The ghost of our recent neighbor and competitor at 346 Madison Avenue lies naked in blessed memory of its once glorious past. I write this confession more in sorrow than misplaced glee.
In 1950, when I was 12 years old my grandfather, the eponymous Jacobi Press, took me to Brooks Brothers for my Bar Mitzvah suit. He took it back to his shop across the street for alterations and the first thing he did was rip off the Brooks Brothers label and replace it with one of his own.
Grandpa Press’ dismemberment of a Brooks Brothers label from my size 14 grey flannel suit followed the protocol first established in New Haven turn of the last century: namely, emulating Brooks Brothers.
All the players alongside the Yale campus — Langrock, Fenn-Feinstein, Arthur Rosenberg, White’s, Isenberg’s, the Yale Coop “followed suit” in mimicking Brooks Brothers. And when LIFE Magazine proclaimed the coast-to-coast explosion of the Ivy League Look, mainstream retailers got into the act by further copying the Brooks Brothers Number One Sack Suit, not to mention exploiting the famous button-down shirt, repp tie, seersuckers, Indian Madras, polo coat—the whole works.
However, in a memoir of his days at Yale, Episcopal Archbishop of New York Paul Moore, Jr. credited Jacobi Press with doing more than anyone else to establish the Ivy Look. “His tweeds were a little softer and flashier than the Brooks Brothers tweeds,” Moore writes, “his ties a little brighter.”
Soon his sons Irving and Paul used the Brooks curriculum to devise their version adapting a flap pocket on their dress shirts, center hook vent on sport coats, blazers, and suit coats and further adding a raised notch on the jacket lapels. I got into the act in the 1960s bringing Brooks’ 6th floor 346 two-button suit model for our modified requirements on 16 East 44th Street.
Manufacturers and retailers together joined in the conspiracy to clone the Golden Fleece including Gant and Sero in New Haven, Hathaway Shirts in Waterville, Maine. Norman Hilton in Princeton, Julie Hertling in Brooklyn, and Haspel Brothers in New Orleans.
Demise of the hallowed ground of 346 Madison brings to mind Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poem Ozymandias, “Round the decay of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare/The lone level sands stretch far away,”
RICHARD PRESS
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As you may know, Famous Brands announced that they have brought back the Brooks #1 suit in summer weight model. The pictures in their adds show a #1ish suit, but it is, in my estimate, a shadow of Brooks past glory.
When I was at Trinity College in Hartford, Langrock used to visit us and show its excellent goods. How I wish that J. Press might do the same for us today in Chicago.
I was once on elevator with Richard Press at Brooks Brothers. I told him that I had not defected to his rival. I didn’t know that perhaps he was on a reconnaissance mission.
To quote Shelley is condign to consider the demise of Brooks Brothers, but so is the Bible: “Oh how the mighty have fallen!”
Brooks Bros. was a household name, as they say, known and used even by those who never shopped there. They were to conservative clothing what Hoover was to vacuum cleaners, Hershey to chocolate bars and so on. To lose something like that is to lose a part of oneself.
Egad! Two button jackets? I must ask, “did your grandfather take this opportunity to take this suit completely apart for total evaluation. Or, had it been done previously done numerous occasions?” Many thanks.
Thank you, Mr. Press for a gracious and worthy obituary for the departed colossus. Brooks taught generations of men how to dress, and I am grateful to have been there before the fall. Thanks to you and the current ownership, J. Press continues to provide the finest American style and workmanship as it has for more than 120 years.