Can we talk about clothing brands and target demographics?

[CrkdLttrCrkdLttr]

Because I’m thinking about the brands that form the core of my ‘going out to meet other grown ups’ wardrobe, and laughing at the Margaret Howell mail shot I’ve just opened. (Socks and sandals photo.) Beautiful young model, and each garment will be wonderfully well made - but I know no one under fifty who wears MH. That’s fine - but I wish the marketing acknowledged the fact.

When a brand does make an effort to engage with the real buyers of its clothes I’m full of awe and gratitude - Raey at Matches is usually great at this.

Studio Nicholson hovers somewhere in between. Again, everyone I know (in the UK) who wears their clothes is older and richer than me, probably in a creative profession. Not a wispy 20 year old.

I never used to care. But I’m wondering if marketing is the reason 99% of the middle aged and older women on MN exclaim that there are no decent clothes for them. There are - but not every brand tells you so.

@botempI love that white dress. It's incredibly wearable, would suit a lot of figures.

Thanks for the Aligne link, whoever posted it. A lovely look overall.

Models used in publicity or on their websites? Geographical location? How people you know dress? The clothes themselves? Because obviously this is the central point of this thread - what makes people, women in particular, believe certain brands are for them.

@CrkdLttrCrkdLttr

Specifically wrt Batsheva ... I'm in the US, so basing it on what I've seen here. DD1 (32) would wear Batsheva if it was available on Rent the Runway. I would too even though I'm not a dress woman for the most part and have a little bit to go in order for a Batsheva dress to fit the way I'd like it to.

I like the fact that the style is quite conservative yet still edgy. In fact, the conservative look is part of the edge. I tend not to wear bare-all or even bare-quite-a-lot styles, and I see a trend toward that attitude in the current teen and young adult styles worn around here - baggy sweatpants and hoodies with crop tops, etc. Plus, cottagecore, and balletcore are established # lifestyle goals. There's crochet everywhere, and hygge. Badges of 'cores' are everywhere too. I think modestcore will be a thing soon, not necessarily involving the statement Batsheva is, but definitely a fashion tribe. There are a lot of Muslims in America looking for clothing that is contemporary but neither corporate nor markedly ethnic. And lots of non Muslims who don't want to look completely basic and uninspired but still don't want to go all the way to ripped, revealing, rapper, form fitting, more cut out than fabric, blingy, boybait styles.

Then there is this appeal -
“It’s not just like, ‘I’m covered,’ as in I’m covering my shameful body,” Batsheva says. “It’s like, ‘I’m wearing a big puffy piece of something. Don’t fuck with me.’"
www.townandcountrymag.com/style/fashion-trends/a38199995/batsheva-hay-alexei-hay-family-portrait/
For DD1 I suspect this would be a major attraction. It's quite a subversive look. And it's fun.
While Batsheva is what I would call expensive, DD1,has been making a decent salary since she graduated, not unusual for US grads. This makes it a choice for younger American women.

“I feel it looks really good worn on someone who’s a little bit androgynous and wearing sneakers,” she says. “This is not really the dress for Pamela Anderson or Kim Kardashian.”
www.theguardian.com/fashion/2018/nov/25/batsheva-hay-interview-fashion-designer-former-lawyer-new-york-frills
It's really a counter to mainstream depictions of the feminine. While it's kind of nostalgic to me (I'm a Carpenters fan, and love Abba and Europop of the 70s and 80s, and I have a pair of high heel clogs that are identical to the ones pictured in the Guardian article, in red) it's also got an edge and a very modern feel that slots right in with other style trends.

There's a fine line between prairie / crunchy side of the 70s style and cosplay or costume, and I think the Batsheva line finds the right balance. The look has subtly evolved since its beginnings; for an individual looking at her dresses and hearing them call your name, I think you need to consider the line all the same.

An American brand broadly similar to Margaret Howell (without the tailoring) would be Eileen Fisher. I think they appeal to the same sort of middle aged woman - the fact that Marie Kondo is the flag bearer for minimalism tells you something about the Eileen Fisher style.
www.eileenfisher.com/our-brand.html?country=US&currency=USD

Both brands are consciously fairly drab, one is more angular and tailores (MH). Fisher's design sense was inspired by the Japanese aesthetic, and features a minimalistic, simple shape, lack of fussy detail, and ease of movement.

Her market in the US tends to be women over 40 (no menswear) who are well heeled, like natural fabrics, care about the environment and workers' rights, and other social issues. There's possibly a different market in Asia, where trends operate a little differently, in a different cultural context. The fact that Japanese teenagers wear Margaret Howell only tells you something about Japanese teens. I personally think Margaret Howell clothing is a little coy in its retro vibe, costumey without the sense of fun of Batsheva. I think there's a specific kind of younger woman who would wear MH - the female equivalent of the bearded men who take up knitting and craft beer and fly fishing. Older women who wear MH are woen who care about quality and can afford it and don't care about fast fashion but care enough about clothes to buy something that identifies them as women who in former decades would have lived in sturdy tweeds, wools, cashmere, and pearls.

Appreciate your view of Batsheva, @mathanxiety, as it’s a brand I only see online here, rather than being worn. Interesting use of the word conservative! Here we’d say deliberately ironic and playful - a knowing pastiche of past representations of femininity.

I’d disagree about any commonality between MH and Eileen Fisher, though! Completely different vibe. (I’ve been aware of the latter for a long time and would kick and scream if anyone tried to make me wear any of it.) MH is cool (or whatever the 2023 equivalent might be of that word.) EF is entirely what the word ‘conservative’ conjures up - safe, unadventurous, humourless. To me it’s what ‘nice’ American SAHMs wear in a million streamed TV series and films set in the sort of leafy suburban residential areas we just don’t have in England. Here, MH is urban (doesn’t matter how many Barbour collabs they play with) and worn by creative professionals. (At least among my friends and peers!) I’d also say it’s the type of aesthetic that comes as a relief to women who’ve lived through several other phases - punk, goth, New Romantic, 80s power suits … There are actually plenty of places one can shop for the full-on tweed experience, even now. MH is a bit too minimalist to replace that.

(Typed slowly while coffee grinding, so crossed @Enheduanna - but clearly we perceive MH in the same way.)

I agree, MH is decidedly urban and is accidentally cool (as opposed to trying for it). I've always found it had an interesting paradox of very much referencing the industrial but doing so with such attention to detail that it reads as craft, that alongside the interesting English aspect is probably at the root of its success in Japan and the rest of affluent Asia.

There's a larger thing of it whenever I'm in the east end of London where you see the offspring of the middle classes working their creative jobs in spendy industrial workwear inspired clothes and it has me wondering what the original inhabitants of a hundred years ago would make of it all.

Oh this is fabulous! My brain is in retreat after repeated 🤧🤒🥴- so it’s troublesome to pull together and express all the threads of meaning and significance that inform my relationship to MH.

I’m realising the androgyny is part of what makes my finger hover warily over my keypad. In my youth I was often mistaken for a boy - but couldn’t have cared less about the gaze of stupid, probably racist, strangers. Why would they stop me taking advantage of the sheer glory of vintage men’s tweed coats or cunningly pleated dress shirts? Or M&S cashmere cardigans, or boots and overalls from the farm shop down the road? Now I’m older, and the world is more complicated, such mistakes would be tedious, so I’m more conscious of not piling on too many indeterminate garments all at once. Besides which, my finally-growing-into-itself face is becoming quite imperious - so actually wants dowager duchess accoutrements.

And yes - ‘craft’ and deliberate visual references to an industrial past are the lifeblood of hipsters of any generation - if they wear tweed it’s only with extreme irony, not as a birthright.

I wish I could find more there that suits me. As it is I always leave the Wigmore Hall-adjacent shop (favourite location) with gifts for other people, and their houses, but rarely with anything for myself beyond the odd indestructible vest or t shirt.

(There should have been a ‘thank you’ to the two posts above mine!)

Hmm Ok I'm now trying to pin down my MH devotion.

Urban - yes guilty as charged. And I don't mind hipsters either - they can be a bit pompous sometimes but they're generally polite, at least to my face, and they make good coffee.

The quality certainly has a lot to do with it. I think I've already said that what struck me about my first ever MH purchase was how it looked just as good at the end of the day as it did the beginning. But that's not the only reason.

It's also very much about the presentation. I've always enjoyed an androgynous vibe and, although I flirt with other looks sometimes, it's the one I always come back to. I don't have an androgynous body any more but figuring out how to make it work for me in 2023 is part of the fun.

And then I think it's partly the fashion-but-not-fashion aspect to it. That's not to say I don't enjoy fashion, including fast fashion, because I do. But mostly I like a look that's modern but hard to pin down. Not classic or timeless - because to me they mean different things - just slightly off the fashion radar, and I think she does that well.

I rate MH for its super-plain, not try-hard style. I've just bought an ochre sweatshirt with a crossover collar, very similar to the style my mum knitted for us as kids. I shall wear it with Annette Gortz chinos from last summer, and mustard trainers from next month. It's a version of (nice) jeans, shirt and sweater that I wear all the time because it works for walking the dog, lunch with friends and going to the pub. Lots of basics from Uniqlo. And while I live in the rural SW now, the mindset is much more urban gentlewoman. The outerwear does tend to come from the feed merchant though!

Think Peggy and Nancy Blackett from Swallows and Amazons, grown-up tomboy-ish. And looking back at old photos from childhood, my style has hardly changed in 60 years.

Nothing against hipsters, @Floisme . But I do think they diverge from @mathanxiety‘s formerly tweedy rural landowning class (in style and attitude).

I also disagree with the comparison between Eileen Fisher and MH, the two brands couldn't be more different. MH has always been edgy, since the 1970s, in her use of men's tailoring in women's clothing, and even now still has some unusual cuts and styles. Whereas Eileen Fisher comes across as bland, conservative, safe, etc., and also quite feminine, in contrast with MH which, as others have said, aims for a more androgynous look.

This is a great article in the Guardian from a few years ago: www.theguardian.com/fashion/2020/jun/14/margaret-howell-50-years-design-katharine-hepburn

Hmm, I'm not sure MH aiming for androgyny necessarily, more less concerned with the difference between masculinity/femininity and works towards something universal. There's something Bauhaus about her approach, Jil Sander (the designer not the current brand) is similar in approach but not in aesthetic.

Agree it's nothing like Eileen Fisher though, I don't think there's really a comparable US brand.

Interesting because Jil Sander is a pretty reliable line for me, but MH, while I admire it on the models, often isn't great. The JS stuff is often just that little bit more tailored, I think.

@mathanxiety

Interesting about Eileen Fisher. I was considerably younger when we left the US, but it was definitely fixed in my mind as drapey clothing for late middle aged women who'd given up on having style. Now that I am more or less that, I wonder if I'd see it differently? I did see an EF shop on Marylebone High Street a while back and noticed it had closed when I was there the other day, so it looks like it didn't quite hit the target. They did do some really nice linen bedding for a while!

They are cut differently, IME, @throwawayaway1. I’ve never met a MH pair of jeans or trousers that fitted me at at both waist and hips - they always seem problematically straight up and down. Whereas JS clothes always seemed to accommodate every part of my body.

Yes the way they cut is very different, Jil Sander definitely recognises the body underneath but doesn't idealise into something, but doesn't treat it like a clothes hanger either. The focus is the garment and the hidden skill within. Even in something as overtly body conscious as attached from JS in the 90s, it doesn't read as look at my body. The current Jil Sander designers have built on that and some of their pieces sit really close to haute couture in terms of construction and finishes.

Weirdly the MH trousers fit me almost perfectly (bit tighter on the bum and thighs than I suspect intended) but I find them intensely dull 🤐

Loving this conversation but popping in with a brief interruption for Flo to share this black vintage wool blend skirt on charity eBay just in case. You have 4 days to decide!

It doesn't read as "look at my body" because there are no secondary sexual features to look at bo. That could have almost have been photographed on a pretty young man. My DS could wear it convincingly. The FT had an interesting article on current supermodels last weekend; hard to determine the genders. It really isn't about flattery at the moment, imo. Fashion is quite seriously intellectual or "cheap". I hate using that word because it sounds like a slur on all the (probably much younger than us) women and men who would welcome a better segue into relationships. I currently despair for my stylish, handsome (but a bit neurotic) DS23 who is not in love.

I'm a boring shopper - 90% from Net-a-Porter solely because items arrive at the house and can be sent back with minimal effort and I never have to see myself in a poorly lit fitting room mirror, but I'm really feeling like they've lost their way this year. I'm finding their buys are varying from uninspiring to ridiculous. Is it just me?

Yes, EF is definitely suburban, and also lake house-y. More casual than MH.

I don't see MH as cool. I do see it as a retro / British pastiche, in the same way all those Keep Calm And Whatever mugs and cushions were. I'd borrow your phrase and say 'a knowing pastiche of past representations of Britishness', except I don't think it's 'knowing' - to me it's backwards looking, in a way that tips it into caricature, while a brand like Ralph Lauren, which attempts to embody Americanness, seems to be ever looking and moving forward and avoids the element of caricature.

A good deal of MH is what I'd imagine Julian, Dick, Anne, and George would wear when they grew up.

Perhaps not Anne. But definitely George.