Tuesday, November 1, 2011

A Profile of Simon Spurr: Tough Swagger Confident

Simon Spurr is handsome. He needs no adornment for this to be true. He's thirty-seven, blond, British. Wears his granddad's dog tags every day. Married to a doctor who looks like an actress who might play a doctor in a Michael Bay movie. Met her seven years ago at, no joke, Diddy's White Party in the Hamptons. (Spurr was the guest of a guest.) Drives an Audi A7 with room in the back for his ninety-pound Rhodesian, Apollo. Favorite funny movie is Anchorman. Soft-spoken, polite in that way that closes doors as well as opens them. He's the kind of man who can say that Ryan Gosling would play him in a movie and not get laughed out of the room.
Gosling is handsome, too. You can see this in Blue Valentine or Lars and the Real Girl, where creative facial hair or an actorly layer of flab can't quite conceal the movie star underneath. Or you can see it in Crazy, Stupid, Love, in which he literally needs no adornment as he stands, bare-ass naked, swaggering in front of Steve Carell in a sweaty locker room, a perfect 10.0 on the Richter scale of confidence. But there are other moments in that movie — moments when Gosling's character wears the kind of suits that make you — yes, you! — think, Hey ... maybe, with the right light and the right sunglasses and that suit, that suit, I, too, could look like that. Handsome. Like a man. Like the man. (And hey, it works for Carell. At least in the movie.) Many of those suits, as you might have guessed, were designed by Simon Spurr.
As were suits worn by the full spectrum of young Hollywood this year, from the guys who seem to possess Gosling-like levels of swagger and charisma — Justin Timberlake, Bradley Cooper, and Gosling himself — to those who don't — Daniel Radcliffe, a Jonas brother, assorted Twilighters. That you can't immediately tell the difference between the two kinds of men, at least when they're staring down the paparazzi, shows why people are talking about Simon Spurr right now. If he can make a big-balled killer out of Harry Potter, he can make one out of you.
A storm is coming, and Spurr is looking for a face. It's late summer and he's sitting in his office in New York, shuffling through a pile of models' head shots and searching for the guy who would be, for all intents and purposes, the face of his five-year-old brand — meaning the guy who will wear his first look on the runway at his upcoming Spring-Summer 2012 fashion show. (Spurr, as the employer of no more than ten people, isn't going to be buying any glossy billboard ads anytime soon, so the face he chooses is critical for branding the whole operation.) Hurricane Irene is due any day, and Spurr mentions that he and his staff should move his clothes to a safer location. During the last storm, his river-facing ninth-floor office's windows blew out completely.
About those clothes: The critical shorthand on the brand is something like "a young Savile Row." Even though he traffics in denim and leather and other casual staples, Spurr is known mostly for suits and tailored separates that reflect the architectural rigor and aesthetic attitude of one of his idols: Tommy Nutter, the Savile Row legend who made suits for Mick Jagger (he wore one at his wedding to Bianca) and the Beatles (all but George wore Nutter for the Abbey Road cover). Nutter was a designer of suits for men who didn't have to wear suits, and Spurr has a similar customer in mind. His jackets, made in Italy, come with armholes that are cut extremely high, which has the practical effect of forcing you to walk taller, stronger, better. His choices in patterned cloth lean toward the provocative. His inspirations are British, but the type of British who like to fight and fuck and drive angry. (Backstage at his Fall 2010 show, Spurr posted a sign to set the mood for his models. It read: TOUGH SWAGGER BRIT STRONG WALK GUY RITCHIE CONFIDENT.) In other words: The Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels Brits. The Daniel Craig Brits. Brits who could kick your ass while wearing a suit.
Which is a far cry from the boys on the model cards. The image he wants to project for his collection is a bit more grown-up, more manly than what you'd see from contemporaries like Phillip Lim and Thom Browne — as one stylist notes, Spurr's pants have special tabs that can be let out in case the owner adds a few pounds around the waist, as men tend to do — and none of the emaciated teenagers before him quite fit the bill. Ultimately, he selects a handful of models he's used before, and later that day, he will review the music for his upcoming show. When asked how much time he gets to spend designing clothes, he says, "This much" and holds his fingers an inch apart.
The journey — from boy to man to designer to brand — begins in a tiny village in Kent, in southeast England, a town, Simon says, "with one grocery store and five pubs." His parents were both bankers, his dad commuting forty minutes each way to London. "I still look up to him," Spurr says. "As a person, as a man. But he's also very influential in my aesthetics. My dad had a lot of suits working in a bank, late '60s, early '70s. They still had the slim lapel, the narrow shoulder. And I guess it was subconsciously ingrained in me. That's the decade I always go back to."
As a teenager, he worked in supermarkets and dressed like Paul Weller and favored art in school, and he credits a line of relatives on his mom's side for inspiring that. (He's related to the sculptor Sydney March, who was commissioned to design public monuments in such far-flung places as Calcutta and Hamilton, Ontario.) He earned his bona fides studying men's fashion at Middlesex University in London before landing jobs in New York at Nautica, CK Calvin Klein, and Ralph Lauren Purple Label. That last one, designing suits at the pinnacle of the Polo empire, was about as close as Spurr ever got to a Savile Row education, learning from the other designers and tailors at Ralph Lauren how to create off-the-rack suits that could meet the highest sartorial standards.
Then, in 2006, Spurr left to go solo and launch Spurr, a denim-centric line of mostly casual clothing. "I needed to make the choice between putting my feet under the table and enjoying the financial rewards associated with foreseeable promotion [at Ralph Lauren], or take an educated gamble and try to create something that would allow me to have freedom down the road for a family. It felt like my last chance to get out of the corporate world." He designed three pairs of jeans and brought them to Bergdorf Goodman, where the fashion director, a former colleague from Calvin Klein named Tommy Fazio, liked what he saw. The first pair of Spurr jeans was sold to an older man, a rich guy who liked how they fit. The designer was there when it happened, sheepishly looking on, and before long, they were among the store's top-selling jeans. Recognizing that "the jeans guy" was a limiting role, Simon Spurr (the man) created Simon Spurr (the high-end suit-and-sportswear brand) in 2009. That same year, Fazio joined as president, seeing to it that guys in, say, Tokyo could buy Spurr jeans and Simon Spurr suits just as easily as guys in New York. In 2011, they can. And they are.

And now, what some other people have to say about Simon Spurr:
"I think what best describes Simon is five words: He knows what he wants." —Tommy Hilfiger, who currently employs Spurr as a creative consultant for his men's-wear label. The first results of that collaboration — a slightly British update on Hilfiger's trademark preppy Americana — are in stores now.
"When everyone was doing slim lapels and the Mad Men look, he was doing peak lapels. It's almost a Mod Squad/Dylan kind of swagger." —Michael Nash, the stylist who has put Spurr's suits on Justin Timberlake and Joe Jonas
"[Spurr] has the best financial mind of any of our clients." —Spurr's lawyer (according to Spurr)
Spurr is confident. "I'm not naturally someone who enjoys the spotlight," he says over dinner. "Having a brand with your name comes with a lot attached to it. You can't switch it off, you can't mess up... . You're always being watched. I am a brand." He named his company after himself — no "Band of Outsiders" or "Rag & Bone" for him — which can be seen as evidence of both healthy self-regard and good horse sense. (Ten letters, neatly symmetrical. Simon — a name of biblical piety, of British pedigree, of the studious Chipmunk; and then Spurr — rugged, western, with that extra r to make it search-engine friendly. It's a good name.) He has modeled his own clothes in the pages of a fashion magazine. He appears comfortable in his own skin and in his ability to make good clothes, and if it's all merely a projection — if he's really just one of the uncool guys trying to look anything but — then it's a pretty damn convincing one.
What happens when a man becomes a brand? Good things, certainly, if you play your cards right — see: Calvin Klein, Ralph Lauren, Hilfiger — and bad things, too, if you don't. Consider Joseph Abboud or Jil Sander, two designers who sold, and eventually left, their namesake brands and can no longer design under their own names. "I was very careful," Spurr says. "I read all the horror stories. I own my own name." And yet one can't help but wonder if it's already slipping away. This summer, a sailing team competed in the forty-fourth Antigua Sailing Week, sponsored by Simon Spurr, with his brand's label — a giant "SIMON SPURR" — on the humongous sail. Apparently, it wasn't his idea. "I should be careful with what I say ..." he says when discussing it.
Then again, the team won.
The pressure for any designer — any man, really — is to grow, to expand, to build. And back in Spurr's showroom, there's talk of opening a store, of doing a bespoke line of suits (the name Simon James has been bandied about), of art to be created and furniture he'd love to design. And, and, and. But first, a storm is coming, and the clothes need to be put away.

Thanks to Esquire. Article available on Esquire November 2011 issue.

No comments:

Post a Comment