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ha, maybe kids will start to look different from us aging hipsters... got this from a friend who works at Nike:
Dressing up: A fashionable rebellion of youth
By Nedra Rhone
The Ledger (March 20, 2006)
Baggy jeans, begone: Young men are finally dressing up.
Instead of buying more oversized pants and T–shirts, 18– to 24–year–old men spent $987 million on tailored clothing in 2005.
A new generation of men discovers the tailored look, and finds it suits them.
A new study by the NPD Group, a market research firm, reported a dramatic 53 percent increase in sales of suits, dress pants, sport coats and jackets to young men last year, compared with a 2 percent increase in 2004.
Variety, along with a renewed interest in grooming, may have helped fuel the boom.
“Image has become important again for the teen consumer — and particularly for the young adult male,” said NPD chief analyst Marshal Cohen. “This is a generation that never even knew what a suit was, let alone saw their parents in one. They have discovered the suit.”
While women spent nearly twice as much as men in overall apparel sales last year — $101 billion vs. $53 billion — the 5 percent bump in men’s apparel sales beat a 3 percent increase for women, thanks in large part to those young men making the transition from dumpy to dapper.
Two years ago, young men were purchasing electronics, Cohen said.
“Now that everyone has their fancy cellphone and iPod, it’s how can you separate yourself and make yourself cool? Now, it is cool to dress up.”
Edward Carroll, 19, is a big fan of Kanye West — a hip–hop star with a penchant for preppy styles. He also favors clothes by designer Ralph Lauren.
“I like to stand out,” said Carroll, dressed in a navy blue pinstriped suit with a green argyle vest, pink shirt and green bow tie. In a social scene that’s filled with throwback jerseys and Tshirts, “A suit is just a style, a particular type of dressing, that is different,” he said.
At Sebastian’s Closet in Atlanta, suit sales have even surpassed sport coats.
“These young people, they are wearing suits because they want to,” said Michael Serrano, assistant manager at the store, which specializes in men’s European clothing and sportswear. It also helps that newer options don’t remind young customers of their father’s suits.
The link between sports and suits came to the forefront last year when the NBA announced its new business casual dress code requiring athletes to wear suits to team functions.
“The biggest thing that has happened in men’s fashion is that we have more choices now,” Serrano said. “Trimmer cuts fall in line with what a younger man wants. A lot of them work out and are health– and body–conscious, and the last thing they want is a baggy suit.”
Not surprisingly, pop culture has also contributed to the shift.
“Hip–hop culture in itself has changed. It’s not so much 7X T–shirts anymore,” said Edwin Ro, assistant manager of a Y–3 Adidas store. Some young men are taking their cues from the store’s local celebrity clientele, including Usher and Dallas Austin.
“I think they are going more toward European tailoring,” he said.
While Y–3 specializes in upscale sweats and sportswear, Ro said blazers and trousers are moving out of the door at a rapid pace, and in return, the store continues to offer a growing number of dressier choices.
The link between sports and suits came to the forefront last year when the NBA announced its new business casual dress code requiring athletes to wear suits and suit separates to team and league functions. The trickledown has even reached high schools.
“Seeing them wear suits makes you think of them more as professional,” high school sophomore A.J. Adams, 16, said of NBA players and the athletes at his school who dress up on game days.
When his sports marketing teacher announced that students could earn extra credit for dressing up on Wednesdays, the high school student began stocking his wardrobe with slacks, ties and sport coats.
“You feel a lot more classy, and you have a lot more respect for yourself,” said Adams. “It seems like, since we started the class and started dressing up on Wednesdays, people have been dressing up on other days.”
His friends even compete with one another, mixing bright colors instead of standard blues and black, to see who can come up with a more personal style.
Essentially, that’s the entire point behind the interest in suits, said Don Guffey, owner of Guffeys of Atlanta Inc., a custom men’s clothing store.
“It’s sort of a rebellion,” he said. “They are flexing their personalities and thinking, ‘I’m not like all these other sloppos, so I’m not going to dress like them.’”
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