Saturday, January 9, 2010

11/04/09 - Wednesday

Suit: Jos A Bank / Shirt: Jos A Bank / Tie: Old Navy / Belt: GAP



Like this combination, which was paired with a suit this time.


Side note: I haven't seen funky/edgy Old Navy ties in a while and it had me thinking, could they have stopped offering such ties as a result of upper management's rocky breakup with (ex) lead designer Todd Oldham? Hmmm one can only speculate.






From the Business Week article "Old Navy May Still Be at Sea":

Although harnessing the power of a celebrity designer was by then common, few retailers had tried it the way Old Navy set out to. Usually designers put together a line of their own or create a one-time collection to get people talking. Either way, they are fairly isolated from the everyday workings of the company. Oldham, however, who traveled back and forth between New York and San Francisco, was supposed to inspire and motivate the designers in any way he saw fit. The idea of a well-known fashion figure hovering over the entire creative process at a retailer the size of Old Navy was an altogether different undertaking, one that would require finesse and tenacity.

Changing Old Navy's attitude toward design was going to be a challenge, especially for someone working part-time and without any direct authority or reliable means of persuasion. To spark designers' imaginations, Oldham created a library of fashion monographs, old magazines, and catalogs that reflected his aesthetic: bold, colorful, retro. He showed a marching band uniform, a varsity sweater; he combined a Fifties prom skirt with a ski sweater from the Seventies. "My ideas weren't supposed to go into the stores," Oldham says. "What inspires a designer might horrify a merchant. My goal was to inspire the designers to create something appropriate for the merchants."

But it quickly became clear that some of Old Navy's more literal-minded merchants were skeptical that the designers could interpret Oldham's ideas. "Right from the beginning, I sensed that Todd wasn't the right fit," says David Fox, who returned to Old Navy in November 2007 after a three-year absence specifically to work with Oldham. "As much as the company may want to be creatively driven, it hasn't ever been. It wasn't then. It isn't now. In order to be successful there, you have to understand that."

1 comment:

  1. the business week story was eyeopening a clear example of corp greed todd got caught in the middle of internal turmoil they hired him to do a job which he was doing they decided not to honor his contract what an honorable thing to do old navy shame shame shame i will never shop
    there again

    ReplyDelete