anti-Semitism or just amazement. Who knows?

One summer evening in the summer of 69, as the train rattled to a stop in the Red Bank Station and Alan got up to disembark, my old man poked me, asked under his voice, “What do you think of the suit Alan’s wearing?”

“Huh?”

“The suit? See how it’s tight at the waist? The hourglass shape? The side vents? It’s English.”

I was stuck for an answer. My dad may have been dismayed to realize, although scion of a great American clothing family, I had no idea what he was talking about. I had never looked at the shape of a suit jacket before. Every jacket I had, every one Norman had, and every one any one I’d ever met had, had the same shape. What was there to look at?

“That’s what they’re all talking about.”

I didn’t think to ask who “they” were. “Um,” I managed. “It’s nice.”

“That’s what Lauren wants,” he said.

The great escape was the last anyone heard of Alan Abrams. A clean getaway. Totally vanished, to my family’s great dismay, along with the mayor’s daughter. Until years later, probably because a young sales woman in the Burberry organization told be she’d been burned in a massive commodities futures Ponzi scheme by a phony operation known as J. Carr. Ltd., who fallaciously claimed to trade on the unregulated London exchange, did I recognize in the typical “perp” photo in the New York Times a handsome and impeccably dressed man being led in handcuffs from a fancy Boston town house, Alan Abrams, aka J. Carr.

Langrock – Princeton: Case Study in Retail Darwinism

July 10, 2014 Nick HiltonLeave a comment

We think of ourselves as a kind of successor store to the legendary Langrock, especially with fall – and the feeling for tweed, and football games in the crisp cool air, and Nassau Street with the huge oaks turning to russet – coming on. So the question comes to mind: What happened to them, anyway?

They had a larger-than-life, country-spanning reputation for quality and style, even as their take on tailored clothing became more and more anachronistic. They specialized in heavy tweeds and Saxony suits in the Ivy League, three-button sack-coat model. The pant style was ankle-high and narrow at the cuff. They defined themselves as much by what they did not carry as what they did. (Believe it or not, some traditional shops like this are still in business today – albeit in pretty remote locations. Buffalo, New York, comes to mind.) They thought that men who still wanted to dress in that peculiar style that would have nowhere else to go. Even if that were true, it was a shrinking numbers game.

I tried to sell Langrock our new (1971) “West End,” model. Named for the upscale, fashionable end of London, it was a shapely, two-button, darted front jacket. I thought I could convince Allen Frank, the owner, that “updated” traditional was tasteful and right. He wasn’t buying, but with a vengeance. Mr. Frank wasn’t insensitive to my pitch; he was downright insulted. True Natural Shoulder style was his Religion; the three-button, undarted coat style, the flannelly finish, and skinny pants were the sacred icons of the faith. Anyone who proposed a change was the Infidel.

“Never!” He practically shouted. “I could never put that kind of stuff in this store! Never! My customers would be insulted.” You’d think I’d been proposing human sacrifice. “This store stands for timeless good taste. We have no use for your fads and gimmicks. Our customers know what they want, and they don’t want shape!” It never occurred to him that Ivy League itself was just a longish-lasting fad.

I left the store that day and walked around town in a daze, trying to figure out what was going on. Here was a respected, successful shopkeeper telling me that it was his customers who decided what his store carried. As if a single one of them even knew what the hell a dart was. If that was true, what did they need him for? Was I wrong to embrace change, to believe in progress? Looking back, I think Allen Frank had a terrifying premonition that the formula that had worked for Langrock to that point was not going to last. He knew what I knew. But he was saying, without being able to really admit it, that he couldn’t change. He knew what he knew and nothing else. Change threatened him.

The next time I saw him he was standing in a dark corner of the Princeton University store, in the “Langrock Shop.” It had not gone so well. The sign that had been outside his wonderful Nassau Street store was hanging above him on the wall. “This is a lot easier than paying all that rent,” he said. Two years later he was gone altogether; no more than a memory.

Let the dead bury the dead, as I always (well, not always) say. But there is a cautionary tale here. Forget about the fact that there was a certain arrogance and snobbishness to the way Langrock treated the customer; forget about the fact that they let some ideological bias take the place of creative merchandising; forget even that they ignored the Darwinian nature of retail. Remember this: good taste and good style are fluid. Doctrinaire, stubborn attachment to one type of style is to attempt to deny human nature. At least one Princeton gentleman, unable to find anything like anything new at Langrock, found his way to 45^th and Madison, into the waiting arms of Paul Stuart.

FYI A dart is a seam that makes shape in a garment. Rather than joining two separate pieces, the dart, in the case of the tailored jacket, allows the front to be gathered together and then sewn so that the waist line can conform to the natural lines of the waist.

Ralph Lauren and Halston Meet “The Experts” – A Tragicomedy in 2 Acts

June 19, 2014 Nick Hilton

Halston Read this as a philosophical comment on the possibility of being totally wrong when you’re completely right; or it might be a comment on the nature of a certain generation of Italian men; maybe you’ll see in it a depiction of the self-assurance of a young designer that is emblematic of a certain genius; or maybe it’s a business fable with a familiar moral. Anyhow, here are the facts of the case:

In 1967 my father sold his shares in Winnebago Industries to invest $75,000 in a company called Polo Fashions, the brainchild of an employee of his named Ralph Lauren. My father had an instinct for the next big thing. (Eight years later he took on the U.S. agency for Burberry, then selling a few raincoats to a few stodgy men’s specialty stores.) Lauren had already achieved some notice for his extrvagant, 5-inch wide, richly textured and colored silk neckties, and his idea was to expand the line into dress shirts and furnishings, sportswear, and, finally, tailored clothing. Since Norman’s family owned Hilton Manufacturing, a clothing factory built by my great-grandfather in the 20s, this was to be a win-win all around.

Mike Cifarelli was the “designer” at Hilton Manufacturing. Today I think he would be called a pattern-maker, but back then the guy (always a guy) who made the “paper” was The Man. He always wore a crisp white shirt and a necktie, black, in mourning for his father, and he never laughed. He never really spoke much, in fact, as his English was as bad as his self-importance was large. But he was unquestionably The Man. It would be easy for me to go off on any number of tangents right here, but this is a blog, not a book. Suffice it to say that Cifarelli created one really great jacket model, at Norman’s behest, which had been the reason why my father’s business, in 1967, was unbelievably good. Everything he made subsequently, however, was this one model with minor variations.

The “kid” (Lauren) had a definite idea in mind for his clothing, down to the lapel width, the shape of the notch, the waist suppression, where the coat should button, the length of the vent, everything. He’d told my father the inspiration was Adolphe Menjou and his romantically classic style, and this idée-fixe was the driving force of Polo from the start. Cifarelli didn’t know from Adolphe Menjou or anything like romantic anything, but he knew (or thought he knew) what made clothing sell at retail. I suppose a series of encounters took place, at the last of which Cifarelli, unable to verbally convince Lauren of the folly of such a skinny-waisted, low-button jacket, threw the garment on the floor and stomped on it like it was a live animal, yelling “Not in-a my shop!” and so on, at which Ralph walked disgustedly out, went to Lawrence, Massachusetts to the waiting arms of Leo Lozzi and Lanham Clothes, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Wait. There’s more.

Cifarelli retired eventually, leaving no one trained to be his successor, but the head tailor in the Hilton shop was then another Italian Mike, this one surnamed Cruscito. The retail icon Danny Zarem was a friend of Halston’s and a fan of the legendary quality of Norman Hilton’s tailoring. Halston had apparently been convinced by Zarem that his name would sell men’s clothing as well as women’s, and Hilton was selected as the manufacturer. ( A footnote here would mention that the timing of this was crucial, because by 1975, more fashionable lines like Polo were eating our proverbial lunch, and the factory was literally working hand-to-mouth.) Following Halston’s instructions, a freelance pattern maker had given the factory a paper pattern for a man’s jacket with very distinctive lines and a feature as yet unseen in the men’s tailored clothing business: a one-piece back, together with trousers designed with rather narrow legs.

So we made the sample, amid a lot of bitching and moaning about having to make so strange a garment, with no center-back seam and all, and the day came to bring it to Halston, then ensconced in a five-story townhouse cum design studio cum residence in the East 60s. Butler, houseboys, the works. You get the picture. A cloudy spring afternoon. Me and Cruscito and Frank Cuzzola, the guy who drove us. This was the industrial equivalent of a scene from the Beverly Hillbillies, except that I alone among the three of us, actually knew who Halston was, and what he stood for, and the Liza connection and all the rest. To my colleagues he was just a rich finocchio with a strange finocchio suit.

After a few minutes of pleasantries it became imperative in Mr. Cruscito’s mind to explain to Mr. Halston the myriad problems with the one-piece back. To which Mr. Halston responded with I have to say a supercilious remark to the effect that the problems with alterations and fit were not important to him, a spark to the Italian’s tinderbox. “I am a professional,” Cruscito says, to which Halston’s initial flustered response is “I am a professional, too.” Hardly worthy of the more famous man, but sufficient to tank the meeting pretty much altogether; and thus after a few more minutes of very tense chit-chat from me, the three of us headed back down the stairs, into the Cadillac and back to NJ.