This American Brand Has Made Suits for 199 Years. Now It Wants to Start Over in China

Getting younger, building a womenswear business, and working out the Chinese market — these are the problems Brooks Brothers has to solve.

On March 23, Lin Wenlong said he was dressed far more formally than usual: a full lake-blue suit, a pale yellow tie, and a pocket square in his left breast pocket picking up the color of the tie.

He works for Walton Brown, a subsidiary of the Hong Kong luxury department-store group Lane Crawford Joyce Group, and is managing director of Brooks Brothers (Greater China) Co., Ltd. That day, Brooks Brothers opened a new flagship store at Oriental Plaza East on Beijing's Wangfujing Street.

Walton Brown runs Maison Mode department stores in Chengdu, Changsha, and Urumqi, and Times Outlets malls in Chengdu and Qingdao. It also operates brands including Kate Spade and Juicy Couture in the Chinese market.

Brooks Brothers is a piece of business Walton Brown landed only in January 2016 — though Lin Wenlong says "Brooks Brothers came to us." As with Kate Spade, the arrangement is not a licensing deal: the two sides signed a 20-year contract and set up a joint venture in which each holds 50%.

You may already know Brooks Brothers. For the past ten years, this menswear brand with 199 years of history was licensed in China to another Hong Kong company, Dickson Concepts, which ran more than 90 stores — but pitched at the low-to-mid end, out of step with the brand's image in the U.S.

"My advice on BB: buy it abroad. The Brooks Brothers store here in Beijing doesn't carry BB suits; the shirts and the casual stuff, T-shirts and jackets, are better stocked. You come back to Beijing and see this American clothing brand founded in 1818, the oldest one there is, and Chinese people don't recognize it, it sells for less than Polo, even less than Tommy. Very strange — it's priced like Timberland or Nautica." On May 13, 2012, the forum user "Wangcai Jia De Dizhu" wrote this in a thread titled 《Brooks Brothers 这个牌子咋样》 ("What's Brooks Brothers Like as a Brand?").

The thread, started on April 3, 2012, drew only 149 replies, but it had a long life: the last one came in February 2016, by which point Brooks Brothers had taken its operating rights back from Dickson Concepts and had just begun working with Walton Brown.

Across five years of complaints in that thread, Chinese consumers' view of Brooks Brothers looks bleak. Other gripes: "they sell shirts but not suits"; "buy it in the States, the prices here are daylight robbery"; "there's nothing worth buying in China, too few styles and not enough sizes"; "aimed at working professionals — presentable office wear or casualwear. The prices are fair too, and it's a real bargain on sale."

As "Wangcai Jia De Dizhu" said, plenty of people already know the Brooks Brothers story.

Brooks Brothers was founded in Manhattan in 1818. In matters of style, it is the ancestor of the American Ivy League campus look. Ralph Lauren, who later made his fortune selling Ivy League elite culture to the American middle class, worked early on as a salesman in the Brooks Brothers store on Madison Avenue.

American culture is marked not only by heavy industry's ability to mass-produce and copy, but by its ability to export. The ideas of the "culture industry" and "mechanical reproduction," put forward by the Frankfurt School — known in its day for "critical theory" — were the academy's attempt to think through an America skilled at manufacturing popular culture. Those theories dealt mostly with mass media and entertainment (one famous case was the record industry's effect on classical music) and had not yet reached into the small details of the clothing business. But the power to copy and export was no weaker in this trade built on beauty than it was in entertainment.

Brooks Brothers took part in that shift and watched it happen.

Later arrivals such as Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo gave Japan a fashion style of its own, yet Japanese fashion never cut its ties to America. Over the past 50 years, the Japanese turned their obsession with American clothes into an industry: make a Japanese fashion that imitates America, then sell it back to America. There are two classic cases. One is the faithful reproduction of Levi's jeans, which now has a term of its own, "Japan-made LVC." The other is Ivy League style.

Ametora: How Japan Saved American Style, published in 2015 and tracing how the Japanese learned American fashion, records one detail. In the 1950s, Kensuke Ishizu founded a clothing brand called VAN. Before that, on a trip to America, he had gone to study at Princeton, where he first saw the Ivy League look. The way the students dressed drew him in, and he decided to build his brand's designs on it.

"In 1959, VAN produced Ivy League-style suits, borrowing from the classic suit and coat designs of Brooks Brothers, founded in America in 1818," the book says.

Brooks Brothers likes to claim its place through political leaders. American presidents who have worn the brand include Kennedy, Ford, Clinton, Roosevelt, Nixon, Hoover, and Bush.

The other story it likes to tell involves Abraham Lincoln. When Lincoln was shot in Washington in 1865, he was wearing a Brooks Brothers coat, handmade for him, with an eagle stitched into it and the words "One Country, One Destiny."

Besides its links to politicians, Brooks Brothers has dressed many films and television shows: the entire male cast of Mad Men; Chuck Bass and Nate Archibald in Gossip Girl; George Clooney in Up in the Air; Dev Patel, the lead in Slumdog Millionaire; and Ben Affleck in Pearl Harbor — all wore Brooks Brothers suits.

It once led the market, turning out one item after another that surprised competitors and shoppers alike: Harris Tweed, the lightweight Madras plaid line, argyle socks, and the no-iron shirt.

After that, the invention slowed. Even the brand's own Wikipedia entry lists no new product after "the 1998 no-iron shirt." The one exception is a 2016 New York Times article, Brooks Brothers Revives the Preppiest Shirt Collar, on how the brand reworked its classic Ivy League shirt: better mother-of-pearl buttons, squared-off shirttails, no chest pocket.

The "modern history" of Brooks Brothers is closer to a reshuffling of the product mix. It has another problem to face: the market has grown indifferent to clothes that look too formal. Put plainly, suits no longer look fashionable.

So in 2007 Brooks Brothers brought in the independent designer Thom Browne to develop a high-end line, Black Fleece.

Browne had worked with Ralph Lauren before, leading the creative team at Club Monaco, a Ralph Lauren sub-brand. After starting his own label under his name, he won the Council of Fashion Designers of America (CFDA) award for menswear designer of the year in 2006. His designs broke with the stiff formality of the old suit: always cut a size small, trousers short enough to show the ankle, no belt loops; the jacket smaller too, sleeves short enough to leave three inches of shirt cuff showing, three buttons down the front, narrow lapels, sometimes a side vent.

Browne brought the same style to Brooks Brothers. The first collection ran to 50 SKUs and sold in more than 30 of the brand's stores worldwide. Black Fleece was meant to be a three-year project, but it sold well, and the line ran straight through to 2015.

"We come across as a bit old-fashioned — we do have 200 years of history. We wanted a fashionable designer to make the brand more current; the idea was to do more business with young people. That line was aimed at the young, with a slimmer design and cut," Lin Wenlong told QDaily.

After 2015, though, Black Fleece was discontinued. Lin Wenlong said this was partly because Thom Browne was busy with his own label, and partly because "consumers were paying too much attention to the designer and not to Brooks Brothers, which wasn't good."

In the run-up to ending the partnership with Thom Browne, Brooks Brothers made another plan. Again, this was not innovation in the product sense but a bigger push on womenswear: it hired the designer Zac Posen as creative director for women's collections.

"We brought in Zac Posen for womenswear because we wanted the women's line to be more fashionable and the business to be bigger," Lin Wenlong told QDaily. The long-term plan, he said, is for menswear and womenswear to each account for 50% of sales.

For Lin Wenlong, everything Brooks Brothers is wrestling with worldwide falls within his remit — including the womenswear business it hopes to grow with Zac Posen, and even the leftovers from the shuttered Black Fleece line.

But China adds problems of its own. In the Chinese market, suits are only 10% of sales. They sell better in Hong Kong, at around 60%, "because Hong Kong has more businesspeople, and there are evening events too," and "a lot of lawyers, doctors, and accountants buy them." Since shirts also count as formalwear, casual and formal now split sales roughly 50-50.

"In the Chinese market, suits are not our most important product. Wearing a suit is common in America, which is a little different from here. If we only sold suits in China, we could not survive," Lin Wenlong said. "That said, formalwear is hard to sell right now."

The answer, for Brooks Brothers, is to change how its stores are laid out. The old stores put formal and casual products in separate zones; in the new flagship at Oriental Plaza East, casual and formal are sold side by side.

In May the flagship adds a new service: made-to-measure suits. Brooks Brothers offers made-to-measure in the U.S., but under Dickson Concepts it never measured and cut for customers in its stores here. "Dickson probably thought it was too much trouble, so they didn't put the effort in," Lin Wenlong said.

Even so, it is not young people Brooks Brothers is after. Its customers in China are mostly 40 to 60 years old, and the plan is to pull that down to about 30.

The other priority is opening stores. The first order of business, Lin Wenlong said, is to separate from Tommy Hilfiger. Because Dickson Concepts held the license for both Tommy Hilfiger and Brooks Brothers, it often put the two brands' shops next to each other.

"In a lot of the old locations, Tommy Hilfiger was right next door. It has a casual feel; we have plenty of casual clothing too, but not that casual — we built the business on suits. So we have to change that and give customers a new impression," Lin Wenlong said.

The new store, opened in late March, sits in the middle of Oriental Plaza. Across from it is Coach, whose recent overhaul is starting to show results; to the left, Montblanc, with a huge photograph of Hugh Jackman; to the right, the Italian-flavored Moschino, and the watch brand TAG Heuer. Tommy Hilfiger is 200 meters away — far enough that you have to walk a while before you see it.

The joint venture gives the company a lot of room to handle what is particular about China. But years of caution may still leave it too slow for how fast things move here.

One sign is e-commerce, still at the planning stage. Another is the first Red Fleece by Brooks Brothers Café, opened in New York last year to pull customers into the stores; there is no plan yet to bring the café to China. "We want to see how the U.S. market responds first," Lin Wenlong said.

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