Ralph Lauren started out selling ties from a drawer. Calvin Klein began with an idea for women’s coats. Michael Kors was a part-time window dresser. For each man to get where he was going, there were gatekeepers and tastemakers, moneymen and middlemen, all of whom wanted a cut and/or some credit for their respective roles in making the designing, creating, and selling of clothes really, really hard. It’s still hard today. It remains a grind. But thanks to a once-in-a-generation confluence of factors—low, low interest rates for seed capital; new manufacturing models that bypass middlemen; direct paths to consumers through e-commerce and social media; and a surge in demand as men stock their closets as never before—a new generation of men’s-wear leaders has emerged to show us new ways of buying and wearing clothes. Some are designers with bold and insistent visions for how men today should dress. Some are entrepreneurs with novel ideas about supply chains and retail models. Some are simply guys who didn’t like the job they had before and couldn’t quit wondering why khakis didn’t fit better or why dress shoes had to be so damn expensive. Together they’re the future, and they’ll be helping men look their best in the years and decades to come.
Fashion and Designing 