An American icon revived
American writers use the name 'Brooks Brothers' as character shorthand. When a male strolls across the page of an American novel and is described as dressed by Brooks Brothers, the reader may presume the following: the man is well-off, well educated and highly likely to be white, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant.
In Donna Tartt's extraordinary murder story The Secret History, an impoverished young man joins the college elite by simply donning a second-hand jacket which is 'wonderful, old Brooks Brothers, unlined silk, ivory with stripes of peacock green'. The imposter knows the score; even better, he claims that the jacket is his grandfather's because he realises that anything too new (especially money) is suspect.
WASPs (white, Anglo-Saxon, Protestants) and preppies (that word with which Ali McGraw so consistently insulted Ryan O'Neal in Love Story ) like Brooks Brothers. Its quiet traditionalism soothes them. And it speaks softly another word supposed to be banned from the vocabulary of the United States but which is still alive and well in the late 1990s: class.
The trouble is that the past decade has also seen an explosion in the whole arena of menswear. Relative upstarts such as Hugo Boss, Tommy Hilfiger and Calvin Klein have leapt into the fray without so much as an engraved calling card. Brooks Brothers, dithering around in an excess of polite disdain for the vulgarities of commercialism, has had to go through a painful rite of passage.
What has emerged as a new identity is not altogether clear - it is still feeling its way, as it freely admits - but if you are curious to witness the further growth of an American retailing legend you may now do so at Seibu, where Brooks Brothers has set up shop. The outlet in Seibu Windsor House opened last week, the one in Seibu Pacific Place opens tomorrow.
Brooks Brothers' arrival in Hong Kong certainly provides a rare opportunity to buy garments from a company which describes itself as 'Clothiers'. It was founded in 1818, which means it has measured generations of Astors and Goulds and Rockefellers and Vanderbilts.
When Abraham Lincoln stood up to deliver his second inaugural address in 1865, he was dressed by Brooks Brothers (and, alas, when he decided to go to the theatre five weeks later, he plucked a Brooks Brothers suit from his wardrobe - an outfit which would soon be ventilated by his assassin, John Wilkes Booth).