Within half a dozen years, the brand had become synonymous with preppy apparel, and Cinader decided to open its first brick-and-mortar shop—a potentially risky move for a business based on a meticulously conceived catalogue. But he and his colleagues enlisted catalogue data to make decisions about location. The first J. Crew store was in Manhattan’s South Street Seaport, a tourist zone that also happened to be close enough to Wall Street to catch the after-work crowd. The night of the grand opening, a fire marshal was said to have shown up because of reports of overcrowding. When J. Crew expanded to Boston, Cinader and his colleagues targeted the Chestnut Hill Mall, an accessible distance to at least a dozen colleges. “We never meet a college student who doesn’t know J. Crew very well,” Cinader said. By the mid-nineties, J. Crew, still a family-run business, was opening stores across the country and sending out seventy million catalogues a year. More important, it was permeating culture—competitors imitated its catalogues, and, where it had once positioned itself as an affordable alternative to Ralph Lauren, upstart brands now offered themselves as down-market alternatives to J. Crew.
All of them were trying to replicate the potent yet amorphous sensibility that had captivated Cinader: prep, which the author Maggie Bullock describes as “the bedrock of straightforward, unfettered, ‘American’ style.” Her new book, “The Kingdom of Prep: The Inside Story of the Rise and (Near) Fall of J. Crew” (HarperCollins), is a buoyant and persuasive account of how the company’s fluctuating fortunes reflect Americans’ shifting attitudes toward dress, shopping, and identity.
At the center of Bullock’s story is the malleability of prep, which she depicts as the “leisure uniform of the establishment.” What people consider to be cool changes with time, but coolness always presumes exclusivity and effortlessness. At its height, Bullock argues, J. Crew embodied the nonchalant, “broken-in cool” that typified prep. What’s complicated about the mass-marketing of social aspiration, though, is that it’s more about belonging to a group than about standing out as an individual. The class fantasy at the heart of prep style was the prep school, where dress codes offered a way of diminishing the differences among its students. This was a different temperature of cool from, say, the leather jacket. With the rise of prep fashion, you could dress up like members of the ruling class, even if the looks you mimicked were solely of them dressing down.