Crew’s Control
Hip catalog company J. Crew has a new store in Dallas, where devotees are flocking for casual clothes and image adjustment.
THERE IS SOMETHING CHURCHLIKE about the J. Crew store that opened in May in Dallas’ NorthPark Center, something solemn and reverent, as if the store had been designed by a Shaker splinter group. Shoppers accustomed to the aristocratic fun of the ubiquitous J. Crew catalog—photo after photo of those handsome, impeccably proportioned couples wearing windbreakers and chinos at the shore—will find a different aura here. Studied simplicity is the rule, from the burnished wood floors and the (darker) burnished wood shelves to the clothes themselves, folded with decorous precision or hung precisely in the clutterless windows. It’s a stark contrast to the razzmatazz of Barneys, right across the mall, but in the ongoing fashion wars for the hearts and pocketbooks of the nation’s consumers, J. Crew displays the understated cool of a winner. The store resembles nothing less than a chapel of worship for the fashions of the nineties.