“Men’s fashion is the most exciting thing happening in fashion,” Rachel Comey told me on a visit to her Noho studio earlier this week. You don’t have to tell us twice, but while menswear is indeed basking in a larger industry glow, there are a few women’s designers who men only dream will make menswear—Rachel Comey being first among them. The designer knows this, and when I asked her why she believes men want to wear her stuff, she laughed and said, “Because men like that attention from a woman?” But anyways, she said, “there are plenty of [Rachel Comey clothes] that aren’t specifically gendered,” and the men who work on her team and in her store have no problem wearing her structured wide-leg trousers or geometric print sweaters or even her big earrings.
Rachel Comey is one of America’s most successful and thoughtful designers, the kind who knows and understands her customer deeply without being too woo-woo or skipping through a fashion fantasy land. Her clothing is intimate and sophisticated but always a little weird, cerebral, like the person wearing it is smart and interesting enough to want to look cool but not so out there that they want to be buried under a lot of fashion. In the 19 years since she launched the brand, Comey has basically created one of the dominant concepts of what it means to look like a successful adult woman in New York. Even her denim is—well, not aspirational, because there’s no snobbery to Rachel Comey, but desirable in that “stop someone on the street and ask them who made those” way. Her high-waisted, wide-legged cropped Legion jean remains the standard for nearly every woman in downtown New York and Brooklyn (and probably Los Angeles—I’ve never been there, but I have seen Marriage Story!). In the past decade in particular, she’s made even twenty-somethings want to dress like successful gallerists with a ceramics hobby and a moderate expense account. Even if Comey doesn’t have a dedicated men’s offering, the designer has a lot of lessons about what it takes to build and maintain a successful American brand.
So you can understand why men want some of what Comey’s got. She started in menswear, after all: “At that time, I had a lot of male friends that were performers and musicians and skulking around Manhattan, and they needed stuff for the stage. I was kind of doing little costume pieces here and there,” and then she began making shirts with a manufacturer who did custom men’s shirting in New Jersey. Japanese stores loved her menswear—“Men are engaged with fashion there the way men here are with sports”—and she found support there from her very first collection. But at a certain point, the womenswear was growing so quickly that she shuttered the men’s half of the business.
But even as many designers are pushing big into menswear, Comey works on instinct rather than responding to trends. So here is the hard truth: she won’t bring it back. “I think I can fill more voids and do better work for women right now,” she said, because of “who I am and what’s happening in our society. I think women’s clothes have gotten more serious, and men’s clothes have gotten more playful, which I think is just a reflection of our time.
“Sometimes I feel like our [clothes] are so serious, but when I think about the women that are wearing them, I feel like they have to be,” she continued. “There’s a lot of moments in your life when you want to be taken seriously, you want to be heard, and you need your clothes to help you with that. And then conversely, I think we all need to feel the other way, you know: cared for, and off-duty, and relaxed, and there’s different clothes for that. I think I really am relating more to that experience than I did when I was in my twenties, and dressing men for the fun of it. It was a different time in my life.”
American designers are eager to show in Europe, and have left New York this season with a rather thin fashion calendar, but Comey is back on the schedule with her typical small-scale but glamorous dinner-and-a-fashion-show arrangement. It has been a beloved part of the fashion universe for years, but she hasn’t hosted one since September 2017. Unlike many of her fellow star American designers, she’s never even thought of showing outside of the country. (She’s shown twice in Los Angeles, and will host a pop-up in Paris February 22nd-March 18th—a real American Woman in Paris moment.) “I don’t know why; it has never even occurred to me,” she said. “I think that that’s just kind of a different thing.” She thought for a moment. “I don’t know why other designers go to Paris, or London. Just to be on the world stage, I guess?”
Still, she acknowledged, “We have like a bad reputation right now, this New York industry, huh? I don’t know why that is exactly.” She continued, “There’s obviously a shift in retail and direct to consumer, and people’s obsessiveness with newness and new brands and new companies and things like that. I see that a little bit, but I think that if you know who you’re designing for, I think it makes sense.” Comey is pragmatic, a problem-solver with fashion gumption. As dreamy and ever-so-slightly batty as her clothing can be, she is a New Yorker through and through.
In fact, Comey seems to have a lot of things figured out that younger fashion brands find flummoxing. She’s built an independent American brand from the ground-up, with a dedicated core of customers that is only growing. The key is that everything has been slow, an idea that young designers may find unfamiliar or even exotic. “I hired my first employee after six years. I worked alone for six years while I was freelancing and doing other jobs, just figuring it out and scraping by. I don’t know if people have that same expectation now. I think with social media it seems like people just expect to have a huge business so quickly, you know. That never happened. For me, it was very slow, steady, and word of mouth.” Even the way she builds things from collection to collection is slow. Rather than a relentless push for novelty, she evolves her ideas with each season: “You can experiment, or you can move on.”
That work process has also brought her brand a number of unexpected hits. Many brands need a sneaker or a tiny bag to make the business work, but every few seasons, something pops out of Comey’s world and becomes ubiquitous, like her jeans, or her wooden clogs. This season, I’d put money on a pair of woven leather sandals she had made in Italy. Men, in particular, will love them. As she said slyly, “These are kind of mandals.” And with a pair of pleated pants? See you guys in the boutique!
