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NY Times article on young men and shopping
July 14, 2002
Boys to Men: Fashion Pack Turns Younger
By RUTH LA FERLA
ANNY HACKETT steamed down a corridor at the Roosevelt Field Mall in Garden City, N.Y., fueled by a mighty adrenaline rush.
Mr. Hackett, 25, who manages e-mail systems for Reuters America, the news agency, spent his day off scouring the Long Island mall. He prowls its shops three or four times a month, scouting for bargains and spending an average of $100 on clothes and accessories each visit. Last Wednesday afternoon, he bagged a black zip-front pullover at Armani AX, which he had plucked from the linen and cotton shirts piled pell-mell on the sales tables. "I've just gone through the whole $19.99 table," Mr. Hackett said, flushed with the thrill of the chase. "I was going crazy."
His shopping zeal used to be rare among men his age, but it is increasingly the norm. For a new breed of teenage boys and young men, clothes shopping, once a chore, is now a pleasurable pastime, a form of recreation, self-expression, even fulfillment, motivations rarely acknowledged in their fathers' day, but that young men now share with female contemporaries.
"Young men are the new generation of consumers," said Candace Corlett, a partner in WSL Strategic Retail, a New York consulting firm. "They shop for clothing more like women than they do like older men, and are becoming pretty passionate shoppers." A study by WSL of American shopping patterns released in January found that the habits of men 18 to 34 closely mirrored those of women their age. Young men reported that they increasingly visited the kinds of places where women traditionally shop for clothes, particularly specialty retailers like Abercrombie & Fitch, Hot Topic and Structure.
Another report, by the NPD Group, noted that overall retail sales of men's wear, an industry gravely troubled by the slow economy and the shift to casual styles, dropped $4 billion in 2001 from the previous year, but the youngest shoppers represent a bright spot. Men 18 to 24 actually increased their spending by 2.5 percent, to $9.2 billion, the only group that spent more, not less, on clothing.
"Over the last two years," said Terry J. Lundgren, president of Federated Department Stores, the owner of Macy's and Bloomingdale's, "the young women's market has been the hot category in apparel, but now young men's is what really is catching fire." This year Federated reported a growth of more than 10 percent in young men's apparel, "significant in an environment where sales have been flat or or even slightly negative," Mr. Lundgren said.
The growth is coming especially from so-called urban brands like Sean Jean and Ecko, whose recent dressier styles like plush sweaters and calf-length coats are garnering a mainstream following. Other popular looks include weathered low-rider jeans and stretch fabric dress shirts in a variety of colors.
Young men these days share with young women a heightened brand awareness, a tendency to buy on impulse and a predilection for clothes that are simpler, more close-fitting and sexier than in the past.
What is more, they tend to view shopping both as a means to an end — dressing appropriately, and stylishly, for dates or the job — and, increasingly, as an end in itself. And the taste for Gucci logo belts, Burberry shirts, Gap khakis and Mavi rinsed jeans is skewing ever younger. The NPD reports that boys 13 to 17 spent $7.9 billion on clothes in 2001, up $1.8 billion from 1999. It is not unusual these days to see teenage boys roaming the malls in packs, just as girls do, chattering animatedly among themselves and spending their weekly allowances, along with their own meager earnings, on jeans, designer sunglasses, roomy logo T-shirts and loose-fitting khaki-tone cargo shorts, sneakers and square-toed leather shoes.
"They want what's new and they want to fit in," said Marsha Drogin Dayan, the owner of Marsha D.D., an Upper East Side purveyor of jeans, khakis and casual tops for boys. "That's their fashion sense.They drop in two or three times a week to see what's new, and I don't see them as embarrassed at all."
Colleen Flynn, the mother of three teenage boys in Manhattan, said her sons shopped often and enthusiastically at a variety of stores, showing a marked taste for luxury labels like Burberry. She conceded that her sons' unconcealed consumer lust left her slightly nonplused. "I don't remember boys shopping this way when I was that age," Ms. Flynn said.
What, then, would she make of Mike Arana, who was shopping the other day at Express for Men at Roosevelt Field, his hair spiked, his eyebrows shaped and waxed, wearing a loose T-shirt and Express jeans. Mike, 14, had ventured inside to check out the the denims and dress shirts that are his club wear of choice.
"I love shopping," he said almost boastfully before vanishing into a fitting room with an armful of bright-colored stretch cotton shirts. "It is my favorite thing to do."
Not surprisingly, that sort of ardor has given rise to brisk marketing efforts aimed at teenage boys and young men through their early 30's. "The young men's area certainly has become more of a focus for us in the men's world," said Randy Heil, the fashion director of Macy's San Francisco. Mr. Heil, who was hired two years ago expressly to build the young men's category, added: "We do believe young men's is a large customer base and we're spending a lot of time, effort and money to attract that customer."
The store has broadened its selection of urban labels like Enyce and Ecko and surfwear labels like Hurley and Quicksilver, and dressier club wear, brands like CK Calvin Klein Jeans.
Scoop, the popular New York-based chain of young women's boutiques, opened its first men's shop in Miami this year and plans to add a men's store on the Upper East Side of Manhattan next month. Uzi Ben-Avraham, a co-owner, plans to stock labels like Helmut Lang and Paul Smith alongside Pepe Jeans and Levis, aiming the selection at a fashion-conscious clientele.
They are shoppers like Chris Colon, 29, who browsed the Fifth Avenue store of H&M, the cheap chic chain from Sweden, last Friday with no particular goal in mind. Mr. Colon, who works in the operations department at Salomon Smith Barney, and wore a salmon pink shirt from Banana Republic, finds clothes shopping both relaxing and gratifying. "I like to treat myself," he said. "You work hard so you want to enjoy what you have."
A fan of Latin music and hip-hop, he also buys CD's, but finds himself shopping more often for clothes, at least once a week, usually during lunch hour. "It's a good way to get out of the office," he said.
Several yards away, Tod Michael, 20, an actor who recently moved to New York from Portland, Ore., considered a denim newsboy cap and sleeveless gray wool sweater. "For me shopping is recreation," said Mr. Michael, who was dressed in a pleat-front black linen shirt from Structure and boot-cut pants. "I like to buy fun things, not basic things I already have."
Young men are dressing these days with a new refinement and style-consciousness, retailers say. "For a while they were all caught up in the casualization of America trend — T-shirts and khakis and five-pocket jeans," Mr. Lundgren said. "Today they are dressing up, responding to a great deal of fashion that has been injected into the business."
Indeed, at stores like H&M youthful customers are gravitating toward the exotic or unusual. The store says its Moroccan-style denim men's tunics offered last May sold out within a month.
Few younger men need to be prodded to shop, dressing and spending on their own steam. "Guys have always shared a pack look, like girls," said Ms. Corlett, the retail consultant. "The difference now is that the guys are dressing themselves and not sending mom out to `buy me this or that.' "
Their alacrity stems from having grown up in households where mothers work, Ms. Corlett said. "These moms tend to leave $50 on the counter and say, `Get your own jeans for the dance Friday night.' "
Many men no longer find clothes-shopping stigmatizing. The younger ones, especially, are "liberated from the fear that shopping will brand them as insufficiently masculine," said Michael Weiss, president of the Limited brand's new Express for Men stores. He added that starting at the age of 14, "boys are coming to the realization that it's O.K. to cry at a movie and maybe to buy a pink shirt."
Express for Men, formerly known as Structure, has seized on this shift in attitude as a business opportunity, balancing its inventory of casual styles with $90 jeans, $300 suits and $600 shearling maxicoats.
"Young men are interested in looking cool and they are where the growth is," Mr. Weiss said. "A lot of guys have had enough of that sloppy, beat up collegiate look, the clothing equivalent of beer."
He might have been thinking of Thomas McGlynn, 19, who strolled into the Roosevelt Field Mall's men's Express and made a beeline for a wall of gem-tone stretch cotton shirts. A devout reader of magazines like Maxim and Gourmet, Mr. McGlynn drops about $150 a month on clothes from stores like Kenneth Cole and Bergdorf Goodman in Manhattan, and on grooming products like Aveda hair balms.
Michael Gerbovnka, a 27-year-old finance manager for a cosmetics company, lives in Hoboken, N.J., but shops in Manhattan on his lunch hour. At H&M, he inspected a pair of $50 dark-washed, sand-caked jeans. "I've gotten into trendier clothes," Mr. Gerbovnka said. He was heading for the door, when a stack of T-shirts stopped him in his tracks. "When I find just the right dark one to wear with my jeans, then I'll be set to go."
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