J. Press is ready to reclaim its turf. Founded in 1902 in New Haven, Connecticut, the American Ivy prepster brand has gone quiet in the US, even as the aesthetic it helped originate has risen in popularity and the business has grown significantly in Japan. With a new creative director and president — Jack Carlson, who built and sold modern prep label Rowing Blazers — and a slot on the New York Fashion Week calendar, a comeback is coming into focus.
Carlson joined the company six months ago, and sees today’s New York Fashion Week show as an opportunity to make a statement. “J. Press is the last brand standing of its ilk. I think it should really own that role and take up that mantle,” he says. One of his first moves when he joined was to put a runway show together, off calendar at NYFW in September. This season, it’s one of few menswear brands on the schedule. The brand prioritizes cut and fit. Most of its pieces are still made in the US, by American mills and manufacturers. “If you’re going to be the standard-bearer for American menswear, you should be there bearing the standard during New York Fashion Week,” Carlson says.
Carlson was hired by Japanese owner Onward Holdings (which also owns British label Joseph) to modernize the preppy sleeper brand. Carlson was chosen, in part, for his ability to attract younger consumers to this distinctive aesthetic; Carlson founded collegiate-inspired Rowing Blazers in 2017, built it into a recognizable, sometimes viral brand (remember the Princess Diana sheep sweater?) and sold it to Burch Creative Capital for an undisclosed amount in 2024. He exited the brand in 2025, and later that year joined J. Press. At Rowing Blazers, Carlson helped to spearhead the resurgence of Ivy League style among younger shoppers. Now, he’s tasked with aligning J. Press with this shift.
Lucky for him, consumers are gravitating towards American sportswear and Ivy styles. “With the consumer becoming more educated, and with this look coming into the mainstream, it changes the game as far as what the reach and appeal of J. Press can be,” he says. “It is the embodiment of Ivy style in 2026, but without it feeling stuffy, without it feeling like cosplay, without it feeling like something that’s just being recycled.”
Carlson’s second collection is inspired by the book Take Ivy, the 1965 Japanese book which documents the preppy, collegiate fashion of Ivy League university campuses in the US throughout the sixties. It’s an apt source of inspiration for Carlson, who joined a brand known for its American prep — J. Press was founded at Yale in 1902 — that has been owned by Japanese apparel company Onward Holdings since 1986.
“For the show, I want it to be like the book has sprung to life,” Carlson says. “That’s a reflection of my desire to show people that J. Press is Ivy style. There are so many brands and so many designers who are inspired by it. J. Press is the real thing.” He contrasts this with American prep brands that have gone the more Italian route in cut and style.
Under Onward, the creative director has ambitious expansion plans for the brand. As of now, the Japanese operation is much larger than the US; J. Press boasts 80 stores in Japan, with sales of ¥208.4 billion ($1.36 billion) for the fiscal year ended February 28, 2025 — versus just three stores in the US. Carlson is tasked with expanding the latter. By 2030, the goal is to increase the number of US stores from three to 20; and increase US revenues tenfold from just under $10 million (for fiscal year 2024) to $100 million. Here’s how he’ll do it.
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Growing the brand and modernizing
This commitment to authentically Ivy Prep is what Carlson is hinging his strategy on, and he’s betting that menswear enthusiasts will take notice. “It’s really for the guy that’s seeking out that three-role-two [jacket] and sacksuit cut and the hook center vent and who’s obsessed with the exact collar roll and so on,” he says, rattling off a host of Ivy style-specific menswear terms that would be lost on the average person. The prices are also high (a made-in-USA suit goes for $1,695; a fox air wool sport coat for $1,295; a dress shirt for $185; and a classic ‘shaggy dog sweater’ for $275), thanks to the brand’s commitment to US manufacturing.
Carlson has no plans to dramatically shift or update the J. Press aesthetic. “There’s a lot to be done in making the product really consistent, in getting things like the roll of the collar exactly right, bringing it back into alignment with what, to me, J. Press should be,” he says.
Instead, Carlson wants to broaden out this ultra-specific appeal J. Press has cultivated over the years. He’s confident that, now, it’s this very commitment to classic, preppy American menswear than will encourage more people to buy in. “It’s not supposed to be a brand that’s going to fit everyone’s style or taste. And I think the American menswear brands that have tried to do that have ended up in trouble,” he says. He wants J. Press to have a clear aesthetic and message, one that a shopper can get a gauge of after just a few clicks around the site.
The first step — the “low hanging fruit”, as Carlson calls it — was to update the website. “It looked like a website from the early 2000s,” he says. Now, it’s very 2020s: it leads with campaign images; places emphasis on ‘Made in USA’; and, of course, links out to the brand’s Instagram. Already, the e-commerce site has driven growth since its revamp, and the goal is to continue to grow e-comm sales in the immediate term, the creative director says.
Longer-term, the focus is on brick and mortar. When we speak, Carlson has just arrived back from Chicago, which is on his list of store priorities alongside California (San Francisco and Los Angeles), Florida and Texas. It’s not just the big cities he’s eyeing. Another is Cambridge, where J. Press once had a store for a long time in Harvard Square. He’s also eyeing smaller, affluent locations across the States. “It would make sense for us to be in some of the suburban locations around the cities where we have stores now, or are opening locations,” he says.
These physical locations will be key to communicating J. Press’s history, he says. The stores can bring that alive more than any website tab can, with photographs and artefacts. “Any J. Press store you go into should have that same sort of feeling of magic,” Carlson says. “We can create that with every location that we open, but it’s hard to recreate that feeling on a website.”
The Japanese edge
J. Press may be distinctly American, but Carlson is keen not to downplay the brand’s current Japanese ownership. Japan is so central to menswear that he actually believes it gives the brand more of a competitive edge.
Historically, J. Press has downplayed the Japanese connection, Carlson says, focusing squarely on the ‘American Ivy’ messaging. He wants to bring it to the fore. The New York Fashion Week (NYFW) show is an example of this, he says, placing the Japanese-written Take Ivy at the center. “[Japan is] viewed as the best quality, the most knowledgeable people and consumer, the arbiter of taste,” he says. “It’s something that J. Press in the US hasn’t historically celebrated very much.” Carlson believes that J. Press’s Japanese ties lend it more, not less, credibility, because of how strong and influential a menswear market Japan has.
Carlson also added Tokyo to the J. Press logo when he did its redesign. Historically, the J. Press logo is an oval or circle and around the edge of the circle are all the cities where J. Press has stores, he explains; it’s changed over time. “It’s actually part of how you can date vintage J. Press clothes,” he quips, by whether or not Cambridge, San Francisco or Princeton is included in the circle. Moving forward, the logo won’t be continually updated — you can’t fit 20-plus city names. But Carlson felt Tokyo should be included. It now reads: New Haven, New York, Tokyo. “It represents three chapters of the brand’s history: starting as a collegiate outfitter, really just for the Yale community, to then becoming a national brand, to then becoming the international representative of American Ivy style.”
Over time, he hopes to bridge the US and Japanese brand experience more closely, but admits this won’t be in the near future. “J. Press is much more well-known and a much more mainstream brand in Japan than it is in the US,” he says. “And of course, the consumer behavior and tastes are so different in Japan than they are in the US, which will make it challenging even in the long run to completely integrate things. But the goal is, over time, to have more and more synergy between the two.”
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