Maggie Bullock - The Kingdom of Prep

THE KINGDOM OF PREP . Copyright 2023 by Margarette Bullock. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.

Art direction by Mumtaz Mustafa

Cover design by Alex Merto

Fabric texture m.jrn/shutterstock

FIRST EDITION

Digital Edition MARCH 2023 ISBN: 978-0-06-304266-7

Version 02162023

Print ISBN: 978-0-06-304264-3

For my boys, Nick, Finn, and Maxalways

O n May 4, 2020, six weeks into the first global pandemic in a century, J.Crew filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection. Within hours, true believers came out of the woodwork. On digital platforms that could not have been fathomed back when the company printed its first catalogue in 1983, tributes piled up. They read like sympathy cards to an old friend.

My email is literally lovesjcrew. Were pulling for you.

Weve been best friends for a long time now and I refuse to break up.

Forever a J.Crew girl.

What was it about J.Crew? I had been pondering this question since 2019, when Vanity Fair assigned me the task of figuring out why the golden brand of the Obama era had been reduced to rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic, as the Washington Post had recently put it. The pandemic shutdown was not the cause of J.Crews problemsmore like a final straw. The company had suffered extensive preexisting conditions for years: Crushing debt. A spin cycle of failed execs. Irate customers decrying problems of quality, fit, pricing. Lackluster clothes. And a major identity crisis. How could this happen to a company people once loved?

This was the right assignment for me, for a few reasons. Id spent my career covering beauty, fashion, and culture, mostly as an editor at Elle and Vogue. And for most of that time, I kept a J.Crew shopping cart bookmarked on my laptop, ready to press Buy Now whenever the right sale code struck. Not everyone is susceptible to the magic J.Crew once embodied: the delicate brine of a clambake wafting in the air; the particular romance of a misty morning at a rustic lakehouse. Lots of people see no particular allure in a rumpled chambray shirt, or the well-trod clich of a bateau stripe. I happen to be the kind of person who is susceptible.

But by the time Vanity Fair came calling, I was also like any other customer, occasionally buying summer sandals at 60 percent off in what appeared to be a never-ending fire sale, wondering what the hell had gone wrong with the company that once handily provided the basic building blocks of my wardrobe. Walking into any J.Crew store at that point was confusing. The brand that once arguably had the most clear-cut identity and aesthetic in mass retail seemed to have no discernible identity at all. The clothes were an uninspired mishmash of trends in noticeably subpar fabrics. Even the racks themselves seemed somehow dejected. Was I imagining it, or was that heart-printed frock a little slumped on its hanger, as if it, too, was depressed by this recent state of affairs?

Why couldnt J.Crew get it together? Was it simply another casualty of the retail apocalypse that had been steamrolling once-great American brands for years, leaving tumbleweeds bumbling down the corridors of American malls? Or was this condition more specific to J.Crew?

What I found were two things: Yes, of course it was the retail apocalypse. J.Crew is, in fact, an almost perfect microcosm of how shopping itself has evolved over the past forty yearsand how we as consumers have evolved, too. Its story, as youll soon see, connects the dots from the catalogue boom of the 80s to the specialty retail bonanza of the 90s, through the birth of online shopping, and into an era in which we shop from phones that never leave our handstracing our longing, and our consumption, from a time when it was a small thrill to drop an order form in the mail and wait for that rollneck sweater to arrive on the doorstep, all the way up to the impatient present, when a sweater ordered Monday morning with a single swipe of the finger could be drone-dropped into our hands by Tuesday afternoon. All the forces that have been working against the brands that once dressed Americathe rise of new technologies, the often-disastrous interventions of venture capitalhave been working hard against J.Crew, too.

But perhaps I should say... yes, and. As I began to peel back the 100 percent cotton layers of J.Crew, I discovered that it was a story of not one but two cults of personality. Everybody knows about one of these: Mickey and Jenna. As in Mickey Drexler, the merchant princethe most famous clothing retail exec of the past fifty years, the man who helmed the monstrous rise of Gap in the 80s, birthed Old Navy in the 90s, and reinvented J.Crew as the great American mass retailing success of the aughts. As in Jenna Lyons, the one-of-a-kind fashion starthe woman who spent her career toiling in obscurity at one catalogue brand, yet somehow became a bona fide celebrity. He was the P. T. Barnum of retail; she was the walking fashion illustration in a Schiaparelli-pink evening skirt and a jean jacket, standing on the steps of the Met Galathe J in her own J.Crew. Together they built a J.Crew where any mall-going American with sufficient disposable income could purchase a sequin-studded cardigan worthy of a First Lady.

But almost nobody outside of J.Crews inner circle remembers the other pairingalso of an older male business eye and a younger female creativethat built the brand that Mickey and Jenna revived: J.Crews father-daughter founders, Arthur Cinader and Emily Cinader (now Emily Scott). Here was a duo just as fascinatingas specificas that of Mickey and Jenna. Arthur erected the business of J.Crew and agonized over every comma in its catalogue copy. Emily, as gorgeous as the models in her own pages, honed a uniform of East Coast minimalismprep, minus the schlockin images that sold us not just sweaters but membership to the world those sweaters beckoned to.

So, what was it about J.Crew? Two wildly differentyet oddly parallelduos molded a brand that embodied at least two zeitgeists: First, as the understated, feel-good catalogue of the 80s and 90s; and again, as the exuberant, rule-breaking Obama house brand of the 2000s and 2010s. Each of these duos would lead J.Crew to a golden period. Each would lead J.Crew to crash and burn, too.

For all of the prepandemic chaos evident within the walls of J.Crew, I could understand why people still loved this brand. I had loved it, too, for ages. Ever since boarding school.

I know what youre thinking: