NEW YORK, July 11 — 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 menswear 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,” 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 Snyder became the senior vice president for menswear design in 2004, he made serious inroads among style cognoscenti.
A former high school football player, Snyder is the guy who modernised 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 Council of Fashion Designers of America award and after being named one of GQ’s best new menswear designers, 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 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 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 Snyder’s Midwestern reserve.
“There’s just not a big ego there,” Weeks said.
Then, in a turn of events few could have anticipated, 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, 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 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,” 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 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 USA label that held the most appeal.
“As Japanese, we are always eager to find another American designer, because we’re fascinated by American stuff,” 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 Snyder as one of the anchor designers for the weeklong menswear presentations in New York this month.
“Todd comes across like a very calm big brother,” 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 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 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 Suzuki, who could just as easily have been describing young Americans. — The New York Times
