Muted colors and classic styles exemplify Patrick Robinson's autumn collection for Gap. It has been trying to revive the brand after customers defected to other labels.
On Monday afternoon, as the ballyhooed new designs of Gap's autumn collection by Patrick Robinson began appearing at its store on Fifth Avenue and 54th Street in Manhattan, a line of customers stretched well around the corner - at Abercrombie & Fitch, two blocks away.
Fashion magazines have heralded the recent arrival of Robinson at Gap in reverential tones (he is actually called a "megabrand messiah" in the September issue of Elle), and the windows announce in big block letters that a "New Shape" is in store. But there has not yet been a seismic return of shoppers to a retail chain that stopped being cool around the time Abercrombie opened its doors with a reinvented brand.
Inside the Gap store, a few dozen customers were trying on $58 waffle-knit cardigans and blazers made of fleece. But for a better picture, one could stand outside on the street corner for 15 minutes and count shopping bags: 6 from Gap, 27 from Abercrombie on Monday; 8 from Gap, 38 from Abercrombie on Tuesday.
Reinventing Gap, the largest specialty apparel chain in the United States, has been fashion's equivalent of Merlin's stone for much of the last decade, as sales and profits have dipped, along with its image among young consumers.
Robinson, 41, is the third designer to attempt to pull the sword from the stone since Gap began to publicly acknowledge its creative personnel in 2003, and the most closely watched because of his popularity with industry insiders and his finesse with casual American sportswear.
His fall designs have generated promising reviews, but also concern about whether a single designer - one with a mixed track record - can revive a brand with 1,155 stores in the United States in the midst of an economic crisis. The company also has a substantial overseas presence, with $1.6 billion in 2007 net sales for its international division, compared to $4.5 billion for Gap North America.
On the one hand, Gap has continued to report weak sales, including an 11 percent drop last month in stores open at least a year, and on Tuesday, Brand Keys, a research consultancy, announced that Gap ranked last in customer loyalty among its peers. On the other, some retail analysts long critical of Gap's merchandising efforts and management choices have joined the chorus that is singing Robinson's praises.
"I just about died when I went in the store," said Jennifer Black, president of Jennifer Black & Associates, a research company focused on the apparel industry. "I don't know how traffic's been, but from an aesthetic perspective, I think it looks great. For me to be taken aback is kind of a big thing."
In an interview in the Gap showroom in the Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan last week, Robinson said he could best describe his vision for Gap as one of "optimism," keying into an emotion conveyed by the company's past advertising campaigns that spotlighted bright colors and made wearing khaki seem like a swingy choice.
Having grown up in California, he recalled shopping at Gap stores and thinking how cool the white, gallery-like spaces were. While he wanted to recapture that feeling, he said, the styles, fits and colors - even the weight of the T-shirt fabrics - all had to be changed. "We can't go back and put women in big old heavy sweatshirts," he said. "That was Gap in the '80s."
Throughout his career, Robinson has demonstrated a single-mindedness about image control, including his own. In 2005, when he was hired at Paco Rabanne, a French fashion house, he compared his intended makeover of that fading collection to Tom Ford's transformation of Gucci, a remark that proved foolhardy when the line was closed after three seasons.
He had previously worked for Giorgio Armani in Milan and Anne Klein in New York and briefly made sportswear collections under his own label in the 1990s. But his greatest critical success occurred in 2003, when he was hired to remake a lower-priced women's sportswear collection for Perry Ellis.
But he resigned the next season. "We just totally disagreed on the vision of the brand," he said, "and they owned the thing, so they won."
But at Gap, Robinson said, he is comfortable working within a large corporate environment. That said, he has continued to assert the need for creative control: Last week the company dismissed its European design staff, adding the duties for creating lines for international markets to Robinson's purview.
Gary Muto, president of Gap's adult and body divisions, said Robinson's arrival had revitalized Gap's design staff, describing the difference as "night and day." Part of the reason is that the designs are selling, he said.
One thing that stands out about Robinson's collection for Gap is how similar it looks to his work for Perry Ellis, with loose popover plaid dresses, sleeveless wool jackets and cropped cargo pants in mushroomy grays, layered up with artsy knits - clothes that fashion editors had clamored about back then but customers never had a chance to buy. Now anyone can at Gap.
"It's definitely a major improvement," said Rie Cochran, a 21-year-old secretary from Marshall, Michigan, as she left the Fifth Avenue store. "It's chic, but still subdued." Nevertheless, she walked out empty-handed.
