IF contestants on ”Family Feud” were asked to name the favorite fall activity for men, few would rank shopping for clothes ahead of watching football, checking out the new cars or maybe even raking leaves. But as more men begin to follow fashion, retailers are moving to exploit that growing interest.
The sales pitch in peddling menswear for fall 1996, especially for higher-priced apparel at specialty retail outlets, is decidedly flip and hip. There are equal measures of humor, to put men at ease with what many still consider an anxious experience, and humidors, to capitalize on the craze for cigars.
”The idea used to be that a guy got to have fun only after he took his suit off,” said Simon Doonan, senior vice president for creative services at Barneys New York. A campaign created by his in-house department, which celebrates the stylishness of dressing up, carries a theme, ”Rule your rat pack,” that is both tongue-in-cheek and retro-chic.
The goal of most of this advertising is to generate that ineffable quality known as cool. For instance, a campaign for what Saks Fifth Avenue describes as men’s advanced designer clothing — labels like Dolce & Gabbana and Romeo Gigli — is centered on two stars who ”just look cool to us,” said Sheri Wilson-Gray, senior vice president for marketing at the Saks unit of Investcorp in New York. One is the actor and singer Donovan Leitch and the other is the actor David Arquette.
Though both are 20-something, being cool is ”not so much an age as a mentality,” Ms. Wilson-Gray said. That may be because few men that age can afford Prada boots ($610) or a Dries van Noten T-shirt ($160).
Perhaps the most ambitious effort of the fall is a campaign to promote the men’s store in midtown Manhattan that Bergdorf Goodman opened in 1990 to sell premium-priced apparel by the likes of Oxxford and Turnbull & Asser. Though the store has been profitable ”for the better part of two years,” said Stephen C. Elkin, chairman and chief executive at the Bergdorf unit of the Neiman Marcus Group in New York, ”there seems to be a perception that it has not done well.”
Indeed, he added, in focus-group interviews, men would often say ”they have no knowledge we have a separate men’s store.” He said, ”I suspect that was because we didn’t have a comfort level that we had figured it out.” An early derisive nickname for the store, ”Ira’s folly,” after Ira Neimark, former chairman and chief executive at Bergdorf, is still heard.
