Not so Claudio Del Vecchio. Last Thursday night while Donatella showed off her latest razzle-dazzle creations to Rod Stewart and Elle Macpherson at a party in London’s Sloane Street, Del Vecchio was hosting a rival bash in Regent Street showcasing a very different look.
Del Vecchio is bringing an icon of American retailing to London. Brooks Brothers — the preppy New York-founded chain that formally opens the mahogany and brass doors of its first 11,000 sq ft British flagship store this week — is as much a part of the fabric of America as baseball, Cadillacs and apple pie.
The oldest American retailer has dressed American presidents, including Abraham Lincoln, John F Kennedy and Bill Clinton, business leaders, notably Bill Gates, sportsmen and actors, including Brad Pitt, Katharine Hepburn, Will Smith and Nicolas Cage. Now Del Vecchio wants Britons to wear the American dream.
“Europe is wide open and Britain is a major priority,” he said as he sipped champagne on his opening night. “We think our modern American tailoring and Ivy League school style will be very successful.
“There is a more traditional, classical attitude to style in Britain than in other European countries and we fit in with that.”
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The London store, which sells the firm’s full range of men’s, women’s and boys’ formalwear, leisurewear and accessories, follows the launch of a small men’s boutique in the City of London last year. It is the first step in a £25m investment programme that will see a dozen shops open here in the next five years.
After Regent Street, Brooks will open large branches in Manchester, Glasgow, Edinburgh, Liverpool, Leeds and Cardiff and smaller boutiques in Cambridge, Oxford, Kingston, Guildford, Plymouth, Southampton and the new Heathrow Terminal 5. Sales in Britain are expected to reach £20m by 2010.
The UK expansion — a joint venture between Del Vecchio’s privately held Retail Brand Alliance and UK-based Brightark, an investment operation owned by Ian Livingstone, property entrepreneur and founder of David Clulow opticians — will put Brooks in direct competition with Europe’s closest equivalent retailer, Marks & Spencer.
It is a rich irony. It was Marks & Spencer that sold Brooks Brothers to Del Vecchio after its attempts to revive the brand in America failed and it abandoned plans of its own to start up in Britain.
M&S bought the company 18 years ago for $750m (£400m) and steered it away from its roots in gentlemen’s tailoring and sportswear.
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Sir Rick Greenbury, the boss of M&S at that time, believed that the traditional Brooks Brothers customer was a dying breed and decided to try to capture a more youthful audience by repositioning the firm as a more upmarket version of the American “casual chic” chain Banana Republic.
But Brooks Brothers’ core customers drifted away and the firm failed to lure the younger market.
“They killed their base without picking up a new one,” said Del Vecchio, scarcely able to disguise his glee at the mistakes that enabled him to pick up the firm for a bargain-basement price of $225m (£120m).
Del Vecchio had a hunch that the old Brook Brothers’ formula would work — provided it was updated. “I’d seen Italians going to New York to Brooks Brothers. I was one of them. I felt very close to the customer and felt they wanted the old Brooks Brothers back,” he said.
So he went through the design archives and changed 95% of the supply base, sourcing only from upmarket firms — Italian manufacturers for suits, Pringle of Scotland for cashmere and Peal & Co of Leicester for footwear.
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Del Vecchio revived Brooks Brothers’ tradition for innovation — the company invented the off-the-peg suit in the 19th century and was the first to make shirts with collars and cuffs attached.
He also scrapped the chain’s glass and chrome shop fittings, taking inspiration instead from the older shops’ traditional gentlemen’s outfitter look.
The back-to-basics strategy worked. From a loss of $3.7m (£2m) in the second half of 2001, sales at the 90 American stores and 70 Japanese outlets have risen sharply to a projected $800m (£427m) this year.
The new UK stores, a Paris flagship which opens next week and new Italian shops will, Del Vecchio predicts, push sales to $1 billion (£535m) by 2008, valuing the company at about $2 billion (£1 billion) — almost 10 times what he bought it for.
“The big question we had when we bought the company was whether the customer was still around. We know now that they were,” Del Vecchio said.
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Selling button-down shirts, blazers and suits for men, and cashmere twin-sets, argyle knits and polo shirts for women may be easy in the America where Wall Street bankers, Desperate Housewives devotees and even hip-hop stars have adopted the preppy look. But in Britain, where consumers equate the preppy look with Chelsea mummies and hooray Henries, it will be a tougher sell.
Del Vecchio — the 49-year-old son of the billionaire boss of eyewear manufacturer Luxottica which manufactures and distributes eyewear for Burberry, Polo, Ralph Lauren, and Ray-Ban and has a £2.65 billion (£1.4 billion) turnover — acknowledges that many British consumers see Brooks Brothers as a stuffy American institution. “Because we are 188 years old they think we are fusty.”
He concedes that its style is “classic” — he dislikes the word preppy — but insists that the firm uses the most modern production techniques and finishes.
“We have a healthy respect for the past but we’re not completely influenced by it.” Suits are laser-cut, cashmere woven super-fine and shoes made from the latest spazzolato Italian leather.
His UK strategy is to become the general outfitter equivalent of Thomas Pink — appealing to customers who want to look stylish, rather than fashionable, and whose budget does not extend to designer labels such as Giorgio Armani or Paul Smith.
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“We appeal to the customer who is not a designer maniac, a fashion victim. We are not on the edge of fashion. We translate the new trends into clothes that are wearable in a comfortable way and will last more than three weeks.”
Brooks Brothers’ economies of scale and its decision to manufacture outside the UK and Italy — unlike many designer labels — enables it to undercut its rivals.
“We offer an incredible value proposition. When you turn over the label to check the price you are pleasantly surprised,” Del Vecchio said.
Hand-made to order shirts start at £110, off-the-peg suits at £595, made-to-measure suits at £800 and “Golden Fleece” suits, made from premium fabrics, at £1,000 — several hundred pounds less than the likes of Zegna or Canali.
What’s more, Del Vecchio insists that the Brooks Brothers’ shirts and suits are better quality.
“When customers try our shirts they will take all their old shirts and throw them away. Our basic suit is better than a Canali at a better price. It is made with much more flexibility of fabric than Canali, which is more machine-made.
“Zegna makes some beautiful products but, if you look at value for money, we are certainly competitive with Zegna.”
You can almost hear Ermenegildo Zegna and the Canali brothers groaning in their design studios in Milan but Del Vecchio is unmoved.
“It’s taken 188 years and one crazy Italian to get Brooks Brothers to London, but now we are here we are going to stay — whatever anyone says.
“This is the beginning of another 187 years of history.”
Off-the-rack outfitter to the stars
RETAILER Brooks Brothers is an American icon. Since Henry Sands Brooks opened the first store on the lower Manhattan waterfront in 1818, the ready-to-wear fashion emporium has dressed presidents from Abraham Lincoln to Franklin D Roosevelt, and John F Kennedy to Bill Clinton. Generations of Vanderbilts, Rockefellers and Astors shopped there.
Actors Cary Grant, Clark Gable, Katharine Hepburn and Fred Astaire loved the tailoring, while European gentlemen including the Duke of Windsor and Gianni Agnelli, boss of Fiat, sported the shirts and dressing gowns.
Current fans of the company — its original mission statement was to be ‘an innovator, not a conservator’ — include hip-hop star Queen Latifah and Desperate Housewife Bree Van der Kamp (actress Marcia Cross), who lives in Brooks Brothers twin-sets in the hit television show.
Brooks Brothers, known in crime fiction, movies and TV as the apparel of choice for FBI agents, has been credited with inventing everything from seersucker (in 1830) and the ready-made suit (1845), to the button-down polo collar shirt (1896), the repp tie (1920), the first shirts with collar and cuffs attached (1895) and argyle socks (1949).
Many of its classic lines are based on traditional English clothing, including its ties, which boast British regimental and club designs. The logo for the premium Golden Fleece range — a sheep suspended in ribbon — has long been the symbol of British wool merchants.
Its best-known product is known, somewhat inauspiciously, as ‘the sack’ — an American suit with unpadded shoulders, a soft construction, a jacket with a centre back vent and straight-legged trousers.