Salt: The Crew

Thursday, March 1, 2012

The Crew

The line-up you'd wish you were in.
J. Crew's Fall 2012 Collection @models.com

Learned this in our Film Theory class back in college and have also read it somewhere, that people are usually pleased when things turn out the way they imagine it in their heads. In simpler terms, when things meet our expectations. Whether or not you give this your approval, it does somehow ring true that when you're faced with something, a new song, a relationship, a movie, a book, parties and dinners out, you tag with it some kind of expectation and when it ends to meet what you've tagged it with, you're smiling.

J. Crew is no excuse from this. Many times have I abused the phrase--when reviewing J. Crew, "There's nothing new with it" and almost always end the entire thing happily. Huge credit goes to J. Crew's hero, Frank Muytjens for always meeting our expectations of him and the brand and at the same time, giving men all the finest reasons to avoid dowdy days and lack-luster looks.

What's not to love with J. Crew when you're safe with their looks? And yes, maybe "safe" is never the best word to describe a collection, but in my tiny, tiny world of style, I believe that it's great to have an option when it comes to dressing that just never ever f-ing fails you. Their color palette is flattering no matter what skin color you have, always masculine and dignified. Their pieces purely taken out of a handbook of classic men's fashion that will rarely go out of style or make anyone look like a joke. And their line-up of models (because it matters to me) is always punctuated by faces both known and up-and-coming.

And while the closest I've got to J. Crew are brands that it competes with, I swear by things that J. Crew offers: casual elegance. When you're rule sounds like something like mine "Dress up as if you're about to meet someone important but at the same time guarantees your comfort", you are definitely a J. Crew fan.

Muytjens genius is our remedy to drab, uninteresting looks. And when a menswear designer's job is to make a man awfully more handsome, then Muytjens is just meeting everybody's expectations handsomely well.