The American retailer is hoping for a comeback after declaring bankruptcy in 2020, after forty years of operation.
Wearing a chambray shirt and jeans with a Shetland wool cardigan on top, Brendon Babenzien, the creative director of J. Crew menswear, was attired for work on a sunny October morning twenty-two stories above the palm tree-studded court of the Brookfield Place mall in Battery Park City.
This tea cozy-style garment, adorned with rows of pastel pink roses, blue daisies, and purple irises, would have been a perfect fit on Mrs. Doubtfire. It read as intended on a founding father of the streetwear movement in fashion, who, it should be noted, created the sweater for his own label, Noah, rather than for his day job at J. Crew:
This was an item of clothing that, in many respects, retailer Arthur Cinader could never have predicted when he started J. Crew in 1983. Mr. Cinader named his mail order company after an Ivy League sport at the start of the preppy era, slapping the initial “J” in front to create the appearance of provenance.
The preppy look that Mr. Cinader intended to mass-market has been accepted and rejected, defined and redefined so many times in the forty years that have passed that a Nirvana T-shirt appears to have entered the Gen Z perception of “how preppies dress.” Alongside it, what defines “American style” and the whims of the American consumer have fluctuated, and the business Mr. Cinader founded has worked hard, sometimes to great effect.
J. Crew developed into the American brand with a genuine history that it initially pretended to be. Ah, heritage. The company would prefer to forget some aspects of its past, such as the protracted creative slump of the late 2010s, when its quality declined and debt grew; the resignation of president and creative director Jenna Lyons in 2017 and the subsequent identity crisis; and the near-death experience that followed when J. Crew became the first significant American retailer to file for bankruptcy during the Covid-19 pandemic.
Many believed that J. Crew would be forced into bankruptcy in 2020. As it happened, it was a Hail Mary. Anchorage Capital and other investors assisted the company in managing a crippling $1.6 billion debt and provided a $400 million line of credit to finance a restoration effort. The company turned over control of its affairs to its creditors. Libby Wadle, a longtime Madewell and J. Crew veteran, took over as its revolving-door chief executive six months after the company filed for bankruptcy.
Ms. Wadle, fifty, sat on a couch in her corner office nearly three years after her appointment, recalling “the most uncertain and tumultuous” retail period she had ever seen.
But with the support of two bright new hires, Ms. Wadle has stopped any obvious bleeding: Mr. Babenzien, the former leader of Supreme, the skate shop turned fashion powerhouse, and designer Olympia Gayot, who returned to J. Crew in 2017 to oversee women’s and children’s design.
Judging her recuperation efforts is difficult because J. Crew is privately held and does not make much financial information public. During our interview, Ms. Wadle exclaimed, “I love being private!”
However, encouraging indicators exist. The average order value, or A.O.V., which measures how much customers spend in a single transaction, has increased, according to the company.
Aside from the occasional snarky moment, everything is pretty cheerful at HQ. Even so, no one is really using the term “comeback.” According to Ms. Wadle, J. Crew “owned” up to 90% of the clothing of its main clientele back in the day. J. Crew had 285 locations at its peak in 2015; as of right now, it only has 119. It makes sense that Ms. Wadle wants to change the objectives. She remarked, “I’m not trying to do much that goes back to what we once were.”
In an era where the mall brand itself is somewhat of a heritage concept, asking any establishment retailer to put the genie back in the bottle seems like wishful thinking. Victoria’s Secret, Ann Taylor, and Abercrombie & Fitch are all rushing through different phases of crisis and efforts.
The new team appears to be hoping to achieve something similar by tempering previous excesses and lovingly adjusting the current codes rather than by shattering the mold. Of course, it took some trial and error and time to truly nail Ms. Lyons’s look—which in retrospect seemed to happen overnight. J. Crew has now recovered from its severe setback. Will it, though, be “back”?
In an Instagram post made the day after the company’s 40th anniversary celebration this past September, Ms. Lyons appeared to address this query, if unintentionally: “I’m rooting for you, J. Crew.”
