Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which we quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.
This week’s guest is Nordstrom’s men’s fashion director, Jian DeLeon. After holding editorial positions at nearly every magazine responsible for the menswear renaissance of the last decade (and the hypebeasts that came with it), Jian decamped to retail in 2020. Which is an interesting move. I had a stint at Selfridges post-pandemic, which I loved, but found very different from media, pace-wise.
I could have spoken to Jian endlessly about that, but it’s menswear season, so we focused on the latest from Nordstrom and Pitti, where he’s been since the beginning of the week.
Hi Jian, what s the scoop?
I’m in Florence for Pitti, where a lot of action happens during aperitivo hour. So after this call, I’m going to an event held by this New York-based tailoring company, J. Mueser. The founder, Jake, has built a really strong business in the last few years, gaining a very diverse audience. We are about to launch the brand at Nordstrom. We are their first major retailer, and I’m really looking forward to celebrating that partnership. Especially as there’s going to be a new creative director announced soon at J. Mueser, who is also a dear friend of mine.
How did the partnership come about?
Menswear is like a big community. So Jake and I had a lot of mutual friends. I’ve been keeping track of how he’s been building his business. We went and saw him at [menswear trade show] Chicago Collective, then back in New York. In the end, it was just a matter of figuring out the best way of working together and the timing.
He brings a younger approach to tailoring, and his audience just runs such a broad swath of everyday people, all the way to people in the industry. He makes suits for the guys from ‘Throwing Fits’; he made a suit for GQ global correspondent Sam Hines’s brother’s wedding. It’s such a great brand for me to be involved with because it feels exactly like what a modern, bespoke suit maker out of New York should look and feel like. It’s a great suit to get after your first suit.
What are the characteristics of a modern suit?
What I like about what Jake does is that it’s a classic-fitting suit that’s not too skinny, but also not particularly oversized. There’s like a snap-button Western shirt and like a Tencel, as opposed to a super severe spread collar shirt underneath. It encourages guys to have fun with their tailoring, or at least dress it down in a way that it’s not so stuffy. As you know, the best way to get guys to wear anything is to get them to feel comfortable in it. How do you dress down a suit to make it feel like something you actually want to wear, rather than something you have to wear?
This Pitti featured a suit walk. Our generation has been dressing very casually, even at events or the office. But are men about to start dressing like my dad, who wore a suit every day at work in the ’90s?
I feel like guys are rediscovering and liking the art of getting dressed. You see this on the red carpet too — this classic sense of elegance in a different way, whether it’s with accoutrements like brooches or different textures and patterns like velvet and checks. Or plainly by being open to different colorways.
Jonathan Anderson really embraced ties in a different way at Dior. There’s been a resurgence at Ralph Lauren, who is also about to show in Milan. There’s a Brunello Cucinelli documentary coming out later this year. And the recent passing of Mr. Armani made people look at his outsized impact on menswear and be inspired by it. You have the US government saying people should dress up for the airport. Why are you wearing sweatpants? So from a cultural perspective, there’s also this ideal of ironically going back to what is a conservative way of dressing, which comes with toxic connotations.
We have been seeing the same turn to conservatism in womenswear as well. What are your menswear predictions for the season that just began?
I’ve started to see this trend — I think of it as mall prep. It’s going back to when there was more of a monoculture in style, and you would go to Abercrombie and Fitch and see the perfect washed cargo pants, and you’d see the same thing at Brunello Cuccinelli, too. It’s what Jonathan Anderson put on the runway in the summer — a quarter zip made out of jersey, which you can get from Drake’s, but you can also get from Dior. It’s this idea of uniform dressing and playing with those tropes to strike that effortless look balance.
How does this inform your buy?
It’s a bit different with menswear because we don’t go to market thinking we need this type of product. It’s more about who’s best in class in each category, and how we tell a story around that.
Besides the art of getting dressed, men are also increasingly embracing tweakments.
It makes sense, especially as millennials are pushing 40. You have GQ and all the other men’s magazines exploring how we can take away the toxic nature of masculinity. The “men shouldn’t care about their looks” belief. Why shouldn’t we? If it makes you feel better and benefits your mental health, right. It’s an extension of that idea of self-care and self-worth being important and encouraging men to be OK with that mindset.
Speaking of millennials, why do you think 2016 is trending?
I think a lot of the navel-gazing is coming from millennials who are faced with their own mortality. We’re already this generation that came of age on social media, and this is, in a way, a test case for how Gen Z or Gen Alpha might look at the TikToks that they’re posting now, 10 years later. Our parents didn’t have that. Our childhood is old VHS videos. But most people have the high-res photos from 2016 still on their phones.
I just turned 40 last year, so I am participating in all this, but I’m also watching it as an interesting cultural phenomenon. Because this did not exist before. Before, we had our parents typing in phone numbers for, like, the local store on Facebook. And now we are becoming our parents, but we’re not struggling with technology in that same way. It’s more in the vein of “God, my parents are chronically online.”
You can catch up with last week’s Scoop with Golden Goose CEO Silvio Campara here.
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