Previously,
Todd held leading roles at Polo Ralph Lauren, The Gap and J.Crew. As head of
menswear at J.Crew, he created the J. Crew Liquor Store in New York City, a first-of-its-kind concept offering a
curated selection of apparel and lifestyle products. He has also been
recognized twice by the CFDA as a Menswear Designer of the Year nominee and a
CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund finalist.
Todd is currently based in New York City and has three daughters.
https://www.toddsnyder.com/pages/bio
Todd Snyder
founded his namesake label in 2011 in New York City. Born and raised in Ames,
Iowa, Snyder moved to New York to design outerwear for Polo Ralph Lauren before
becoming the Director of Menswear for the Gap Inc. Afterwards, Snyder became
SVP of menswear at J. Crew, where he introduced formal wear and created
collaborations with heritage brands, including Timex, Red Wing Shoes, Thomas
Mason and Alden.
Todd Snyder
the brand launched its first menswear collection in the Fall of 2011, at
retailers Bergdorf Goodman, Ron Herman, and Neiman Marcus. Snyder is inspired
by Savile Row craftsmanship, military tailoring, and New York style. In 2012,
the fashion label was picked up by Barneys New York and select Nordstrom
stores.
American
Eagle purchased the Todd Snyder clothing brand, and Snyder's Tailgate brand of
vintage-inspired collegiate sportswear, for $ 11 million in November 2015.
Style
The Man Who Taught Men to Love Clothes
Todd Snyder is the man who slimmed down your suit,
persuaded you to shop in a liquor store, and got you to buy a turtleneck. He's
created a world where men can care about furniture. And American manufacturing.
And the kind of boots usually seen on construction sites. Here, the most
influential menswear designer of his generation explains how he convinced
ordinary guys to care about what they wear.
BY SAM
SCHUBE
PHOTOGRAPHY
BY DAVID WILLIAMS
February 6,
2018
https://www.gq.com/story/todd-snyder-taught-men-to-loves-clothes
A little
after 9:30 A.M. on a crisp late November day, a potential customer tried to
enter designer Todd Snyder’s flagship store, located a camel-coated walk across
26th Street from Madison Square Park. Snyder watched as the guy rattled the
doors. The store would open, as it does Monday through Saturday, at 10 A.M. (11
on Sundays.) The guy would have to come back.
This stuck
in Snyder’s craw.
“Four a
day,” he says. That’s the number of guys who don’t buy Champion-collab sweats
or Tricker’s-collab shoes or Snyder-brand T-shirts with the little button on
the pocket because they’re too early—too eager—to enter. Still, he’s tickled.
“I just love that. I just sit here all the time and just watch.”
Snyder
explains all this to me as we sit in a scaled-down branch of El Rey, the
hipster-beloved downtown coffee shop, that happens to be located inside his
store. Snyder looks not unlike an off-duty superhero transported from the
1950s—maybe six-two, sturdy and strong-jawed. He acts like one, too. He’s
Midwestern polite and shockingly even-keeled, not just for a fashion designer,
sure, but for any kind of human alive in 2018.
This
morning, Snyder sits with his back to the wall and observes, placidly noting
whether everything is in its Snyder-approved place: the new barber for the
in-house barbershop (needs keys), the preparation of the eggs on the cafe's
breakfast sandwiches (“How come sometimes it’s scrambled?”). The next time we
meet, also at the store, he'll be derailed within seconds by the height of a
sale sign occupying the main window. He’d like for it to be raised ten inches,
he tells an employee, and then greets me with a bear-paw handshake. The store
is his magnum opus. It won’t ever be perfect, or finished (if you want, you can
buy the rugs; two people have), but that won’t stop Snyder from trying to make
it so. Because it’s here that the Todd Snyder project is most painstakingly
articulated. The store is a proposition: This is everything a man needs.
These days,
the menswear labels that show on European runways, flood department stores, and
blow up Instagram accounts prize novelty, artful ugliness, and the almighty
logo. In comparison, Snyder might scan as safe, or just not interested in
playing the same game. But as granddad sneakers and all-embroidery-everything
rise, peak, and fall out of favor, he’ll be here, tucked away just north of
Madison Square Park, selling khakis and Alden shoes and bodywash to guys who
trust him to do what they themselves can’t: make them look and feel like better
versions of themselves.
You’ve seen
that better version because he’s now everywhere. He’s your frat brother who
lived in cargo shorts, and then showed up to your wedding in a suit with a
shockingly slim lapel. He’s your actual brother, who arrived at Thanksgiving
wearing an uncharacteristically dapper topcoat, a pair of tailored sweatpants
from a heritage sportswear company, and a pair of reissued sneakers from a
different heritage sportswear company. He’s your coworker, whose watch—vaguely
military face, colorful fabric band—earned him compliments after the marketing
meeting. Maybe he’s you, who finally pulled the trigger on a turtleneck. (It
looks great, by the way. You’re totally pulling it off.)
This is the
Great Every-Guy Makeover, and it's happening for many reasons. Perhaps the most
significant one: it's happening because Todd Snyder knows exactly what guys are
willing to wear to look good.
Snyder
himself is Exhibit A. He wears mostly his own clothes—a Todd Snyder camel
topcoat with Ralph Lauren jeans, or Todd Snyder black chinos and sneakers that
Snyder designed in collaboration with New Balance—to each of our meetings.
These are his staples, best characterized by their deep respect for American
manufacturing, but also the nonzero chance that wearing them might get you mistaken
for a Sporty European or a Reformed Sneakerhead or a Successful Turtleneck
Wearer. The Todd Snyder aesthetic isn’t overtly challenging, but I wouldn’t
call it boring, either. It’s clothing from an imaginary Menswear’s Greatest
Hits catalog, a brand that’s just as happy to educate a curious guy on the slim
sweatpant revolution as it is to sell four-figure outerwear to that guy three
years from now. It’s clothing that marks Steve McQueen as the high point of
American style, which is no longer the hip thing to do but is also really hard
to argue with.
Todd Snyder
isn’t the most famous American menswear designer of his generation. But he just
might be the most influential.
The people
who become movers and shakers in American fashion generally come up in
high-fashion places: New York (Ralph Lauren, Marc Jacobs), or San Francisco
(Alexander Wang, John Elliott). Todd Snyder is from Huxley, Iowa. Growing up,
Huxley, then a town of 2,000, was not a fashion capital. “Probably half the
kids went to college, half didn't,” Snyder says. “Most of them were farmers.”
But between parents Rosa, an artist, and Dennis, an engineer, and his own
bone-deep interest in getting dressed, life as anything but a designer seemed
kind of tough to imagine.
His career has
progressed with the near-certainty of someone who knows he’s doing the only
thing he’s meant to. It’s also been marked by a willingness to make tasteful
things for people who didn’t yet know to want them, which meant he had to teach
himself first. Snyder spent summers doing draftsmanship for dad, and eventually
landed a gig at a men’s shop in Des Moines. There he met a Ralph Lauren rep: “I
was like, ‘I want to do what that person's doing.’"
So he did.
In the early ‘90s, after college in Iowa (his nickname: “GQ”), he called the
Ralph Lauren offices until he won an interview, then an internship. The
band-collar shirt he cut and sewed himself convinced a higher-up to let Snyder
be more than a coffee boy. (While telling this anecdote, Snyder made a sort of mental
note: “Band collars are kind of back now. It was oversized. Actually, it would
be very good right now.”)
From Ralph
Lauren he went to J.Crew, then the Gap, then back to Ralph to work for John
Varvatos and alongside would-be menswear luminaries like Tim Hamilton and Frank
Muytjens. In that era, Thom Browne and Michael Bastian moved through the design
studio, too. The whole thing was to the nascent world of menswear what the
University of Kentucky now is to the NBA. “It was the university,” Snyder
recalls.
Snyder
returned to the Gap—Old Navy, actually—to be reunited with CEO Mickey Drexler, the
retail guru who built Gap into a powerhouse in the '90s. Old Navy was new. “It
was Mickey’s little sandbox,” Snyder tells me. “It really showed me how to do
mass and make it look amazing, but it doesn't have to cost a fortune.”
Drexler was
fired, then resurfaced a year later at J.Crew, a musty brand in desperate need
of a reboot. He convinced Snyder to come over in 2004 to run menswear.
“At Ralph,
the team would create these rig rooms,” Snyder explains, to show off the
season’s collection. “They would spend days building this room that you would
walk in and be like, ‘This is magical.’ It would change your point of view.”
Linking
back up with Drexler, and having learned how to launch a brand with Old Navy,
Snyder had an idea: He would take that rig room and turn it from industry
secret to the store itself. He’d make the place where men shopped less about
the clothes, and more about seeing themselves in a tasteful loft with an
impeccable vinyl collection and art on the walls—and, yeah, they’d wear shades
of camel while sitting on the tufted leather Chesterfield. In doing so, he'd
pull off the impossible: convince guys who might spend a Saturday in the gym
that shopping, done the right way, could activate the same joy and curiosity
receptors sparked by every other leisure activity worth pursuing.
It wouldn’t
be an exaggeration to say that, in his four years running menswear at J.Crew,
Snyder fundamentally changed the way American men dress, as well as the way
they shop. “At the time, men's was always in the basement,” Snyder explains.
“It was always the back of the catalog. You were an afterthought. You were
always in the back of the store. You were always the step-child.” But every
time he’d set up one of those rig rooms to show Drexler that season’s men’s
collection, Drexler would leave convinced they needed to open a men’s-only
J.Crew store. The business side, Drexler tells me over the phone, always said
no. Eventually Drexler secured a yes. He enlisted marketing savant Andy Spade,
and, in the summer of 2008, the trio found an old liquor store on a quiet block
in TriBeCa that, with a little elbow grease and a tasteful neon sign, became as
much a clubhouse as a shop.
“That just
changed everything for J.Crew,” Snyder recalls. “I knew it was going to be
great, but I had no idea how great it was going to be. That store alone did
almost as much business as the store on 5th Avenue.”
And then,
while the new everyday-is-Casual-Friday ethos was taking over everyone’s job, J.Crew
launched a suit, the Ludlow: slim, approachable, affordable. (Until J.Crew's
legal department interfered, Snyder says, the suit was to be called the
"Tribeca.") “There was a lifestyle we had at the Liquor Store, and
the Ludlow suit became the uniform of the time,” he tells me. “The Alden
wingtip, the longwing, I guess they call it? That became the other part of the
uniform. The rolled-up jean became the other part of the uniform. There were a
lot of things that were kind of birthed at the Liquor Store.”
It’s worth
pointing out that Snyder didn’t invent that uniform single-handedly—it had long
existed in out-of-print copies of style Take Ivy and on blogs like A Continuous
Lean. What Snyder did was figure out how to sell a real fashion moment to
skittish guys who were used to thinking of their closets as a series of
checkboxes meant to be ticked. How do you get skeptical guys to trust your
clothing? You pair them with things they already trust. If you’re selling
trimmer-than-ever khakis, set them next to beautiful Indy boots—literally named
because Indiana Jones wore them—from 134-year-old American shoemaker Alden. At
the Liquor Store you could buy a new shawl-collar cardigan and a vintage Rolex.
Snyder learned that if you can’t do it better than someone else, don’t—go get
the best and sell them, too.
“If you
look at the world today, collaboration has become kind of the word of the
moment,” Drexler recounts. And it’s true: collaboration is perhaps the marker
of cool in 2018. Of course, Snyder’s job was never to chase “cool” quite so
plainly—it was to fraction off the portion of cool that regular guys could
stomach, and help them integrate it into their lives and wardrobes.
That year,
menswear, in the most traditional sense, was booming—not yet dominated by logos
and streetwear, but by suede derbies and slim cargo pants and ultra-dense
oxford shirts. In other words: by stuff Todd Snyder had, if not invented, told
guys they were allowed to wear.
And then,
on a Friday not quite a month after the Liquor Store had opened, Todd Snyder
tendered his resignation. The following Monday, Lehman Brothers collapsed.
There’s a
whole list of things that American men from 25 to 50 now own because of Todd
Snyder’s clairvoyance. But Todd Snyder that man did not become Todd Snyder the
$10 million dollar business just because an Iowan guy knew that suits could be
a little slimmer. No, he owes much of his financial success in large part to
that bastion of dudeliness: the college-logo T-shirt.
Snyder quit
J.Crew in 2008, after four years, planning to start his eponymous line, but
he’d actually been working a side hustle since the ’90s: Tailgate Clothing Co.,
which he helped his father and brother launch with tees for Iowa State,
Snyder’s alma mater.
“Because I
worked at Ralph, I knew how to make really nice t-shirts that didn't shrink
three sizes,” Snyder said. “So we started doing it, and it took off. I was
still working my full-time job, so I helped [my brother] get started. And it
kept growing, each year. He started selling to Urban Outfitters. The hope was
that it would get big enough that I could go do my own thing.”
It did,
eventually selling at places like Bloomingdales, Gap, and Old Navy. Snyder had
built a career teaching mall companies how to tap into upwardly stylish guys,
then turned around sold those same companies the lounging-around tee those guys
still craved.
And then,
in 2011, Todd Snyder the label was born unto the world, racks on racks of
sweaters and button-fronts and outerwear that a million guys felt safe buying.
His first collection—shown in March 2012; all flannel and suede and tweed, dark
colors and military silhouettes—wasn’t terribly challenging, which explains why
it was a hit. “I want to blur the lines between the designer level and the
J.Crew level,” he says. “I think there is a white space in between the two.”
Every
collection since has put an arrow in that bullseye. His clothes are more
refined than the mall brands—finer fabrics, typically from Italy; 202-level
outerwear, like a calf-length, investment-grade shearling coat—with a price
point that won’t make you spit out your Orange Julius. (A dress shirt from
J.Crew will run you $70, where Snyder’s range from $125 to nearly $300.)
“You get
great clothes, and you get someone who has a specific vision,” explains GQ’s
creative director-at-large Jim Moore. But Snyder, he continued, also “wants to
dress real guys, wants to elevate their style, give them colors that are
complementary to their skin tone and give them shapes they can wear even though
they might be a 34 waist. Not to put him in that everyman category always, but
he has this way of elevating them, and solving problems for them, and giving
them confidence.”
Snyder has
emerged, less as a mythical Tom Ford-esque shaman of luxury or a Raf
Simons-grade artíste, but as a benevolent god of well-designed chinos.
Deification makes sense in that, if you want to boil down his success, it’s as
much about fortune-telling as it is craftsmanship. Snyder possesses an
awareness of what the everyman is willing to try out, and an even stronger
sense of what he’s not ready for. If influence is quantified by the number of
men a designer has taught how to dress, then Snyder is as influential as they
come.
Since that
first show, he’s opened, closed, and reopened City Gym, a Manhattan pop-up to
house his ever-growing collaboration with Champion. (Back in his Ralph days,
Snyder began collecting Champion sweatshirts; now, he says he’s got a thousand
of them in storage.) He’s opened—and closed—four stores in Japan. And, in 2015,
he parlayed the growth of Todd Snyder the business, underpinned by massive
online sales and the relentless success of Tailgate Clothing Co., into a sale
to American Eagle for about $11 million in cash and stock.
The working
arrangement gives Snyder the autonomy to stock and operate his Madison Square
palace as he sees fit, and it also gives him something vanishingly rare in the
fashion world: job security. He declined to share concrete numbers, but said
that his business had doubled in the last year—and more surprisingly, that
since opening the store in December 2016, all business (retail, wholesale, and
digital) was up 300 percent.
“People
love to catastrophize how retail is,” Snyder says. “Traditional brick and
mortar is dead, and people have to figure out how to change and evolve.” Which,
sure—true. But Snyder’s ace in the hole isn’t disruptive tech or high-concept
environments built for Instagram likes, and he knows it. “You got stores that
you can go into that you can't walk out with the clothes, they'll send them to
you,” he says, rattling it off. “Then you have stores that everything is
untucked.” A smirk. “Then you got stores that sell a lot of suits.” And then,
the kicker: “But they lack two things: taste and experience.”
Snyder’s
looking into launching a subscription box, he tells me, another way to build
his non-wholesale, non-flagship audience. (Eighty percent of his sales happen
online, the inverse of the 80-percent wholesale business that Snyder claims
most other designers hit.) But the box will be curated by a staff stylist, and,
anyway, the clothes will be certified-gold Todd Snyder classics. Where the
dot-commers have an algorithm, he has something better.
“You got
stores that you can go into that you can't walk out with the clothes, they'll
send them to you. Then you have stores that everything is untucked. Then you
got stores that sell a lot of suits. But they lack two things: taste and
experience.”
“I worked
for a Ralph Lauren. I've worked for J.Crew. I've worked for Gap,” he says. “And
20 years of that teaches you a lot. I know how to put all the pieces together,
whereas a lot of these brands don't have that.” Those brands, for instance, are
long on sneakers. Snyder, ever clairvoyant, knows better than to be.
"Sneakers are gonna be hard for guys to give up," he says. But he's
already seeing the look go wrong in the wild. "When you see the
sportscasters wearing sneakers," he says, it's time to move along to
what's next. (Did you know that Todd Snyder is one of three Crockett &
Jones stockists in New York?)
As for the
luxury brands that hover in the sky above? “I think what's happening right now
in fashion, we've benefitted from, because it is a bit polarizing,” he tells
me. The stratosphere-level high-fashion clothes that models, athletes, and
musicians showcase are intentionally challenging: embroidered out the wazoo or
willfully, hilariously ugly. Todd Snyder doesn’t do ugly. And when he
challenges, it’s with an elbow to the ribs to get a guy’s attention, not a poke
in the eyes.
Snyder
presented his fifteenth runway show this week, even though his guy has no
vested interest in watching models strut around in next season’s looks. “The
show has its audience,” he says—meaning the fashion industry editors he needs
to court for coverage, and who thrill to dramatic silhouettes and weird shapes,
to pokes in the eye—but “our customers rarely watch it.”
“We did
pleated pants last year,” he explains, “and they didn't do that well. So it
might be a couple of years ahead on that one.” Pleated pants, he thinks, are
his new turtleneck: a piece he introduced on the runway, teased into the main
line, and last year saw become a best-seller. As Todd Snyder knows better than
anyone else, the average American man’s wardrobe expands in painfully slow fits
and starts. And when you're ready for pleated pants—and he knows you will
be—he'll be here to get you into a pair.
21ST-CENTURY
MAN
Todd Snyder, a Designer Raised in Iowa, Is Big in
Japan
Credit...Bryan
Derballa for The New York Times
By Guy
Trebay
July 9,
2015
https://www.nytimes.com/2015/07/10/fashion/mens-style/todd-snyder-a-designer-raised-in-iowa-is-big-in-japan.html
Fashion
could use a little Iowa. That’s what stylish Japanese men think, and since when
has Japan ever been late to a trend?
This
particular one is spearheaded by as unlikely a design leader as you are likely
to encounter, a tall and rumpled 47-year-old Everyman with a thatch of sandy
hair, a cowcatcher jaw and a dad bod.
Todd Snyder
is pure, unadulterated Corn Belt, a fact of which he makes a conversational
bullet point at the least opportunity.
True, he
got out of the Hawkeye State soon after graduating from Iowa State University
in 1992, making a beeline for New York, where he honed a craft — that of men’s
wear design — at Ralph Lauren, the Gap and J. Crew. Yet wherever he goes, he
carries Huxley, Iowa (population 3,385), in his pocket.
“New York
is an anomaly,” Mr. Snyder said one rainy morning over a hearty egg breakfast
at Jeffrey’s Grocery in Greenwich Village. “You have to go about 40 miles
outside New York to begin to see what the rest of the country is like.”
During his
time at J. Crew, where Mr. Snyder became the senior vice president for men’s
wear design in 2004, he made serious inroads among style cognoscenti.
A former
high school football player, Mr. Snyder is the guy who modernized J. Crew’s
tailored clothes to attract a generation for which a suit was still an exotic
garment; who anticipated that formal wear, of all things, would turn out to be
of interest for male millennials; and who initiated many of the collaborations
with heritage labels (Alden, Red Wing, Timex) that became a template for the J.
Crew Liquor Store, itself now the model for the reinvention of the
haberdashery.
Yet even
after leaving J. Crew at 40 to found his own label, after being nominated for a
C.F.D.A. award and after being named one of GQ’s best new men’s wear designers,
Mr. Snyder remained an under-the-radar talent.
“The very
first show he did, the first real show on models, just blew me away,” said
Madeline Weeks, the fashion director of GQ, referring to Mr. Snyder’s 2011 New
York Fashion Week presentation.
Editors
went on to prove their enthusiasm by photographing Channing Tatum, John Legend
and the cast of “Saturday Night Live” in Mr. Snyder’s clothes.
Still, he
generated little of the buzz that has accompanied other debuts, and that, too,
may have had something to do with Mr. Snyder’s Midwestern reserve.
“There’s
just not a big ego there,” Ms. Weeks said.
Then, in a
turn of events few could have anticipated, Todd Snyder suddenly became famous.
If not quite a rock star, he is suddenly a mini-cult figure, a Next Big Thing,
a fashion name to know. If it happens you are unaware of this recent turn of
events, that is probably because it took place in Japan.
Backed by
the same group of Japanese investors who made the low-key British designer
Margaret Howell into a phenomenon far from home, Mr. Snyder opened a three-story
concept store in the Shibuya district of Tokyo last March. It was his own
steroidal version of the J. Crew Liquor Store, with elements of City Gym (a New
York pop-up he opened this year in partnership with Champion) thrown in.
Naturally,
shoppers at the Townhouse, as the Tokyo store is called, encounter the
well-proportioned suits that are a Snyder specialty, the high-end athletic wear
he designs better than almost anyone else and the accessories for which he
draws inspiration from his extensive collection of vintage haberdashery.
But they
also find on the store’s lower level an array of the goods Mr. Snyder produces
in collaboration with heritage brands he likes — including PF Flyers and
Superior bags — along with a selection of vintage watches, fine cameras, art
books, furniture, whiskeys and just about anything else that catches his
practiced eye.
“That’s
just something I’ve always been good at, making those connections,” Mr. Snyder
said. “I found companies that never did collaborations before were pretty open
to me. They weren’t threatened. Maybe it’s just an Iowa thing.”
While for
Tatsuya Takaku, creative director of Anglobal Ltd. — which is supporting Mr.
Snyder’s Japanese adventure — the Liquor Store concept was the designer’s
initial selling point, it was the prospect of developing a new American
designer for a market fixated on things with a Made in the U.S.A. label that
held the most appeal.
“As
Japanese, we are always eager to find another American designer, because we’re
fascinated by American stuff,” Mr. Takaku said. “Japanese guys love Todd
because he has such great basic offerings, but also because he can recommend a
tuxedo jacket with terry cloth sweatpants.”
They
apparently love him enough that, soon after his first store opened, he opened a
second in Osaka, with plans underway to expand to Kyoto and Yokohama and other
cities within the year.
“His is the
classic overnight success that’s not an overnight success,” said Steven Kolb,
executive director of the Council of Fashion Designers of America, who is
relying on Mr. Snyder as one of the anchor designers for the weeklong men’s
wear presentations in New York this month.
“Todd comes
across like a very calm big brother,” Mr. Kolb said, adding that, unlike
certain critical darlings whose businesses sputter once the initial hype has
burned off, he is “mature and business focused, and that’s a good thing.”
Men of the
millennial generation are in a “discovery phase” in their relationship to
fashion, said Mr. Snyder, probably the only designer in the business to have
spent his teenage summers detasseling corn. “They want to discover you, and
then they need to know you’ll stand the test of time,” he said.
While the
Japanese are the early adopters in the case of Mr. Snyder, it seems inevitable
the homegrown market will follow.
“Todd
Snyder corresponds with the tastes of a Japanese young generation, in a sense of
making quite easy, relaxed, but at the same time quite detailed clothing,” said
Masafumi Suzuki, the editor of GQ Japan.
“That is
the attitude that rings the bell with a young Japanese man,” said Mr. Suzuki,
who could just as easily have been describing young Americans.
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