Is J.Crew Back?
Taking a look at the debut collection from the new J.Crew men’s creative director Brendon Babenzien.
Mondays are pretty boring in terms of fashion-related content but the way we started off the week this past Monday was a bit different—we got to see Brendon Babenzien’s debut collection for J.Crew men’s!! The hype for this has been building up ever since Babenzien was announced as creative director of J.Crew men’s back in May of last year.
This news did more than just build hype, it also answered some questions I had about something unrelated to J.Crew at the time—Noah’s recent collections suddenly made more sense to me. It seemed that over the course of a few recent seasons Noah ended up falling short in delivering pieces that excited me. Seeing similar pieces across collections, and not-so-fun collaborations that could have had better execution are all part of what made me less excited about new drops from Noah. This isn’t to say the items are bad, the quality is still there, but after you’re seeing similar pieces over and over you kind of start to get over it.
But the announcement of Babenzien splitting his talents in two—Noah, and J.Crew—made me realize that the reason for the lack of really good pieces from Noah recently could be because the focus had shifted to J.Crew! With that in mind, it totally made sense to me at the time—I kind of eased off on critiquing Noah for a bit because I wanted to see how Babenzien was going to tap his creativity and apply it to J.Crew. Splitting your creative flow between two big projects will have its own ups and downs and we need to remember that before we start going off on your judgments, but sometimes you need to speak the truth because it is what it is.
When I woke up to the debut there was excitement in the air, everyone was talking about it, I had to take a moment to really take it all in—I recommend everyone to always check out any collection a few times throughout the day or even a week before making your final decision. Most of the time you’ll find yourself liking and disliking different parts of a collection and all of that depends on your mood, which can change throughout the day so don’t rule anything out right away!
The initial collection felt like we went back in time, which could be a good thing because nostalgia is hot right now so it makes sense. At first glance, this reminded me of the J.Crew that I saw 10 years ago, and maybe that’s exactly what Babenzien wanted to do with it, but in today’s fashion world there are a lot of brands that are experimenting with new approaches while maintaining the core of the brand—something that I feel Babenzien didn’t really do. A good example of this is Virgil’s, Louis Vuitton—I’m also not comparing Babenzien to Virgil, and vice versa, what I am trying to say is I wish there were more standout pieces that would keep J.Crew’s core while introducing something we haven’t seen before.
Maybe I was looking for the wrong answers in Babenzien’s work and projecting that onto this collection.
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