Dress Like a Man
In a changing world of men’s fashion, retailers are tailoring their stores to fit
by Joey Hood
While this new paradigm of American manliness chafes every fiber in Bob Knight’s bloated body, fashion mavens have taken it upon themselves to ply consumers with male-centric boutiques and consignment shops to sate the swelling sartorial appetite. It’s niche marketing at its manliest, and Nashville retailers are scratching that niche.
It’s a GQ culture, in which evolving models of metrosexuality and ubersexuality are rammed down the collective male subconscious with a size 10 Cole Haan and a tube of moisturizer. The scruffy sex appeal of gun-slinging John Wayne and gum-shoeing Tom Selleck has been shaved clean and replaced by a grit-free male who power-lunches on mâche while counting down the minutes ’til his manicure.
While this new paradigm of American manliness chafes every fiber in Bob Knight’s bloated body, fashion mavens have taken it upon themselves to ply consumers with male-centric boutiques and consignment shops to sate the swelling sartorial appetite. It’s niche marketing at its manliest, and Nashville retailers are scratching that niche.
“There were all these consignment stores in Nashville for women, and I thought why not do one for men?” says Klane Maples, who entered the fashion fray last year with his seersucker-swathed clothing store, Flip.
At its low-key location at 909 Eighth Ave. S., Flip draws a nattily clad customer base of straight-laced corporate clients and Music Row stylesters. “We had our first Rolls Royce pull up outside the other day,” Maples says.
With his pithy catchphrase, “It’s hip to Flip,” Maples, a toothy twenty-something with a skillfully tattered baseball cap slung slightly askew, hoards upscale men’s designer clothes at near-liquidation-sale prices. The selection includes such staple name brands as Armani, Brooks Brothers, Zegna, Liberty and Jos. A. Banks, most of which have been gently worn by a previous owner and drastically marked down while still in near-pristine condition. Flip divvies up the sale price, keeping 60 percent for the store and doling 40 percent out to the consigning client.
“Talk of the Town did a story about us, and (host) Harry Chapman wasn’t sold on the idea of buying clothes after they’ve been worn by another man,” Maples said. “But I tried to tell him. ‘Do you get restaurant utensils and stick them into your mouth?’ It’s pretty much the same thing.”
In a peculiar twist of life-imitating-online-commerce, though, the storefront enterprises mirror the model of online boutiques that quickly capitalized on the Internet as an infinite browsing space for virtual racks of Burberry jackets and Von Dutch tees, for men who don’t like to shop in high-pressure sales environments. Rick Reese, proprietor of Dress For Less Clothiers in Englewood, Colo., runs one such website—www.d4less.net—which attracts many Nashville-area visitors. “I don’t run a consignment shop per se, but I can see where you are going with that,” says Reese, who estimates his inventory is about a 50/50 split between leftover goods from Neiman Marcus and unwanted threads from everyday web browsers. He has even sourced previous-season items from local stores including the tony Oxford Shop in Green Hills.
Joe: not so average
On the opposite end of the style spectrum, Church Street’s Joe is a new-fangled upstart with a primarily gay clientele. Joey Brown and Todd Roman, owners of the cosmopolitan gay club Play Dance Bar, opened the high-end fashion boutique last December in the space once occupied by the Global Market. The store carries a mid- to upper-end selection of jeans, shirts, underwear and swimwear.
On the opposite end of the style spectrum, Church Street’s Joe is a new-fangled upstart with a primarily gay clientele. Joey Brown and Todd Roman, owners of the cosmopolitan gay club Play Dance Bar, opened the high-end fashion boutique last December in the space once occupied by the Global Market. The store carries a mid- to upper-end selection of jeans, shirts, underwear and swimwear.
Much of Joe’s aesthetic, specifically the bright-colored designer tees and Lycra bikini-brief underwear, seems lifted from a Gay Times fashion spread that might never see the light of day. It remains to be seen whether Nashville’s fashion scene is ready to adopt the look, but it’s encouraging to know it’s available.
Bloke is it
Meanwhile, spanking-new striped Chinos and carefully distressed khakis are on the block at Bloke, at 2900 12th Ave. S., in the heart of the re-envisioned “hipster” district, where owner Melody Malloy packs her store with the bossy panache of Maxim magazine. Perky-breasted cartoon housewives adorn Bloke’s walls with post-feminism balloon blurbs such as “You surprised me, dear, I thought it was the milkman”; spit-polished chrome Cutlass fenders rest on a shelf above Trovata cargo shorts and Fez polo pullovers; and Kanye West’s Muzak for alpha males thumps through the sound system. Malloy, who calls herself “a guy’s girl,” is an avid collector of Albert Vargas’ naughty housewife pop art and, it should be noted, is on the mailing list for Hugh Hefner’s bunny ranch house parties.
The self-described “black sheep” of a record industry family, Malloy says that her clients vary from fresh-out-of-Belmont, music biz ladder-climbers to fashion-conscious metrosexuals fluent in the vernacular of Queer Eye. “We just have a real mix,” Malloy says. “And on weekends, I bring out the beer and have a football game playing on the big-screen television for everybody to watch while they play pool.”
The self-described “black sheep” of a record industry family, Malloy says that her clients vary from fresh-out-of-Belmont, music biz ladder-climbers to fashion-conscious metrosexuals fluent in the vernacular of Queer Eye. “We just have a real mix,” Malloy says. “And on weekends, I bring out the beer and have a football game playing on the big-screen television for everybody to watch while they play pool.”
Design graduate Malloy is building her competitive advantage on unique apparel such as a one-of-a-kind tees and sport jackets from independent distributors. “I want my customers to know that only four other people in Nashville have that exact same shirt if they buy it here. We only buy smalls, mediums, larges and extra-larges of everything in stock.”
It’s a much-appreciated strategy in an age when a man’s worth is measured by the size of his moisturizer. John Wayne and Magnum P.I. would never have cat-fought if they’d showed up in the same chambray shirt, but with men these days—metrosexual, ubersexual or anything else—you can’t be too careful.
