During the ’80s and early ’90s, J.Crew was more than just a clothing mail-order business.
Their catalogs embodied “the delicate brine of a clambake wafting in the air; the particular romance of a misty morning at a rustic lakehouse,” writes Maggie Bullock, author ofIn other words, they offered a fantasy, something that customers weren’t getting from conventional retail.
By the early ’80s, owners Arthur Cinader and daughter Emily Cinader decided to reinvent the business as a catalog-only retailer, to stay competitive in a market where catalogs increasingly looked like the future. They settled on J. Crew, an amalgam of the initial J — borrowed from J. Press, the storied Ivy League clothier— and crew, the rowing sport.
“Emily associated the P-word with all of the cutesy stuff that came along after Miles Davis–era cool,” Bullock writes. “Under her auspices, anything deemed ‘too Connecticut’ was axed.”Tierney Horne, J.Crew’s creative director during the ’80s, recoiled at the idea that their clothes were preppy. “We were cool,” she told Bullock. “PreppyWhat was cool, at least according to Emily and her art team, was creating a clothing catalog that didn’t feel forced or inauthentic.One former J.
He once described sweaters as having “great strains of crumhorn, hautbois, and sackbut.” Nobody on the J. Crew writing staff “had the first clue what a hautbois was,” Bullock writes. When they finally learned that it was an obscure Renaissance-era instrument, “we all thought it the funniest thing we had ever read,” a former catalog editor told Bullock.Cinader was, in many ways, the original J. Peterman — who didn’t introduce his first catalog until 1987.
“What was up with Mark and Bob, who seemed to gallivant off with a different girl in every issue?” Bullock writes. During much of the ‘80s, the mail order industry has grown by at least 12% every year. By 1988, it hit 12.5 billion catalogs a year, or fifty catalogs for every man, woman, and child. But in the coming years, sales would begin to slow, barely hitting a 1% annual increase, and demand for catalogs — not just from J.Crew, but mail-order catalogs in general — began to wane.
But almost instantly, they were a huge hit. “After work, a surge of suits from nearby Wall Street swept over the area like a human wave,” Bullock writes.
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