Brooks Brothers has fallen. Sales have declined; Factories, closed, and thousands of employees, furloughed or fired. Bankruptcy now seems imminent. Founded in 1818, Brooks Brothers clothed Civil War soldiers, U.S. presidents, and it was integral in the development of prêt-a-porter menswear. The fashion house was a foundation stone of what it meant to be “preppy”What does Brooks Brothers’ demise tell us about consumer behavior—and the decline of taste and manners? More broadly, what does it spell for the human condition, to be enveloped in plastic, uniform garments, that suck the soul dry of aspiration, and any connection to tradition and meaning. Should luxury be defended? The panelists discuss. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit radixjournal.substack.com/subscribe
It's Wednesday, July 30th, 2020, and welcome back to the McSpencer Group.
We dress for the kinds of jobs we don't want.
Joining me again are Tyler Hamilton and Edward Dutton.
Topic two, the end of mass market class.
Brooks Brothers has fallen.
Sales have declined.
Factories closed.
And thousands of employees furloughed or fired.
Bankruptcy now seems imminent.
Founded in 1818, Brooks Brothers clothed Civil War soldiers, U.S. presidents, and it was integral in the development of Pret-a-Porter menswear.
The fashion house was a foundation stone of what it meant to be preppy.
What does Brooks Brothers' demise tell us about consumer behavior and the decline of taste and manners?
More broadly, what does it spell for the human condition to be enveloped in plastic uniform garments that suck the soul dry of aspiration and any connection to tradition and meaning?
Should luxury be defended, the panel discusses.
All right, Brooks Brothers.
They've been around since 1818.
They clothed Civil War soldiers.
I imagine they worked for the Union.
They claim to have invented the ready-made suit, although that's in dispute.
They also claim to have invented the seersucker suit, although that also is in dispute.
I think Haspel might be the first on that one.
I wanted to talk about this.
It's a lighter subject.
But I think it's actually a telling one, and it kind of allows us to expand in terms of what's happening with culture.
So around the year 2000, they were bought out by an Italian billionaire, Delvecchio, I believe is his name, who's actually one of the top 50 wealthiest men alive.
And really, since the 90s, and then now they're apparently going bankrupt.
They are furloughing hundreds of employees.
They are going to close factories.
They were engaged in a bit of a Made in America campaign, which I noticed as, you know, someone who buys menswear.
I do have some Brooks Brothers clothes.
Not wearing any right now.
In which they...
Not all of their...
Some of their higher-end stuff was actually made in America, and they certainly advertised that.
And that seems to be coming to an end.
And so I actually do think it's rather sad.
I have a number of Brooks Brothers staples.
I have some Brooks Brothers dress shirts.
Some corduroy pants, a sweater or two.
I'm not a huge Brooks Brothers fan, but I do think that they have some good stuff.
But I think Brooks Brothers, along with, you know, you could say Jay Press, you know, went a different path.
They maintained a kind of higher-end, actual haberdashery type of company.
But it is a unique American company, and it is a...
Bastion of the prep or ivy style, some nautical elements, some ivy league elements, maybe some English gentleman elements as well.
If you could buy an ascot somewhere in America, you would probably find one at Brooks Brothers.
So I think it's kind of a sad state of the decline of culture, but I think it's also kind of a sad state in terms of the decline of just the concept of menswear and clothing in general, in the sense that...
A lot of these companies, the bigger ones, including Ralph Lauren, who got his, Leibowitz, got his start in Brooks Brothers as a Brooks Brothers salesman before he became a fashion designer, by the way.
But a lot of them kind of went down this path that...
It was kind of like a penny-wise, a pound-foolish.
It led to higher profits and higher brand awareness, but it ultimately led to dissolution of their brand and, in the case of Brooks Brothers at least, bankruptcy.
And that is the whole outlet mall culture.
Ten years ago, when we had the 2008 crisis, people were in a very bad mood.
The stock market had crashed.
Companies were going under.
And they started to see all these kind of 40% off sales.
And they got used to this concept.
And the outlet mall was also something that was arising in the 90s.
I can remember when I was a young person.
The original outlet malls were kind of true to themselves outlet malls.
I remember when we would go to Jackson Hole, Wyoming to go skiing as a family, there was actually a Ralph Lauren outlet mall.
And there you could find, say, last season's clothes or clothes that had a minor defect in them and were half off or something like that.
But they actually were the high quality Ralph Lauren material and clothes.
They were the thing that you could buy in New York City, but now you could buy in Wyoming at 50% off nine months later.
And it's kind of like only a fool pays retail.
And so they started buying more and more at the outlet malls.
And then these companies...
Again, they created this Frankenstein monster that had a life of its own.
They started making items for the outlet mall.
They would have some high-end retail in their New York City branch or whatever.
Then they would basically create Malaysian or China-made material that was just...
You know, the kind of stuff that you would get at Target or Walmart that they were selling at their outlet malls under the Brooks Brothers brand.
I remember Ed and I actually, we stopped by an outlet mall when we were visiting the San Dune of Illinois.
Was that a Brooks Brothers?
It was a Brooks Brothers, yes.
Oh, I love that place.
Yeah, well, you saw it for the last time.
It's kind of like visiting Hagia Sophia before it fell to the Ottomans.
Yeah, it's sad.
As you can see, I'm modeling the Canadian tuxedo by Brooks Brothers right now.
Oh, right, yeah.
Yes, definitely.
Canadian tuxedo, that's denim on denim, right?
Denim shirt, denim pants, cowboy hat.
Yeah, it was a meme of me going around in this.
And it's labeled Canadian Tuxedo by Brooke Brothers.
Okay.
Great.
Yeah, I mean, and so anyway, I don't want to make this too much, like, you know, avuncular advice, but I did a podcast a couple years ago where we just talked about menswear.
I think we did that for under the paywall, but I'll just put it up for free now.
It's a couple years on.
We were strongly suggesting that you kind of change your mindset in terms of menswear, where you purchase shoes that cost...
Not cost $80, but cost $400 or more.
And you know that this is going to last a decade, maybe even two, and you're going to get them resold and so on.
And it ultimately is kind of, it's ultimately cheaper because those $80 ones are not meant to last.
You're going to buy those same pair of shoes eight or ten times.
And as opposed to buying one pair of shoes, it's better, you're more proud of it, and you can get it resold.
Similar with a suit.
A suit...
Made in Italy, made in America.
It's just a symbol that it's a real thing.
It has a full body construction.
You can get it tailored.
You can wear this for 20 years.
And it ultimately saves money, but it's more, I don't know, it's just about having a different mindset.
And I think there is this kind of moment where most of America got in this mindset of...
I want to buy it at the outlet mall.
I'm going to get 20% off.
And it ultimately destroyed these companies that are kind of institutions because part of the Brooks Brothers aura is it's better.
It's aspirational.
You are wearing the same thing that literally a president would wear.
Presidents often wear Brooks Brothers inaugurations.
And they just kind of diluted it to the point where it's like now it's just a brand.
They're selling stuff you could literally buy at the same quality at Walmart, but it now has Brooks Brothers slapped on it.
And I don't know.
I mean, again, I for one am sad.
Well, the interesting thing, though, is one of the things I noticed is that menswear promoters themselves, like you can watch channels or read books or buy people who promote menswear, who actually contribute to this whole situation because a large portion of their writing is about how you can get it at the outlet on sale.
Right.
Almost universally, I noticed that.
And so, it's in a weird way, from the people who promote good menswear themselves, it's actually contributed to this situation where you're getting more and more products just made specifically for the outlet.
Right.
And so, the actual prestige around buying like a $500 suit to $1,000 suit.
Right?
So about a thousand dollars.
And then that's kind of, that mystique's going away.
Because it's like, well, you could go on eBay, you could go on Etsy, you could wait for it to go on the outlet, right?
And it's like this process where they've actually contributed to the situation we're in now.
And I mean, in some ways, it's not, I mean, I could be sad about it, but there is some good, like, smaller designers of good quality made menswear that you could find, like, online and locally.
We're, I guess, benefiting from the situation.
And the symbolic aspect of wearing a nice suit, in a way, is becoming stronger now because it's not as common anymore.
Casual clothing in the workplace, for example, is a big thing now.
But if you wear a good tailored suit just on a normal day and go out to a bar or a restaurant, you're going to get treated very differently.
In a way, yeah, it's sad, but there is some benefits to it for men themselves who know how to wear good men's wear and appreciate the symbolic value and the social value that comes with it.
It's sad.
I like that shop.
It had a lovely collection of privats.
There was a black gentleman who served me and he was extremely polite and he made you feel at home and welcome and looked after you.
It wasn't just some obnoxious teenage chewing gum saying, you know, what do you want?
It was properly done, like a proper department store.
And I thought it was very nice and it's a bit of a shame.
We had a thing in England called Dun& Co many years ago.
It's quite similar, focused on men to wear suits, tweed jackets, things like this.
And of course, the problem is that that kind of clothing, which used to be just normal, you would go to work, of course you needed a suit.
You would go on a date even, and of course you would wear a suit in the 80s or 90s, has now gone and everything's casual.
Even among the three of us, I'm the only person that's remotely smartly dressed.
This is cotton cashmere, by the way.
Smart casual was this.
You've got to keep these things going or they die out.
Eventually, it becomes a statement to not have an open-necked shirt.
That's how much we reverse things.
I think you make a very good point about this issue of quality over cheapness or whatever, mass production.
The idea that what must it do to the psyche to be surrounded by expensive Nice, well-made things, which perhaps have been handmade, but have a great deal of,
I don't want to say love, but a great deal of effort and planning and perfectionism put into them, compared to being surrounded by things which have been cheaply made by foreign people at low prices, will break easily and be chucked away.
And I wonder what is it like to wear clothes and to be surrounded by people wearing clothes, which again have been well made and have been family tradition and all this and sort of back into history and all this, as against clothes which have just been mass produced in Vietnam and will be thrown away within a few years.
And I think it's a similar effect to what does it do to the psyche to be surrounded by beautiful, well made, it doesn't have to be old, but it normally will be old.
buildings with ornate decoration and whatever of the kind.
When I was in Chicago that you saw these 1920s big skyscrapers with little details and all this, you know, little details carefully done to look kind of beautiful in their own way compared to what is done now, just brutalist, unpleasant architecture.
It's bad for the psyche.
It's bad for the soul.
And I think that's another means of repression.
It's another means of putting people down, of making them depressed, of making them the kind of consumerist automata, to have them wearing these just cheap, horrible Chinese Communist Party overalls, really, as opposed to things that have been well made.
And it's like the difference between having a nice...
You know, lovely food in that, whatever that club was you took me to, as compared to having a McDonald's.
It's that kind of difference, and I think this is, therefore, it's for that reason, in terms of just what it's doing to the culture, I think it's very sad.
Yeah, I mean, we can't ignore all the research around enclosed cognition, right?
It's the idea there that...
The actual clothing you're choosing to wear is that this symbolic representation actually does play a causal role in how you behave when it comes to your alertness or the way you deal with problems, right?
Like if you assign someone a task and give them a lab coat versus a painter's coat, and they've done these studies, is that they tend to miss more details when they're wearing the painter's coat.
And that's just like an easy example, right?
But you also have the situation where...
The whole culture, as Ed was saying, is moving towards this more bland, casual style, like sweatpants everywhere or yoga pants or whatever have you.
We all know, right?
You all see it when you go outside.
It's the fact that...
Consciousness and how we view ourselves is not just for our own bodies and for our own mental state, our own alertness.
It's actually intersubjective.
It's how we interact with each other and the symbolic meanings that we confer on it, right?
And so then you have this situation where that kind of casualness is taking part in what I would say is a part of this, like as we're saying with Brutalist architecture, this degration of the human spirit, right?
You don't see yourself as anything, like, higher than what you are.
And it sounds weird to say this, right?
It does.
People, like, say you talk about clothes, but it's also true, right?
It's like social epistasis.
We humans are like bees.
We're better compared to bees in a lot of ways than chimpanzees.
We are youth social.
We are strongly involved to these strongly bonded social groups in which we are deeply affected by everybody around us and in which our genes can only be optimally expressed if we are surrounded by other people who are genetically healthy.
If we're surrounded by people that are unfit, then it will affect our genes and our lives and our fitness.
An example of that is depression.
There was a very interesting paper on this many years ago which found that depression is literally contagious.
If you are with somebody who is depressed for genetic reasons...
Then you can become depressed for environmental reasons just because you're with that person.
In much the same way, in a minor way, but if you're with someone that just couldn't give a toss, who's just scruffy, who's just whatever, just lives for the now, couldn't care less, then that will trickle.
That will spread throughout society and make the society, in a sense, less optimal, less focused towards the transcendent, less focused towards the...
It's a very interesting thing in the UK called chapism.
It's a light-hearted thing with the chap manifesto and the chap magazine, and the idea is to kind of recreate the styles and mores of the 50s or whatever now.
The Chap Manifesto.
It's very, very funny.
I wrote an article for them once on how Finland's president, Manaheim, was a chap.
And it's this kind of thing.
That's what I try and do with the cravat and whatever.
It's a spread, a little bit of positivity throughout society.
That's what you're doing.
If you're wearing these degraded kind of clothes, then it's just spreading this negativity, this couldn't care less, nothing matters.
And if you go, interestingly, to countries that are still religious societies, or even just to Eastern Europe, One of the things that's very interesting is the way in which they dress.
They've got no money.
They've got much less money than Western people have, but what they put money into.
And one of the things that is very important to them is looking good, is dressing well, is kind of expressing a desire for something better and something eternal.
It matters.
I matter and how we look matter.
And you get this difference.
In Finland, you see they just wear awful clothes, tracksuits, things like this.
Whereas if you go to Southern Europe, it's very different.
Even India, how they dress is really, it matters and it sort of spreads a certain Yeah, and I think it's also a bit ambiguous.
I was thinking about the famous slogan of Patek Philippe.
It was something to the effect, you don't own a Patek Philippe, you're simply its custodian for the next generation.
And that, you know, look, a lot of that is like...
I think that's actually a good thing.
So I don't really want to criticize it too hard.
But it's also a true thing.
You know, you can buy a Kalatrava or a Nautilus, and this should last...
80 to 100 years at minimum.
You should service it.
you should absolutely not replace it as opposed to an Apple watch or, or, or something that is built to last two years, three years at most.
And then it's, you know, you can't even literally use the Apple watch after four years because they're not supporting its software and it's just a piece of junk in your, in your drawer.
I think that, you know, and that kind of mentality actually is something good that we should be promoting for the middle class.
It was kind of like what I was saying.
Buy a $500 pair of shoes that you're going to resole and own for 15 years.
That's reasonable.
You'll wear them out at some point, but you'll actually have worn them out and not just toss them because they're made out of faux leather and they look like crap after three months.
And there's this kind of like other aspect to it, which I think is also kind of melodramatic I think it's actually very...
It's a good thing.
It's deep.
It's a good kind of frivolous kind of thing.
But there's this other aspect to it of almost the cargo cult of the really wealthy Arab chic or massively indebted new money China where they buy gold Rolex with gummy bear jewels and encrusted diamonds.
And it's almost this.
Like, you're almost, like, taking it.
You're ruining it.
Because, you know, the idea is that you can pass something on or you can wear kind of your watch or you can have a collection for, you know, 50 years.
And they're almost taking it, the cargo culting it of, like, saying, you know, I own this, therefore I am.
As opposed to saying, like, I'm going to treat this as a symbol of who I am.
And, you know, there is a kind of, I don't know, you could say dark side.
Yeah, that's true.
But I think overall, I would strongly say that there's a kind of morality to the luxury sphere that is actually quite positive and that I would endorse for people.
and I think they should aspire to be a part of it in the right way.
Yeah, well...
Sorry, yeah.
I was going to say, the prudence to actually purchase a pair of shoes that's going to last you 15 years and spend a bit more does play into cultivating a certain kind of virtue that you do find in higher quality menswear that you don't find if you're just trying to be frugal in the moment all the time.
It does cultivate a certain attitude that you're not going to get if you don't try to pursue an end like that.
And it's why you look at a lot of menswear guides and magazines.
In between talking about the clothes and the fittings, there's also a lot about, you know, gentleman manners and virtues and how to talk to each other.
Like, these two things go hand in hand for a reason.
And I just quote from the Chap Manifesto, a call to charms.
For too long, we have been the playthings of massive corporations whose sole aim is to convert our world into a gancho in shopping mall.
Pleasantry and civility are being discarded as the worthless ephemera of a bygone age, an age when men doffed their hats at ladies and children could be counted on to minor Jack Russell while he took a mild and bitter in the pub.
The twinkly-eyed tobacconist, the ruddy-cheeked pub landlord and the bewhiskered tea shop lady are being trampled under the blandness of the drive-through hamburger chains.
Customers are herded now to such places when the alarming similarity to the way in which the cattle used to produce the burgers are herded into the slaughterhouse.
I'm going to order that book.
I think that's fun.
I think we might even need to write a little bit on this subject.
I think it's quite good.
The other thing that I've learned from this podcast is that I think we should have a dress code.
So for many of my Sunday shows, I hope you've noticed, Ed, I have worn a casual blazer just to wear it.
I don't need to.
We're going to go out and have fun with the kids later on this afternoon, dress down a bit.
Still have a collar.
But yeah, I think we should have a dress code.
We take this seriously.
take ourselves seriously.
Have you got one of those ties that cowboys have where it's a kind of jewel here with strings sticking out of them?
See, a bowler tie.
I like that stuff.
I mean, Tyler is in Western Canada where there's really the same culture as in Montana.
I would say in Montana, the style is almost...
There is some remnants of the Western style, but then it's almost now more like the Patagonia style where you're wearing like...
It looks like you're about to go on an arctic hike or something, but you're not.
You're just going to the store.
That's almost replaced wearing the belt buckle or the bowler or the western coat.
It's hard to even find those items now, even though, yeah, they're a bit kitschy, but I actually kind of like them.
When it's done well...
It's done well.
What was chappish about Western Canada when I was there was the images of Her Majesty in public places.
