His first collection for J.Crew is thick with straightforward, well-constructed menswear classics, pushed perhaps five degrees off-center and styled in an unfussy, personal sort of way. (“We need to disrupt the business,” Wadle told The Wall Street Journal.) The headlines seemed to write themselves: “Struggling Mass Retailer Hires Streetwear Legend to Shake Things Up.” And, indeed, it seems clear that J.Crew-a once-proud brand years removed from both relevance and profitability-must change to survive.īut as I spent time with Babenzien, I was struck by the matter-of-factness of his approach. As the company’s CEO, Libby Wadle, put it to me in an email, “Brendon has an integrity to his vision and I believe that to be a rarity in this time of superfast, disposable fashion.”įrom the outside, everything about Babenzien’s hire suggests radical change. Babenzien has busied himself overhauling the brand’s fabric assortment the rugby shirt-thick, hardy cotton in bold primary colors-is an ideal representation of his goals. In recent years, the quality of J.Crew’s clothing seemed to track its financial decline: Everything from T-shirts to the brand’s once-reliable Ludlow suit began to feel disconcertingly flimsy. One morning not long ago, I watched as Babenzien (pronounced ba-bin-zeen) and a few members of his design team discussed ideas for rugby shirts, a staple J.Crew offering. Babenzien’s job is to help bring the company back from the grave. For a generation of men who had once used its casual-but-polished uniform as a stepping stone into the rapidly expanding world of menswear, J.Crew had been dead for years. When it finally came, the bankruptcy filing felt more perfunctory than unexpected. This was due in part to the pandemic, which cratered sales, but also to a yearslong period of mounting losses during which the gap between what J.Crew made and what men wanted to wear seemed to grow larger and larger. In May 2020, the company filed for bankruptcy. It was precisely this lack of familiarity with corporate fashion that made Babenzien appealing to J.Crew in the first place. His employees know that the best way to reach their boss is to text him directly. “I mean, I can barely answer an email.” Indeed, he uses his personal email address to conduct business for both J.Crew and Noah. “My strengths lie in design, and branding, and marketing ideas and things, and not management,” he said.
When we met for lunch one day this spring, he realized, to his embarrassment, that he’d misplaced his office entry badge for the second time in 24 hours. That’s to say: Brendon Babenzien is very much not a corporate person. (One friend described him to me as the “mayor of SoHo.”) In his new job, as the men’s creative director for J.Crew, he spends two days a week working out of the company’s Financial District offices, which, though only a few subway stops away, effectively represent a different world.
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The designer Brendon Babenzien has spent nearly all his professional life-first as an early and longtime employee at Supreme, and then as the founder and designer of the menswear brand Noah-in a narrowly circumscribed portion of Lower Manhattan.
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