Distill the prevailing menswear style of the past few years--selvage denim, tweed, fitted shirts--and turn it into a physical space, and it would be Liquor Store, a cramped boutique in a former corner bar in Manhattan's Tribeca neighborhood. Inside, a vintage wooden bar lines one wall, with bottles of whiskey and gin sharing space with colorful sweaters, a case of old Rolex watches and money clips, and various books and obscure fashion magazines. A threadbare oriental rug covers the worn wood floor, and slim-cut suits and dress shirts hang from creaky armoires stuffed in the corners. A constant stream of impossibly chic downtown dwellers shuffle through the tight spaces between the clothes.
The store belongs, improbably, to a mass-market clothing giant: J.Crew. Back in 2008, chairman and CEO Mickey Drexler decided it was time to elevate the image of J.Crew's menswear offerings, then a collection of preppy basics generally tucked into the back of the J.Crew stores. He needed a way to position the new, more refined menswear collection and attract a new breed of style influencer.
Drexler turned to his friend Andy Spade, best known as one half of the husband-and-wife founding team of the Kate Spade and Jack Spade fashion brands. The Spades had cashed out of their business in 2006, and shortly afterward, Spade and longtime friend and colleague Anthony Sperduti, who had been an art director at Kate Spade and Jack Spade, started working on a variety of branding and art projects together, eventually creating their own branding studio, Partners & Spade.
The three men brainstormed and came up with the idea of a standalone store. Spade and Sperduti suggested putting it in the old bar. But rather than follow J.Crew's retail playbook, the three decided that there should be no brand signage. The shop would be known only by what it said on the old neon "liquor store" sign hanging from the building, a holdover from the space's pre-bar life. There would be curated exhibitions of paintings and photography in the dressing rooms. The merchandise would be a tightly edited selection of J.Crew's new premium offerings along with some of the brands Drexler was adding to the menswear mix, such as Barbour and Alden. It would be the kind of boutique that stylish men dream about, a hidden gem that might be written up in Monocle, only this one would sell the wares of a mass-market brand.