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Freemans Sporting Club in Manhattan Elizabeth Weinberg
In the dead time between lunch and dinner, the second floor of Freemans Restaurant, downtown Manhattan’s culinary shrine to neo-Americana, is deserted. As the few lingering diners lazily draw out espressos amid the restaurant’s heavy wooden furniture, shabby chandeliers, and menagerie of taxidermy, most if not all are blithely unaware that just 10 feet behind them, a narrow passage leads to a dusty bookcase concealing another, altogether more industrious world.
The heavy, tome-loaded bookshelf is a secret door swinging open to reveal two cavernous rooms that contain a bespoke tailoring production line. There is a shabbily stylish fitting area furnished with a well-worn Afghan carpet and a large mirror, providing ample space for the four elaborate fittings necessary to hand-cut a superlative suit (starting price of $3,950). In an adjacent open workshop, merengue crackles out of a clock radio as four focused craftsmen operate under the supervision of a Dominican-born master tailor.
The shop is the latest extension to the Freemans fashion mini-empire, which offers American heritage style with a twist. Even if you are not among its dapper, in-the-know clientele, which includes such style icons as David Beckham, you may have a good sense of what it’s like to shop there—if you’ve ever been to J.Crew. Indeed, unmistakable elements of Freemans’s aesthetic, as well as that of other boutique brands, have cropped up in J.Crew outlets across the country—nowhere more prominently than at the menswear giant’s New York concept space, Liquor Store. According to Taavo Somer, Freemans’s intense, thickly maned founder, this is no accident.
The bespoke expansion is a high-end investment for the Freemans Sporting Club, the clothing line that sprang from the restaurant in 2005. In Freemans’s small Rivington Street boutique, racks of neat machinist shirts ($198) fight for attention opposite electric blue deconstructed sports coats ($528) and limited-edition desert boots developed in collaboration with PF Flyers ($80). Every product is artfully presented, laid out on vintage worktables or nestled between scattered tchotchkes reminiscent of a lost, rustic masculinity: steamer trunks, antique binoculars, and shaving potions.
Somer not only designed the clothes but also painstakingly constructed the fixtures by hand, even custom-mixing an original gray paint shade to ensure the walls reflected the particular 1930s vibe he had in mind. His meticulous care paid immediate dividends. The clothing came to influence—perhaps even spawn—several hipster subspecies: the barman-hunter, the barista-trapper, the line cook–lumberjack. The brand soon added two stores, including one in San Francisco’s Mission District.
Popularity presented new challenges. “When we started, there were not many people doing what we do,” says Kent Kilroe, the store’s co-owner. “Soon everyone was offering clothes like ours and presenting them in the same way.” The ultimate example was the 2008 opening of J.Crew’s Liquor Store. Stylistically, the men’s specialty shop looked almost as if the 450 square feet of Freemans Sporting Club had been reconstructed in Tribeca, brick by brick.
Freemans displayed their product on work-tables and antique cases surrounded by stuffed pheasants, vintage bicycle seats, and classic novels by Saul Bellow and Raymond Carver, among other manly volumes. Liquor Store, meanwhile, piled shirts on banquet tables surrounded by similarly idiosyncratic ephemera: old-time bowling balls, oil paintings of toy dogs, and a complete set of Harvard Classics by P.F. Collier & Son. “They copied us down to the shade of the paint colors,” remembers Freemans’s director of sales, Alex Young. “Every exhibition case was lined with the exact custom-gray shade Taavo had created by hand.”
J.Crew’s head menswear designer, Frank Muytjens, dismisses such similarities as coincidence. “You have to look deeper,” he explains. “We are surrounding ourselves with classic brands—presenting our brand in an interesting way we could not otherwise do.” The Liquor Store opening was nevertheless a lesson for the Freemans team. In the cutthroat growth area of menswear, a $50 billion market in 2010, originality cannot be protected. Mass retailers are able to replicate successful strategies as quickly as knockoff shops in Chinatown pump out fake Louis Vuitton handbags.
