A little hotter, ma’am?
Singing and swinging their way through ads, Madonna and Missy Elliott helped resurrect the Gap when that retailer lost its edge. Samsung became a suddenly -- if strangely -- sexy appliance brand when bare-chested men were pictured toting its microwave ovens. Now the question is: Will the leggy Brazilian Gisele Bundchen bring the same sort of sizzle to St. John Knits?
This week, after a six-month absence from fashion glossies, St. John is returning to its traditional front-of-the-book position, but with a whole new ad campaign starring Bundchen, the Victoria’s Secret model and girlfriend of Leonardo DiCaprio. If the campaign generates enough heat, it could fire up the Irvine-based women’s apparel maker the same way hot new approaches refueled the images of Burberry, Coach and Gucci.
Unlike those fashion companies, St. John’s clothes haven’t changed much, at least not for the coming fall. Despite the recent departure of the Gray family -- who collectively founded, designed and modeled the St. John line -- the clothes are still modest, sophisticated and faintly contemporary knitted styles that would be appropriate in the boardroom or at the charity gala. Yet on Bundchen, they’ve dropped about 20 years and the whiff of mothballs.
The new ads, shot by Mario Testino, are a startling case study in advertising’s ability to reshape perceptions. These are the same dense rayon-and-wool knits with heat-set paillettes modeled by Kelly Gray, the longtime model, muse and creative director of the company her parents founded 43 years ago in a North Hollywood garage, but if the tagline didn’t read St. John, chances are no one would ever link the past with the present image.
The $5-million campaign is the brainchild of David Lipman, whose New York agency also crafted the image makeover of Burberry, the 149-year-old British trench coat maker. Like St. John, Burberry was a respected, if dull, apparel company associated with classic, matronly styles. About five years ago, a new executive team hired Testino to photograph model and English aristocrat Stella Tennant and, later, Kate Moss in contemporary adaptations of the black, red and camel plaids. The company’s traditional customers remained attached to their country plaids and quilted jackets, while young urbanites started to go clubbing in mini kilts and carrying tiny plaid bags.
For St. John, Lipman hired Testino to shoot Bundchen not as a model but as a celebrity, a character. Testino, himself a celebrity, brought his trademark wit and verve to the photos, which are chock-full of detail.
But Burberry didn’t change just its advertising. New executives, designers, collections and stores combined to transform the brand. The same may be ahead at St. John, but neither the Grays nor the company will comment. Who knows? Two years from now maybe we’ll see a collection of St. John bras and thongs, perfectly engineered to slide under those curve-hugging knits that Bundchen wears so well.
Bundchen was chosen, Lipman says, because “she represents fashion and L.A. glamour at the same time.” That she lives in Los Angeles subtly connects her to the California heritage of the brand, an important element in its future positioning, he said.
In the campaign’s 11 images, Bundchen portrays an actress on a Hollywood movie set, where she is poised and confident while surrounded by cables, lights and props -- including men in many guises. She’s the gangster moll in a white form-fitting dress flanked by mobsters in black. A toreador in pink cinches the corset of her Spanish flamenco dress while a cameraman captures the shot. Bare-chested gladiators lounge on set while Bundchen, dressed in slim, business-lady separates, perches in a director’s chair.
The scenarios share the same bone structure as the St. John campaign that ran for 22 years featuring Kelly Gray. In those ads, whether Gray was wearing sparkling St. John couture in the Australian Outback, posing surrounded by bod gods on a Greek isle or stepping onto the beach from her private seaplane, she walked into a fantasy that gave the conservative clothes their allure.
The suits, dresses and sportswear of St. John are the steadfast staples in wardrobes of lawyers like Gloria Allred, politicians like Hillary Rodham Clinton and Madeleine Albright and businesswomen who can afford St. John’s $1,700 jackets, $1,000 blouses and $730 pants.
Though St. John sales have been inching downward in recent years, this is not a moribund label or a failing company, observers emphasized. With nearly $400 million in sales last year, St. John has remained a top-selling golden egg for Neiman Marcus, Saks Fifth Avenue, a slew of luxury boutiques and its own network of 32 boutiques and 13 outlets. Though past efforts to launch sportier collections of everything from faux furs to menswear haven’t succeeded, St. John still has plenty of gold to mine, starting with its iconic advertising.
St. John’s agency understands the risk and potential rewards of tweaking the image. Many companies have strayed too far from their roots and failed. Lipman said the company is looking toward the long term.
“After 20 years of seeing Kelly, you need to evolve,” said Lipman. “If you don’t evolve brands, they’ll dissipate and go away.”
The new campaign is the first public sign of the change in the air at St. John. Founding patriarch Robert Gray retired in 2002, and his wife, cofounder and chief designer, Marie Gray, and daughter Kelly left their creative positions in late July, ending the family’s day-to-day contact with the firm. Though the Gray family remains minority stockholders, Kelly, 38, relinquished her executive duties to become a company consultant, while her mother will retain a board position.
The company’s publicists hinted that Chief Executive Richard Cohen may announce the company’s new direction in September. He has not yet commented on a new designer, but he’s promised in a prepared statement to build St. John “into a global business.”
Were the company to follow the template for other aging luxury brands, it would retool itself to be younger, hipper and sexier. Like Gucci, Burberry, Christian Dior and Givenchy, it would respectfully pay lip service to the heritage of the creative founders and then hire a renegade designer to rip it all apart.
Indications are that St. John won’t greatly change for now, except in name. It will drop the “by Marie Gray” and be identified simply as St. John.
The new ads may expand the audience while renewing interest from the label’s core shoppers, many of whom are loyal and pay full price. Though Lipman updated the company’s image, he and other insiders are careful not to remake the clothes.
“It’s important that we never veer away from the essence of the brand,” Lipman said, though he and company executives haven’t decided on next season’s approach.
Stores have been happy with the product and have been concerned that it would change, said Carol Hoffman, a leading New York buyer for luxury boutiques. “St. John is kind of an oddity in our women’s market in that so many companies come and go. It’s way too steady a ship to rock too far one way or another. But I don’t think anyone argues with the fact that they needed to move beyond Kelly. It had gotten a little stale.”
During her two decades in print, Gray came to personify a classic American story, that of the empowered heroine.
“In a funny kind of way, they were very feminist,” said Simon Doonan, creative director of Barneys New York.
“Here is this incredible, tough woman, clearly in middle age,” he said. “She’s having a fabulous time walking off jets and onto islands, and she’s always surrounded by these sexy drones.
“People forget that they have a fantastically strong business. They weren’t selling hipness. They were selling clothes.”
And they were selling to a greatly overlooked fashion market, women older than 35. Doonan isn’t alone in saying he’ll miss Gray. When Kevin Glennon, who runs a Massachusetts advertising firm, was researching the buying power of older women, he was stunned by the untapped potential. On an advertising industry blog, he questioned the wisdom of overlooking that market, which is an aggressive leader in buying everything from video games to shoes. He questions fashion’s habit of quickly replacing the older with the much younger.
Gray, he said, is a perfect example of an over-35 woman who had a leadership role inside and outside her company, the kind of image “women were screaming to see more of.” In an interview, he said that choosing the twentysomething Bundchen struck him as a decision to “go where the quicker money is. I think the smarter money would have been to reach out to older women.”
Yet the case studies of Burberry, Gucci and Dior also show that once perception changes, the product almost always catches up to the new image. In fashion, as in advertising, perception is often reality. With a little tweaking and a fresh look, St. John may finally get the credibility that it has long sought. And maybe we’ll be flashing the St. John logo from our thongs.
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NEW YARN: For decades, St. John has been what the boss lady wears at the office -- and, in the ads, her fantasy life. For 22 years, executive Kelly Gray (left) has been the campaign’s idealized jet-setting, hunk-baiting goddess. Now Gisele Bundchen (above) is the new boss in town. The hunks remain the same.
The New St. John
The lady: Actress with producer credits
The boys: Hired help but gorgeous
Net worth: Works for a living
Location: Wherever lights and
camera can find action
Mood: Lightly ironic
Literary equivalent: Sequel script
Photographer: Celebrity jet-setter
Mario Testino
Fan base: Teenage boys
The Old St. John
The lady: Billionaire divorcee
The boys: White knights, cowboys and gigolos
Net worth: Rich beyond belief
Location: Any exotic locale with
a five-star hotel
Mood: Dramatically iconic
Literary equivalent: Romance novel
Photographer: Fashion glamorizer Neil Kirk
Fan base: Matrons and female
impersonators
