DRESSING UP AGAIN

Americans get a taste for English shirts

By Rodger Brown

To most men, a shirt is a shirt. Unless, of course, it’s an “English shirt,” in which case it’s a history lesson.

With the growing popularity of fashionable, high-end retailers like Thomas Pink and Charles Tyrwhitt — both of which have parlayed addresses on London’s famous Jermyn Street into booming businesses based on peddling proper English shirts — increasing numbers of men are being schooled in a tradition that has its origins in the faded glories of the British Empire.

Lesson 1: Jermyn Street [n.], pronounced “GER-min Street” — A location in London named for Henry Jermyn, Earl of St. Albans, who received a grant in 1664 to develop a site that once was home to a hospital “for the care of leprous sisters,” but which today is known for being the location of traditional English shirtmakers.

Thomas Pink has opened stores across the U.S. in such cities as Boston, Chicago and San Francisco since opening its first store on Madison Avenue in 1997 and spearheading this latest British fashion invasion. Charles Tyrwhitt, meanwhile, has leveraged its Jermyn Street cachet to become the largest purveyor of English shirts through mail order and over the Web. When it opened its first U.S. store in Manhattan in 2002, the event inspired headline writers to declare excitedly, “Jermyn Street Coming to Manhattan.” (In November, Tyrwhitt opened its second store in New York City just eight blocks from a Thomas Pink location.)

There is an obvious market for these shirts that cost from $100 to $500 each, but what is it, exactly, that makes a shirt an English shirt (sometimes also just called a Jermyn shirt)?

“The main thing that used to distinguish them was all the nicest cottons going back donkey’s years from when Britain ruled half the world, or three quarters of it,” said Thomas Mahon, a “bespoke tailor,” shirtmaker and keeper of the blog EnglishCut.com.

Today, however, with fabrics like Egyptian cotton available to any manufacturer with a checkbook, not just those with keys to the exchequer, so to speak, the distinguishing characteristics of the English shirt are found in the details.

“When you compare an English shirt, or a Jermyn Street shirt, to your average High Street shirt, they’re a lot less skimpy,” Mahon said. “It’s very rare you’ll find a pocket on an English shirt, and the classic shirt has a double cuff. All of the seams should be single needle, all the seams are raised, and details like the yoke — the back panel behind the collar — are made out of four pieces, whereas your ready-to-wear shirts sometimes don’t even have a yoke at all.

“So, there are certain cuts in an English shirt that give it a look and feel; helps get the shape of the shoulders, rather than being just a cotton sack.”

Lesson 2: High Street [adj.] — A generic term to describe any retail strip that caters to the general public, dating back more than 1,000 years as a reference to the main thoroughfare in any town. Used in contrast to more elite, notable addresses such as Jermyn Street or Savile Row.

The irony, of course, is one that is commonplace in today’s globalized manufacturing environment: Although a very few traditional shirtmakers continue to make shirts by hand in the U.K., almost all the shirts sold as Jermyn Street shirts are, in fact, made somewhere far beyond the British Isles.

“The weird thing is that Thomas Pink, Charles Tyrwhitt, all of them, they’re all made outside of the U.K. now, which is a bit of a reality, I suppose,” said Mahon.

“People say, ‘Well, it’s a Jermyn street store and it must be good’ — and they are — but where is it actually made? They get disappointed when they find out it’s actually made in Peru, unlike a bespoke shirt or bespoke suit.”

Lesson 3: Bespoke [adj.], pronounced “b’-SPOKE” — Dating from the 1600s, “bespoke” came to describe total, custom, handmade tailoring, derived from the practice of tailors setting aside fabric for individual customers, said to have “been spoken for.” Not to be confused with “custom-fit” or “made to measure,” which involve merely adapting a pattern template.

Despite the aura of heritage, wood-paneled libraries and colonial elegance that a customer buys along with a Jermyn Street label, both Thomas Pink and Charles Tyrwhitt are relative newcomers to the English shirtmaking tradition that has existed for over 200 years. Pink was founded in 1984 by three Irish brothers who first operated out of a store in London’s Chelsea district before managing to secure a storefront on Jermyn Street and become the most successful at translating its location into a brand proposition. Today, in what is probably the cruelest irony for traditionalists, Pink is wholly owned by French luxury conglomerate LVMH Mo‘t Hennessy Louis Vuitton.

Pink is the largest English shirt company building a global retail business on its Jermyn Street address (with 21 stores in the U.K., 15 in the U.S., two in Paris and one each in Shanghai and Bangkok at the end of 2005). Tyrwhitt has pulled off the same act, only beginning as a mail-order business before pushing a retail strategy.

Currently, Tyrwhitt has annual sales around $95 million, and plans to increase that to $200 million in four years, with growth in an expanded collection of products and an increased retail presence. When the company opened its second U.S. store, Tyrwhitt’s group managing director, Ashley Potter, told Fairchild Publications’ Daily News Record that though 85 percent of its current business is done over the Web and through mail order, “We plan, over the next four years, to make retail 35 percent of our business primarily by developing new men’s categories.”

Although Tyrwhitt also boasts a Jermyn Street address, which, the company notes in its advertising, is “home of the English shirt,” it hasn’t been there long.

The company was founded by Nicholas Charles Tyrwhitt Wheeler in 1986 and initially run out of his bedroom while he was a student at Bristol University. Wheeler chose his two middle names for his fledgling enterprise because “Charles Tyrwhitt” was more “posh” than “Nick Wheeler shirts,” he told The New York Times. He found a Jermyn Street address for the company to add cachet to his mail-order business and last year added veterans from such companies as Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren and Gieves & Hawkes, a prominent bespoke tailor on Savile Row. (Savile Row is to suit-making what Jermyn Street is to shirts.)

Whatever their pedigree, both Pink and Tyrwhitt are benefiting from a convergence of trends and tastes that have once again made heritage hot at the haberdashery. “Timing is everything,” said Marshall Cohen, chief analyst at the Port Washington, N.Y.-based NPD Group, “and this is one of those times when the market has really come to the right place” for men’s apparel companies like Pink and Tyrwhitt.

Leaving behind the anything-goes chaos of the dot-com boom days, and moving beyond the khaki-and-golf-shirt casual Fridays, men are starting to place a premium on dressing up, Cohen says. “Even though the baby boomer grew up in the hippie generation with torn jeans and workshirts and all that, they understood — and understand now, in their quest for eternal youth — the need to separate themselves from the rest of the pack.”

To that end, older men have again embraced fashion as a way to compete in the workplace. A surprising new trend, however, is that younger men have also begun investing in traditional fashion. “The fastest-growing segment in all of apparel is young men buying suits,” Cohen said. “While the boomer is out there dressing for success, the younger generation is out there dressing to impress.”

U.S. sales of men’s tailored clothing grew by 8 percent last year, versus 3 percent for the overall apparel market. So for the first time in a long while, sales of men’s clothes — especially of dressier duds — are outpacing all other apparel sales.

Combined, the trend is driving significant business to the upper-end brands such as Pink and Tyrwhitt. The market for shirts and ties is especially active, because, though many men will buy one or two suits, they are able to extend their wardrobe by purchasing a wider variety of shirts and accessories. “That’s a more affordable way for him to really build on his wardrobe,” Cohen said, “which is a traditional way that a guy does it.”

Mahon says he, too, has seen the trend toward younger customers in his business making bespoke suits. “I’ve got kids 24, 25 years old coming to order suits, which is new,” he said. “A bit of a revelation for me, really.”

In the end, the sale is closed by the appeal of the Britishness of such companies as Pink and Tyrwhitt, whether enhanced by marketing and branding tactics or not.

“It makes them feel comfortable when they know that they’re going to a place that was born in the tradition of dressing better,” said Cohen.

Some things never change, Cohen says. “The American guy still wants to be like James Bond.”