Act Your Age, St. John (NYT)

[DosViolines]

I didn't really know where to post it
so if it's in the wrong forum, please move

source: nytimes.com

May 25, 2006
Act Your Age, St. John

The horizontal Angelina Jolie appeared in ads for the reinvented St. John.

By ERIC WILSON
IT is hard to miss the changes at St. John.


For more than 40 years this California label's dedication to luxury knit suits — of a resilient rayon-and-wool blend, which customers speak of in hushed tones of reverence — has made it famous. Well, the suits have, with an assist from an adorably screwy advertising campaign tracing the adventures of Kelly Gray, the daughter of the house's founders, whose international travel in the company of an entourage of subservient men captured the essence of St. John, unaltered by time or trends.

Arlene Herson, a once loyal customer, at home with her much-loved St. John outfits.


Then, like any fashion brand that begins to outlast a generation of customers, St. John started to look old. Last year came stirrings of reinvention. Fusty, boxy St. John — the safe, tasteful choice of powerful women in business and politics — decided it needed a face-lift. And to the label's devotees, it was scandalous.


Arlene Herson, a contributing panelist to National Public Radio, who has St. John suits in her closet dating from the Reagan administration, was looking at the new spring collection last Friday at a Saks Fifth Avenue in Boca Raton, Fla. "I'm not a shopper, I'm a buyer," Ms. Herson said. "I like to go into a store and come out with everything I need in one day. I used to buy four or five things in a row from St. John, and I would be set for the season. Now it's hard to find two things I like, and sometimes it's hard to find even one."


At Saks and at a Nordstrom in the same mall, Ms. Herson, 65, found few of the St. John knits that make up more than half her wardrobe. But there were plenty of woven wool trousers and designs she considered garish. She said a saleswoman told her St. John was going for a younger customer.


"These are not young-looking clothes," Ms. Herson said. "These are ugly clothes. I hate to be negative, but I want my old St. John back."


Therein lies the conundrum. In the 18 months since St. John began its attempted renaissance in response to declining sales and profits, the company, based in Irvine, has alienated a good number of its most loyal customers. Belatedly, it has altered course, parting ways with the chief executive who tried to modernize it. Change may eventually come to St. John, but it will be much slower than originally planned, offering a sobering lesson for the fashion industry because so many storied labels are trying to reinvent themselves.


The man hired in 2004 to turn this battleship was Richard Cohen, a veteran of the Italian men's wear firm Ermenegildo Zegna. In quick succession the Gray family — Bob, the founder; his wife, Marie, the designer; and their daughter, Kelly, the creative director — left or were nudged out of the company, which has nearly $400 million in annual sales. Mr. Cohen met with high-profile New York designers about taking over the label, including Vera Wang and Peter Som. He moved St. John fashion shows from provincial Irvine to the higher-pulsed Los Angeles Fashion Week.


And in the most visible change of all, he replaced Kelly Gray in the ads, which for a generation of customers had become as familiar a delusion as an afternoon with a Jayne Ann Krentz novel: there was Kelly at a masked ball flanked by two men; Kelly in South Beach flanked by four men; Kelly in the desert with Loretta Lynn curls in the arms of Olivier Martinez. Sigh.


For the fall 2005 season, the new St. John ads featured the Brazilian model Gisele Bundchen on a Hollywood movie set surrounded by gladiators. And beginning with the spring collection, the company signed a three-year contract with the actress Angelina Jolie, reportedly for $12 million plus incentives tied to sales, some of that planned for a children's charity.


St. John's core customers might hardly have blinked at the retirement of the Grays and the new ads — what's the difference between an imaginary man-eater and a humanitarian man-eater? — had Mr. Cohen not also adjusted the fit and styling of the clothes to bring them more in line with the narrow cuts of European labels like Gucci and Prada. For St. John loyalists, the appeal of Marie Gray's designs was their forgiving construction, their attention to detail and their consistent quality, which justified a high price: $1,200 or more for a St. John suit has been common since the 1980's.


The devotion of customers was cultlike, spurring St. John to become the single largest supplier of women's fine apparel to Neiman Marcus and Saks Fifth Avenue and the most profitable for both department stores. But its recent floundering has caused a serious erosion of sales, executives at those stores said, and now St. John has slipped behind Armani as the No. 1 brand at Saks.


"All the pants used to have elastic waists," Ms. Herson said. "Now they have gabardine pants that are tight fitting. So, no Charlie, I'm not going to buy those pants."


Beginning in April, company board members acknowledged that some changes were mistakes. Mr. Cohen left the company. Marie Gray, a former model on "Queen for a Day," who was a founder of St. John in 1962 and remains on the board, complained to Women's Wear Daily that Mr. Cohen had eliminated 200 jobs at St. John, which employed nearly 4,000 people and produces most of its knits in factories around Irvine, and that the new collections were "too forced."


"How do I view his tenure?" she said. "Brief."


There is little doubt that the executives, designers and image makers at St. John recognize that it must adjust to attract a new generation. "There is only one issue that applies to any fashion company more than 25 years old, and that is that no daughter buys her mother's label — and that statement says a lot," said Gloria Gelfand, an industry consultant. "The only exception is Chanel."


Some day young fashionistas may consider St. John a hot commodity, rather than a designer parody. But the problem with a brand of St. John's size and importance to department stores is what happens between its past and a brighter hipper future — which is to say, now.


Philip Miller, a former chief executive of Saks Fifth Avenue, who was named interim chief executive of St. John in April, said on Monday that the company had addressed some of the fit and style problems with the spring collection. St. John will reduce its assortment of contemporary designs — those targeting the younger customer — to about 10 to 15 percent of its collection, Mr. Miller said. He would only say that sales in the last year were "slightly off" from those disclosed for 2004, when profits of $13.4 million were reported on sales of $396 million. Profits had steadily declined since 2001, after a financial turnaround at St. John in the late 90's, the result of a cash infusion from a private equity company, Vestar Capital Partners, which is now the majority owner.


"Our core customer is the area we need to, and now do, spend most of our attention addressing," Mr. Miller said. "We created some confusion with the new product and the different fit and fabrications."


Jennifer Wheeler, the vice president for designer apparel of the 99-store Nordstrom chain, which is the largest client of St. John in the United States and has carried the collection for 33 years, said the last two seasons have been challenging for devoted customers. But she said she was pleased with the steps St. John has taken to slow down change. "What we're looking for from St. John is for the collection to be re-energized, but not reinvented," Ms. Wheeler said. "We'd like the collection to stay a little more classic but infused with fashion that is distinctly St. John."


And that is what St. John intends to provide, said Mr. Miller, who is also a board member. He said the company is unlikely to name a famous outside designer to head its collection, a plan pursued unsuccessfully by Mr. Cohen, which put St. John in an embarrassing position when Mr. Som and Ms. Wang both rebuffed the overtures.


"We're not talking to anybody now, and we don't intend to," Mr. Miller said. A team of in-house designers, led by Tim Gardner, a former assistant at Calvin Klein, will continue to design in the classic spirit of St. John, he said. The reinvention that was heralded by Ms. Jolie, who has input into the looks she wears in St. John ads, will be mostly confined to the ads. On that point Mr. Gardner described his approach as refreshing the line.


Younger readers who happen upon one of these sultry, black-and-white spreads in Vogue, with Ms. Jolie lounging on a black couch in a black knit dress or reclining all in black on a pool chaise or lying in bed in a black lace-trimmed slip — for some reason, Ms. Jolie's version of the St. John woman is mostly expressed horizontally — may be intrigued by the sexy styles. But should they walk into a store, that is a different story.


At Saks Fifth Avenue in Manhattan this week, St. John's prime floor space was devoted to a pale blue tracksuit with rainbow stitching and denim gauchos. A version of the black dress worn by Ms. Jolie was tucked away in a corner.


A more truthful advertisement might show the actress fending off paparazzi in Namibia, where she has been expecting the birth of her child with Brad Pitt, wearing a $525 St. John zip-up jacket with a mosaic pattern in pastel purple, turquoise and yellow.


But where's the fantasy in that?

 

[Meg]

moved

 

[Andro]

I always respected St. John in terms of design and tailoring, right up there with Maxmara and Armani.

but I agree, St. John has lost a bit of it's luster and commercial appeal in past couple of years. Especially the adverstising, where something defintely had to change there.

Instead of the refined, brilliant, confident woman with elegance. St. John's customer started to look more like an aging woman in her mid-50's, trying to be sexy and hip like her grandaughter.

I think in order for this grandaughter to be a St. John clientele, there must be a reienvention. But it doesn't have to be so drastically different, like say John Galliano for Dior. But there must be a certain level of rawness and edginess invoked to broaden its' 50 year old average clientele.

 

[ebonbird]

Instead of the refined, brilliant, confident woman with elegance. St. John's customer started to look more like an aging woman in her mid-50's, trying to be sexy and hip like her grandaughter.

Whoah! You so pegged the problem. It does not celebrate the beauty of its core clientele. I used to look forward to getting old enough to rock Saint John.