New brands on the block

One might expect Clive Darby to be well-dressed.

As the co-founder of Richard James and former head of wholesale at Savile Row tailor Kilgour, he knows a well-cut suit when he sees one. And yet here he is, with cropped brown hair and trendy beard, in what womenswear writers like to call ‘separates’ — a pair of slim, RAF-blue flannel trousers and an elegantly waisted chocolate brown bird’s-eye jacket, all from his new label Rake. There’s a hint of the Row perhaps, but, well, more rakish.

‘There’s an intelligence that men have about clothes now — an ability to measure not only what makes a good piece of clothing but the different ways in which they can wear it,’ says Darby. ‘They’re looking for diversity and individuality again. To put it bluntly, they have the confidence not to rely on the big, obvious fashion names any more.’

Rake is not alone. London has seen the launch of several new menswear lines over the past couple of years, some native, some foreign, some with their own shops already, some with plans to open. But what unites the likes of Start and Private White VC, A Sauvage, Percival, Oliver Spencer and DS Dundee, to name a few, is that they are independent, craft-oriented and wearable, bridging the gap, both in accessibility and price, between the high street and designer brands.

The middle market may be the most challenging now, but with demand for quality over complication in the ascendant, the signs are good. Ben Sherman is overhauling and Jigsaw is launching a menswear collection in line with the growing demand for wearable clothes. According to a recent Mintel report, one in five men now only buys clothing he regards as an investment, compared with one in eight in 2010.

‘When I worked for big brands I felt very disconcerted with the prices they charged,’ says Alexandre Mattiussi, founder of new French label Ami, who counts Givenchy and Marc Jacobs among previous employers. ‘Those high prices are disconnected from most people’s reality. If you work in fashion, there’s the assumption that everyone else is obsessed with it, but that’s not the case. Your home, holidays and having fun are more important. If I have money left after that, maybe I’ll buy a sweater — something elegant and cool but not pretentious, which the middle market has lacked.’

Mattiussi, 32, lives by this credo. When Ami was snapped up by the prestigious Barneys department store in New York for its first season last year, he declined to have the collection shown alongside top-flight designer names, ‘because for most people those places are pretty intimidating,’ he says. ‘For me there’s the sense that all those brands are for someone else.’

Certainly, according to Lee Douros, the men’s buying manager for my-wardrobe.com, it is the smaller, newer, niche brands and not the designer names that are first to recognise a perhaps recessionary awakening, among male shoppers in particular, that favours ‘a very real wardrobe — nothing overtly fashionable, but quality-driven and gently aware of trends,’ he says. ‘They make the kinds of clever pieces that work season after season. They don’t demand that everyone wears digital prints, for example, and wears them now. Men just don’t change the way they dress every season like that.’

The idea of status in clothing has changed, too. ‘If brand recognition by one’s peers used to win kudos points, now they’re won when you’re wearing something by a company they’ve never heard of. That kind of competition is very male, and the new, much more insidery menswear market is making it all the more possible,’ says designer Adrien Sauvage, whose first shop in Mayfair is due to open shortly. ‘Men want to feel they’re finding a brand for themselves.’

Even entrepreneurial types without a fashion background are spotting opportunity. Brazilian-Swiss graphic designer Alexia Hentsch teamed up with a financier with the ambitious view at first of starting an airline, then of importing Costa Rican rum, before finally identifying a gap in the menswear market for a high-quality white shirt at a reasonable price. Her label Hentsch Man launched in the UK in 2009 and a more extensive line quickly followed.

‘There has been this lack of menswear that’s neither very formal nor especially casual, just well-made and contemporary but not too crazy,’ says Hentsch. ‘I just don’t know who’s wearing that high-fashion stuff, no matter how beautifully made it may be. The Japanese maybe. Simplicity in design is actually hard to do, and the danger, of course, is that it’s perceived as boring — menswear design faces big pressures from press and PR to be “exciting”, but that’s not what men want to wear.’

According to Nick Ashley, 52, son of Laura, ex-head of design at Dunhill and now the founder of his own brand, Private White VC, the new regard for small-scale, functional clothing represents a change of heart. He first launched a small eponymous label 18 years ago, one with as much emphasis on craft and consideration as cool, but it didn’t survive. ‘There weren’t enough customers for that kind of product then,’ Ashley says. ‘Yet now we’re having success doing much the same thing. I think menswear is driving a backlash against mass production and towards a demand for what the Japanese call “high touch” products. It’s not enough just to have a designer label any more. Menswear has to have substance.