Filling The Gap : Fashion: Marketed with some of the artiest ads around, this store’s classic styles are must-haves for those who disdain hip.
If it’s hot, they don’t want it.
Take those trendy, spotted leopard styles, for instance. Way too fashionable. At the Gap, where the notion of “your style, our classics” has practically reached art form status, executives elected to bypass the animal-print look this fall. Despite the fact that they correctly figured such clothes were sure to be some of the country’s hottest sellers.
Ditto for screaming neons--just too hip (not to mention obvious) for the Gap.
So what’s got fashion mavens suddenly falling into the Gap, lapping up its less-is-more, all American basics? After a decade of dress for excess, in everything from Barbie doll petticoats to perfume bottle earrings, people’s attitudes appear to be swinging to the opposite extreme. Style not fashion--the Gap’s stock in trade--is the battle cry.
Richard McNally, the chain’s senior vice president for women’s clothing and accessories, explains the Gap’s anti-trend approach this way: “I don’t ever want to have anything in the Gap that’s in every other store or on the front of every other catalogue.”
Indeed, here at the company’s administrative headquarters, executives have nearly always gone their own unique and highly profitable way.
And since they decided to move their jeans-and-sweats-dominated firm gently into the fashion market about 2 1/2 years ago (after hundreds of other stores had copied them by carrying sweats in every color of the rainbow), the company has again become a pacesetter on its own terms.
It has successfully chosen to stick with the clean-cut, moderately priced classics it’s long been known for--and simply spice them up with a tasteful dash of fashion shimmer.
For example, the Gap’s now-famous “pocket T,” an oversize T-shirt with a single breast pocket has sold phenomenally well at the chain’s more than 700 stores nationwide. The style became so hot it was knocked off at virtually all price levels by competitors large and small. The pocket T was seen everywhere--on grandmothers and neighborhood rap artists, metalheads and CEOs--and it became the fashion statement for spring-summer ’89.
Turtlenecks and mock turtleneck pullovers have also become enormous sellers. Like the pocket T, they were featured in the company’s award-winning, black-and-white advertising campaign, featuring famous and non-famous style setters wearing Gap basics, often with their own accessories.
The soft-sell campaign, a series of portraits by the country’s leading personality photographers (Herb Ritts, Matthew Rolston, Annie Leibovitz, Steven Meisel and a few others) won numerous advertising awards, including the prestigious Clio. So far, models have ranged from actor/director/producer Spike Lee to fashion designer Geoffrey Beene, from artist Ed Ruscha to Peter Howe, Life magazine’s director of photography.
“I think what was nice about the ads was the people at the Gap wanted the personalities to be as strong or stronger than their product,” says Rolston, whose photos launched the campaign last winter. “Their (basic) stuff is so generic that’s it’s not really fashion at all. It’s just the type of good, utilitarian items that everybody has and wants more of. The quality’s good. The idea of the campaign was that you can apply your style to their clothes.” Response to the series of magazine ads reportedly surprised even those who designed it: a team including Maggie Gross, senior vice president of advertising; art director Jim Nevins, and Richard Crisman, who directed the series and is now the firm’s public relations director.
Notes Anne Crawford, the society editor of L.A. Style who was photographed in a black turtleneck in the first group of ads, “The Gap was overwhelmed by the response. They told me they sold every black turtleneck in every Gap store. They were out of them for six weeks. . . . They were going to run my ad again, then they had to switch it at the last minute. They didn’t want to run it when they didn’t have stock for people to buy. . . .
“You know, a year ago, I probably wouldn’t have gone into the Gap,” Crawford continues. “It had the image of being a store for sweat shirts and sweat pants. Now I go in and pick up T-shirts, jeans, socks. They’ve hired some young designers and they’ve got a great cuts of jeans.”
And in the category of slightly more fickle fashion, shoppers have currently or recently found: kicky, paisley-print miniskirts with matching vests; pretty, lace-collared blouses; printed suspenders for men; country looks; cowboy styles; a small-but-stylish line of casual shoes; seasonal “fun styles” changing every five to seven weeks, and a line of accessories, considerably expanded from the days when the chain carried, in the terms of McNally, “the sock, the belt, the bag” albeit in lots of colors.
Says a frequent Gap shopper who declined to be identified, “I want to look great and I want it to be cheap. You go shopping for fashion these days and you can buy a pants leg for $600. Even people who can have anything they want and can buy it wherever they want are now going to the Gap.”
“Business is roaring for the Gap,” affirms financial analyst Thomas H. Tashjian, a vice president at Seidler Amdec Securities in Los Angeles, who adds that the chain is fast on its way to multibillions of dollars in annual sales. “By our estimate, the Gap is the fourth largest-selling clothing label in this country, behind Liz Claiborne, Levi’s and Lee.
“We’re projecting their revenues for this year at $1.5 billion and next year at over $1.7 billion. Year to date, the Gap has been able to generate existing store increases (sales in stores that have been open more than one year) of 16% while the industry’s been averaging about 7%.”
Tashjian says the chain is not yet on a financial par with Columbus, Ohio-based The Limited, which is considered the darling of the retail industry, and, according to the analyst, will rake in about $4.5 billion to $5 billion in revenues this year. But, he points out, “I think the company is perceived as a peer in terms of management respectability and clarity of concept and long-term focus.”
The whiz behind the Gap’s drive to sell enormous quantities of both basic and fashion goods is its 45- year-old president, Millard (Mickey) Drexler. A friendly, reflective man who rarely gives interviews and doesn’t reveal much when he does, Drexler only agrees to talk after a description of the proposed story is submitted in writing along with a list of interview questions.
A native New Yorker who started his retail career at Bloomingdale’s and worked at Macy’s and Abraham & Strauss before becoming the president of Ann Taylor in 1980, Drexler took over management of the Gap in late 1983.
Asked what prompted the Gap’s move into more sophisticated territory, he says the firm was seeking “a little older audience. We wanted to appeal to a customer above 30. Our image was very young. People sort of thought of the Gap as a kids’ store. . . . We feel we’re a company that carries clothes that everyone wears.”
Then he offers a dramatic example from the black-and-white ad campaign: Vanity Fair style editor Maria Schiano wore her $9.50 pocket T underneath a $2,000 tuxedo.
Drexler has spent much of the last two years concentrating on turning around the fate of the Gap’s sister firm, the Banana Republic. According to the estimates of Tashjian and his analyst colleagues, only 15% of the company’s total sales have come from The Banana Republic and “it has been a drag on sales gains and earnings.”
Recently, lush color ads for Banana Republic have begun appearing in magazines. And the company’s idiosyncratic catalogue, which had been discontinued much to the dismay of its fans, has returned.
Allows Drexler, “We made a lot of mistakes (with Banana Republic) and we had a lot of opportunities to test new things. . . . We’re now getting Banana Republic back to its roots (as a travel and safari clothing company).”
Enthuses L.A. Style’s Crawford, “They’re making Banana Republic kind of like a Ralph Lauren store that everyone can afford. . . . It’s very clever. The clothes are cut in a way that looks like you spent a lot of money on them.” Tashjian isn’t as impressed but he’s prepared to be: “We’re starting to get some indications there may be a turn around about to occur, but it’s only on some short-term results. I think we need to see a little more proof.” The Gap’s Crisman claims he’s already seen enough to be sure. “We love the (Banana Republic) product and we’re very excited about what we’ve got coming out,” he says. “I would say stay tuned.”
