When Brooks Brothers was first founded in 1818, the venue for this 200th-anniversary show, the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence, already had a history dating back 619 years. Longevity is relative. Yet Brooks Brothers, surely the oldest continuously operating maker of menswear in the U.S., certainly merits its deeply enmeshed place in the fabric of American history. When Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, it was in a Brooks Brothers overcoat. And when JFK was assassinated, he was wearing a Brooks Brothers shirt. More cheerily, this company created the button-down oxford and claims to have popularized the blazer (at least in the U.S.), to have invented the polo shirt, and to have introduced ready-to-wear on American soil.
So why celebrate the anniversary at Pitti instead of New York? Probably because the current owner, Claudio del Vecchio, is from around these parts—although, there are plans afoot for further celebrations that will continue through the year. As a party-starter, this show proved mixed. The Salone dei Cinquecento is surely one of the most magnificently overblown rooms in the world, and a full orchestra playing “Empire State of Mind,” Muzak-style, only added to the incongruous and fusty grandiosity of a context that was always going to be a struggle for any clothes to complement. Those clothes, when they came, were neither all bad nor especially good. Zac Posen’s womenswear component was on the whole conservatively efficient, with a black notch-lapel executive pantsuit perhaps the purest form of Brooks Brothers’s mass executive function. The menswear was a mutedly expressed walking museum of Brooks Brothers tropes including the tartan, the madras, the polo shirt, and, of course, the suiting.
If it had not been for some truly deranged, done-in-the-dark styling that saw cable-knit sweaters worn over tailored jackets, a raincoat worn inside out, a check jacket over a seersucker suit, cardigans over jackets, and plenty more such unimaginatively disruptive gestures, the men’s component would have been okay, too, but, sadly, these interventions undermined the so-so collection.
Del Vecchio’s predecessors at the helm of this famous firm include the four original Brooks Brothers, sons of the founder Henry. One of their descendants, Winthrop Brooks, was the last in the family to run it, in the 1940s, and during that time came up with a line that rather finely encapsulates a still very relevant menswear dialectic. This is how he put it: “Let me say here a word about conservatism. It does not mean a stubborn refusal to discard what is old and outworn, nor an old fogeyish prejudice against innovations of any kind. It really means a determination to retain what has been tried and proven to be good, and to refrain from the exploitation, simply because it is new, of what is essentially cheap and silly.” Winthrop would not have allowed cheap and silly styling to undermine the anniversary of this magnificently storied company.
