I shall make you to be Eileen Fishers of women
It never occurred to me that Eileen Fisher was supposed to be uncool.
I always enjoyed seeing the print ads for her clothing. They appealed to me because their sartorial spareness implied the luxury of detachment from trends. The silhouettes and the seasonal palettes always conveyed a quality of rigorous minimalism.
Way before the first blogger typed "capsule wardrobe," Eileen Fisher was out there with her "system" dressing. However, Fisher wasn't the first to tap into the appeal of a curated and versatile cache of clothing, nor was she the first to use luxurious fabrics and simple silhouettes as the markers of good design. In Teri Agins' The End of Fashion, there's a delightful chapter devoted to Zoran, a designer hailed by the New York Times as "the master of deluxe minimalism," and his philosophy that all a woman needed was a small wardrobe with a few simple pieces in great fabrics.
Even if Zoran's not familiar, anyone who ever stepped foot in an American shopping mall in the 1980s can recall their mass-market analogue Units. Founded by Sandra Garratt (who worked for Zoran at one time), the unisex, 20-item collection promised effortless yet versatile outfits.
Nevertheless, Units is gone and Eileen Fisher is quietly ticking on. In 2013, the brand got the New Yorker treatment, where Janet Malcolm pithily summed up its overall look: "a kind of cult of the interestingly plain."
The first time I read that, I muttered, "Cayce Pollard." The coolhunter heroine of William Gibson's 2003 novel Pattern Recognition has a personal style described thusly:
CPUs. Cayce Pollard Units. That’s what Damien calls the clothing she wears. CPUs are either black, white, or gray, and ideally seem to have come into this world without human intervention.
What people take for relentless minimalism is a side effect of too much exposure to the reactor-cores of fashion. This has resulted in a remorseless paring-down of what she can and will wear. She is, literally, allergic to fashion. She can only tolerate things that could have been worn, to a general lack of comment, during any year between 1945 and 2000. She’s a design-free zone, a one-woman school of anti whose very austerity periodically threatens to spawn its own cult.
Two books later in Gibson's 2010 novel, Zero History, heroine Hollis Henry discovers the fruits of Cayce's second career as a clothing designer and Cayce explains, "And I couldn’t stand anything that looked as though a designer had touched it. Eventually I realized that if I felt that way about something, that meant it hadn’t been that well designed."
Unobtrusive design is positioned as a mark of very good design.
So you could see where I was confused about why and how the Eileen Fisher look was supposed to be uncool. It was untethered from the vagaries of glossy fashion-editor dictates and it was good design.
It's been especially interesting seeing how Eileen Fisher has become synonymous with transparency and conscious commerce -- and how a lot of Internet-launched brands are picking up on some of the Fisher traits.
Exhibit A: The allure of the curated capsule for women who are high achievers (or would like to be). M.M. LaFleur had their bento boxes of chic workwear basics, now replaced with the omakase collections of clothing picked out for different personae like "power player" and "disruptor." The Reset has their capsule personae -- "the hard worker" and "the individualist" among them.
Exhibit B: "Sustainable" and "transparent" are rooted in an aesthetic of neutral tones, simple silhouettes and minimalism as a mark of quality. See also: Cuyana ("Premium essentials. Fewer, better things") and Everlane ("Exceptional quality. Ethical qualities. Radical transparency").
Exhibit C: The apparently-radical idea that women of all sizes want and appreciate minimalist style. Universal Standard, which dresses bodies from size 00 to size 40, is the best example of this. (And they offer a starter kit of basics.)
Eileen Fisher has also gained notice for her leadership in environmental practices (timely in this age of climate-change anxiety), her leadership in disaster recovery post-Hurricane Sandy, and profit-sharing -- her employees own 40% of the company. The company is rapidly gaining notice as a place that exercises influence through its practices.
So it's notable that other brands are noticing how the definition of "power" in fashion has shifted. Last week, M.M. LaFleur announced that they'll lend clothing to any woman running for office in the United States. And Universal Standard saw that and responded with, "Universal Standard will dress any woman of any gender experience, or non-binary person running for office, for free."
Back in 2013, Malcolm described her idea of the Eileen Fisher customer: "Women who consider themselves serious that the clothes they wear look as if they were heedlessly flung on rather than anxiously selected ... women of a certain age and class—professors, editors, psychotherapists, lawyers, administrators—for whom the hiding of vanity is an inner necessity."
What struck me when I read that the first time was what wasn't mentioned: How those women chose lives full of intellectual mastery and routine exertion of authority, but those acts of power were best left inferred, as unobtrusive and unthreatening as a greige linen sweater.
We're now living in a moment where women are redefining the behavioral and aesthetic vocabularies of power and leadership. Maybe the cult of the interestingly plain will end up spawning a cult of personality.
FURTHER READING
"In the Future, We Will All Be Wearing Eileen Fisher" (Vogue, April 2019) --The sense of power that wearing Eileen Fisher gives younger Gen Xers and Millennials: "[The clothing] made us feel more in control and dignified than our circumstances allowed us to be."
"Why Does So Much Ethical Fashion Look the Same?" (Fashionista, October 17, 2018) -- "Do we really need another ethical brand making neutral-colored basics?"
"‘Menocore Is as Much About Wealth as It Is About Age" (Racked, October 18, 2017) --"The allure of Eileen Fisher style is very much about playing with class codes, while knowing it won’t necessarily lead to more stability."
"Capsule Contradictions: How Minimalist Dressing Misleads Women" (Vestoj, February 27, 2017) -- "For women, the problem being addressed is excessive enjoyment of shopping, and, secondarily, time sunk into in choosing what to wear each day."
"Pick An Outfit From Eileen Fisher And We'll Tell You Where You Are In Life" (Buzzfeed, April 7, 2017) -- Sorry not sorry for how funny I think this quiz is.
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).