Threads

My Life Behind the Seams in the High-Stakes World of Fashion

Joseph Abboud, Ellen Stern

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN:
  9780060535353
• eBook ISBN:
  9780061753985
• Topic: Design
• Subtopic: Fashion Design

Designers are great white sharks, and we roam the waters ourselves. We often pretend to like and admire each other, but sometimes we don't even bother to fake it. The fashion industry is as hardworking, incestuous, and political as any other, and it's virtually impossible, given the size of designers' egos, to sincerely wish someone else well, because behind every false tribute is 'It should have been me.'

So writes Joseph Abboud, who fell in love with style at five. There in the dark of the movie house, he wasn't just some Lebanese kid with a babysitter. He was the hero, in tweeds and pocket squares. That's where he learned that clothes represented a better life—a life he wanted, and would grab, for himself. From his blue-collar childhood in Boston's South End to his spread-collar success as one of America's top designers, he has forged a remarkable path through the unglamorous business of making people look glamorous.

He transformed American menswear by replacing the traditional stiff-shouldered silhouette with a grown-up European sensuality. He was the first designer to win the coveted CFDA award as Best Menswear Designer two years in a row and the first designer to throw out the opening pitch at Fenway Park. He's been jilted by Naomi Campbell (who didn't show up on the runway for his first women's fashion show) and questioned by the FBI (who did show up in his office right after September 11 because he fit the profile). He's soared and sunk more than a few times—and lived to tell the tales.

Threads is his off-the-record take on fashion, from the inside out. With breezy irreverence, he looks at guys and taste, divas and deviousness, fabric and texture, and all those ties. He takes us to the luxe bastion of Louis Boston, where he came of age and learned the trade, and to the seductive domain of Polo Ralph Lauren, where he became associate director of menswear design. He reveals the mystique of department-store politics, what's what at the sample sale, and who copies whom. He explains the process of making great clothes, from conception and sketch to manufacturing and marketing.

Whether he's traveling by daredevil horse, plunging plane, Paris Métro, or cross-country limo, Abboud is an illuminating guide to a complex world.

ONE

Guy in the Gray Flannel Suit

DOCTOR. LAWYER. Indian chief. Fashion designer.

Most guys don’t do surgery on a daily basis, or sue somebody, or open a casino. But everybody deals with what I do: fashion.

“What’ll I wear?” Comes up every morning.

The CEO says, “Does this tie work with that suit?” The art director wonders, “Should I wear my cords with a T-shirt or a cable-knit?” Even people who don’t give a damn about fashion have to admit it into their lives.

There’s covering our nakedness, and then there’s image. A man’s clothes tell the world how he wants to be perceived. Whether he’s wearing a pair of rusty jeans or a beautifully cut Italian suede jacket, he has an image of himself in mind. All clothes make a statement. The right clothes make a statement that will open doors.

That’s why most businessmen wear a suit. It’s easy. They don’t have to think too hard about it, and they always—well, almost always—look correct. A suit says, “Take me seriously.” It’s subliminal, but it’s real.

My very first suit was a little white cotton three-piece, bought for my first communion at Holy Name Church in West Roxbury. I wore it with white bucks, a white shirt, and a white bow tie—right out of Truman Capote. I looked so angelic, so holy. But a communion suit doesn’t count.

My first real suit was a beigy, tweedy mod thing from Jordan Marsh, and being able to buy it at a famous store in downtown Boston was a pretty big deal. It made me feel legitimate. But I was sixteen, and the suit wasn’t expensive, so nobody took my tailoring requests too seriously. When I went to pick it up, disaster! I looked like a clown. I’d wanted the sleeves lengthened and the pants shortened, and they’d done exactly the opposite. My first suit experience wasn’t a good one.

But it should have been. Buying a suit is a major event, because it makes you look—and feel—important. At twenty-one, every young man should have a great navy or gray suit that he can wear to an interview, a bar mitzvah, a funeral, a wedding. He also needs a navy blazer and a pair of chinos. With those three fundamentals, he’s covered for any event. On his feet: anything from penny loafers to wingtips, but shoes should never be outlandish or detract from the outfit.

An observant guy looks around and notices how others dress and walk and decorate their homes. Sooner or later, he makes up his mind how he’s going to look—and how he’s going to be. Is he going to be flamboyant? Is he going to dress like the guys in the stockroom or dress like the boss? Depends on where he’s headed.

A young friend of mine named David Black, who was toiling in the mail room at a publishing company, came in one day wearing a suit, shirt, and tie. “What are you all dressed up for?” somebody asked him with a sneer. The answer: for himself. Working in the mail room didn’t mean he couldn’t dress well and look professional. He wasn’t going to let other people’s perceptions of him keep him down. And they didn’t. He quickly rose through the ranks to become a prominent literary agent in New York. No, it wasn’t just the clothes that got him promoted, but he had a certain image of himself, and the clothes helped him project that image. The first time we met, a few years ago, David was wearing a putty-colored dress shirt with a soft collar, a soft-print tie, and a navy blazer—all Armani, so he made some kind of apology. I didn’t care whose label he was wearing, because he looked great. He had a lot of other things going for him too, of course, but that strong first impression made a difference. We connected, and now he’s my agent.

There’s a migratory pattern to developing your wardrobe and taste as you become more successful. It’s like traveling. The first time you travel, you feel lucky to get on any flight from anywhere at a price you can manage. You don’t care if you sit with the chickens. Then, as you get a bit more successful, you fly coach. When you’re a junior executive, you can travel business class. And then, as the CEO, you’re going first class. It’s an obvious analogy, but it’s exactly what happens.

For example, most guys who are starting to move up the ladder relate to a pinstripe suit almost instinctively. They figure, “It’s been done before—by my father, my boss, my father’s boss—and it’s a classic. I’m the boss now, so it’s my turn.” If you remember the musical How to Succeed in Business without Really Trying, you’ll remember the final scene of the movie, in which the outgoing chairman of the board is wearing a navy chalk-stripe suit with a soft butter-yellow vest, a white shirt, and a silver tie—and Robert Morse, being introduced as the incoming chairman of the board, appears in exactly the same suit, vest, and tie. He’s not just following in the boss’s footsteps; he’s following in the boss’s suit pattern. It’s a spoof, but a spoof with a lot of truth behind it.

The other best choice is a beautifully cut solid or chalk-stripe gray suit with a white or white tattersall shirt, a silver woven tie—nothing too bright or too flashy, no tone-on-tone thing happening, no tricks— and a pair of dark brown suede shoes. (Brown with gray shows confidence, and it’s one of the dream color combinations for the powerful guy. It’s sophisticated, it’s soft, and it doesn’t scream.) With a fine gray worsted or gray flannel, the fabric doesn’t get in the way. You’re not hiding anything. You see the cut, the fit, the details, the stitching. And besides, any woman will tell you that the sexiest guy in the room is the guy in the gray flannel suit.

There are more than two hundred steps in making a suit, from measuring to stitching to pressing to pockets to linings. (A cheaper factory might do it in eighty steps.) You’ve got to go through this little ballet in which the fabric’s treated just right, it’s sewn just right, the tension of the needles is just right so it doesn’t pull, the softness of the shoulder is just right. Then comes the marriage of the inner linings, the shoulder pads, and all the other interior parts to make sure that everything is moving and fluid.

When the front of the jacket is made, the pockets are basted up. This keeps the front of the garment stable while it’s being sewn or pressed. When it gets to the rack at Bloomingdale’s or Saks, the pockets are still stitched. A good salesman will certainly mention it, or the tailor will open them when the suit is altered. But I’ve actually had people say to me, “I like your suits, but I don’t like the fake pockets.”

The final step, the pressing, involves seven or eight steps of its own. The front of the coat gets pressed, the shoulder gets pressed, the lapel gets pressed, the pants get pressed—on computerized machines set to the correct pressure for different fabrics. Overpressing will make the fabric look flat and more commercial, it will make the fabric shine, and it will press the lapel down into the jacket so you see an imprint of the pocket below—like a panty line. So, as with a good sirloin, it’s generally wiser to underdo than overdo.

It’s these little details that make the difference between a great suit and a not-so-great one. People in the fashion business know what to look for, but the average guy trying on a suit doesn’t. And he shouldn’t have to. Designing it, sewing it, and pressing it so it looks, feels, and fits right: That’s our job.

Our clothes are made all over the world—ties in Italy, sportswear in Hong Kong and China, suits and sport coats in New Bedford, Massachusetts. When we bought the factory in Massachusetts, it had been churning out inexpensive boys’ clothing and cheap private label. We installed a great Italian workforce and turned the place around, but before the turn was complete, we had to ride out some serious bumps. Literally.

God does all these wonderful things with Italians. He makes the country gorgeous, he makes the people beautiful, he makes the food fabulous. But just to prove that Italians are human and not divine, he makes it so they can’t sew on a button. It was infuriating. It was insidious. “Oh, we fix it,” they’d say. “No problem. The button’s fine.” Right. Until the call would come from Nordstrom that the buttons were falling off the suits again.

Then, in the early 1990s, I went to London to launch Joseph Abboud boutiques in Harvey Nichols, Selfridges, and Harrods. Harrods put my clothes in the windows and devoted an entire morning to TV people and photographers. Here came the press, here came the invited guests… and here came Joseph Abboud feeling like Prince Charles, descending the staircase to make his grand entrance in a double-breasted navy linen suit. In one smooth, made-for-TV move, I slid my hand over to put it in my pocket—without unbuttoning the jacket. And as the flashbulbs popped, so did the New Bedford button. Flew right off.

There was also the bump in the left shoulder.

On a man’s suit, it’s the shoulders that matter most. They’re the strength of the man, and where you build the suit from. That’s where the emphasis has to be, and if you build the shoulders wrong, you’re screwed. As Coco Chanel (who took her men in tweeds) once said, “Fashion is architecture; it is a matter of proportions.” In the late 1980s, everybody’s shoulders got bigger—some bigger than others. At Hugo Boss, they had to turn sideways to get through the door. It was a good thing that went too far, like a melon that goes from being perfect to over-ripe to rotten. The reaction was a total turnaround. Back came narrow shoulders and narrow silhouettes. Where else was there to go?

Narrow or wide, you don’t want a bump in the shoulder. And ours was a problem that wouldn’t go away. We’d have meeting after meeting. We’d say, “Hey, guys, there’s a bump in the shoulder.” They’d say, “There’s no bump in the shoulder.” “Yeah, there is a bump in the shoulder.” “Okay, okay, we take care of it.”

Next season, the samples would come in, we’d put them on the mannequins, and bingo! a bump in the shoulder. The problem: We had been sewing the fabric too tight, and the tension in the stitching of the shoulder created the bump. We may have had the best machinery in the world, but something somewhere in the system was wrong. After a couple of seasons of diligent investigation, the problem was finally resolved.

We were lucky not to lose customers in those early days. We could say to them, “Look, we’re working on it,” and hold onto them.

Well, most of them.

Neiman Marcus was a major casualty. And a major embarrassment.

I’d bought a beautiful open-weave fabric from Ferla, one of my favorite Italian mills, for some sport jackets. It was soft, beautiful, very expensive stuff, but New Bedford wasn’t ready to handle it. The factory was still in transition, and nowhere near as efficient as it is today.

We made the jackets, shipped them to Neiman’s, and… disaster. It’s called seam slippage: The patternmakers hadn’t allowed for enough seam, so the stitchers sewed the fabric too close to the edge and it started to shred. If a guy stretched his shoulder blades, the jacket would split. The fabric had no strength, because there were no bindings to hold it in place. It would have been nice to blame somebody, but the slippage was nobody’s fault. These were newly developed fabrics, and nobody knew yet how to work with them. Should someone have known? I’d like to say yes, but sometimes you just don’t know about a problem until after it happens.

Back came the jackets. Thunk went my gut. That was years ago, and Neiman’s won’t let me live it down. They buy my sportswear, but they still won’t buy my tailored clothing. Even with the magnitude of my business, I’ve never gotten over that.

A well-tailored suit almost dictates good posture. But most guys don’t know what to do with their hands. Go to a party, and you’ll see every other guy crossing his arms (unless he’s Prince Charles, who avoids the problem by clasping his hands behind his back). It betrays insecurity, makes you look like a wimp. And besides, there’s nothing worse for the drape of a double-breasted suit, unless it’s standing there with your thumbs forward on your hips, which is feminine.

Kirk Douglas addressed the issue on the Op-Ed page of the New York Times in 2003. “Many actors have trouble with their hands. Should they put them in their pockets? Should they put them behind their back? Do they have them at their sides? The cigarette answered the question. You take one out of the pack, you tap it, light it and inhale deeply,” he wrote. “You can point with a cigarette. You can tap the ashes into an ashtray, and put it out gently in the ashtray or fiercely—whatever the scene requires.” But for most guys these days, that prop is gone.

So they play with their pockets.

It’s extremely uncool to put your hands in your jacket pockets. Number one, you’ve got a flap to maneuver through, unless you’ve got patch pockets, so you look silly. Number two, you put a lot of pressure on your jacket. Number three, if you don’t look like you’re scratching your armpits, you look like a seagull because your elbows are sticking out. I’ve always believed that we put pockets on pants just to solve the problem. At least they let you keep your arms close to your body.

But the pockets can get overloaded. In days of yore, when men wore suits to baseball games and tweeds on the train from London to Edinburgh, jackets were truly utilitarian. A ticket pocket held a ticket, a watch pocket held a watch, and a storm latch wasn’t just some cool Ralph Lauren detail. Today’s man has a lot more freight, and it has to be dispersed with aplomb.

Consider the wallet. If he wants to carry a very thin wallet in his pant pocket, that’s fine. But most guys are collectors, so if they get a business card or a girl’s phone number, the wallet starts to expand. The best style is long and flat like a passport case, and it slips neatly into the inside jacket pocket (which is called, in fact, the passport pocket). Otherwise, the guy is walking around with a bulky double-fold either in his side pant pocket, which makes a lump in the front, or in his rear pocket, which looks like a tumor on his tush.

Then there are the glasses, the keys, the change, the cell phone. When clothes were big and baggy, men had plenty of room for all this stuff; now, as clothes start moving closer to the body, they don’t. So try to streamline. Economize on your cargo, keep it flat, carry it in your pant pocket, and—please—respect the shape of the suit.

If I don’t address the subject of pants at greater length, it’s because I don’t find them that exciting. They’re boring to design, and you’re always dealing with the crotch. Pants are funny. We need to wear them, because we can’t go out in our shorts, but there isn’t much to say about them. Women have a capri pant or a cropped pant or a low-rise pant… so many possibilities. We have a dress pant, a casual pant, jeans—and not a hell of a lot in between. I mean, how glamorous can you make a pair of pants? Especially with the wallet and the tush and the fit and the pleats and the zipper and the stains. They’re very unromantic.

Day after day, you see articles about how suits are back in the workplace. When the stock market is on a respirator, the business world is not an environment for flashy fashion. People are looking for real jobs again and need a competitive edge. This means they’re getting interview suits again, and, as a result, wearing shirts and ties again.

Corporate casual arrived on the scene in the late 1990s, around the same time as the Internet. It was a laissez-faire period when anything went. Some people started dressing down, bringing casual into Wall Street and the legal community. Others thought they’d make a killing (or at least a living) by staying home in their bathrobes and slippers, punching their brilliant new concepts into the computer. But commerce is driven by the oldest concept—you give me something, I give you something—and in real life, people have to do business face to face. That’s where dress comes into play.

One morning, two young money managers from Goldman Sachs come to the office and pitch me; they want to manage my portfolio. Obviously they know I’m in the fashion business, but they figure this whole corporate casual is happening, so they show up in shirtsleeves with their collars open and their sleeves rolled up.

Bad choice. I’m wearing a shirt and tie. But I don’t say anything. I just watch them try to give me the message that they’re cool and hip— while the message I get is that they’d look swell if we were meeting for a cappuccino on Madison Avenue, but here on the twentieth floor they don’t fit the part they’ve come to play. They want to sell me something, to represent me, but they don’t project any sense of professionalism or respect. However, I’m not going to base my decision just on how they’re dressed, because if they’re the right guys, I can look beyond that and it’s fine.

Okay. So one of the money managers now picks up a baseball picture from the table. It’s a picture of the moment in 1978 when the Yankees’ Bucky Dent hit Mike Torres’s pitch out of Fenway Park, ending the Red Sox’s World Series bid that year like they always do. (Mike Torres gave me the picture, which he and Bucky both signed, and it’s really a bittersweet thing for me. Being a Red Sox fan costs me thousands in therapy.)

But the money manager, who doesn’t know what it means to me, and who figures he’s got a little making-up to do because he’s noticed he isn’t dressed properly, picks it up and says, “What a great, great moment! I’ll never forget it. An unbelievable moment!” You couldn’t make it up. He’s thinking I’m a Yankee fan, and I’m thinking he’s an asshole.

These guys? They could be wearing the best tailored suits ever made, but they’re not the right guys for me. They just don’t get it. And I just don’t hire them.

If you have any doubts that the suit is back in full swing, go to lunch with the power brokers. If you d...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Acknowledgments
• Index
• About the Author
• Credits
• Copyright
• About the Publisher