How Gap became fashion's 'basic bitch'
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"Basic" used to be a compliment in fashion, a tribute to timelessness; now it's an insult, a criticism of bald lack of imagination. Gap had basics when that was what everyone wanted, and now the struggling retailer is basic in the worst, Kate-Moss-deriding sense.
The once-cool retailer, which bloomed in the 1980s and 1990s with covetable t-shirts and no-fuss khakis, said it would close 175 of its warehouse-like stores in favor of a more boutique-y approach. The American heritage brand also said it would eliminate 250 corporate jobs as part of "fleet management."
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This is a dire turn for Gap, which could and should own a large swath of mass fashion. Several fashion trends of recent years — from the mania for high-low mixing of couture and basics to normcore — were right in Gap's core business.
Yet, Gap has lost its sartorial cachet, and with it a slump in sales, changing creative direction and a closing of multiple stores.
How did Gap lose it?
The golden age of minimal cool
Gap used to own the cool, effortless "low" part of high-low fashion that every expensive stylist wants to imitate. Who could forget Sharon Stone’s daring look at the 1995 Oscars where she sported a white Gap buttoned shirt, collar flipped in an eternal expression of chic, with a lilac skirt from Vera Wang?
“It was the last time Gap was ‘good,’” says Kristin Bentz, a retail expert. “Stone had that Vera Wang skirt along with Gap [it showed the brand had] good fitting basics at a great price point. When you rolled into the Gap for a crisp white shirt, a pair of khakis and a denim shirt you knew you looked good. It was quintessentially American.”
Gap owned a key moment in contemporary American fashion in the 1990s: An era in which its plaids, jeans and thermals matched both the height of Seattle grunge and the growing trend of androgynous, intellectual appeal. The brand became popular at a time when pop culture was fascinated by all things unisex: Models like Jenny Shimizu, the vaguely citrusy scent of CK One, and Nirvana. It was cool to be pared down. It was chic to be minimal.
That was what Gap wanted to be, its core self-identity sitting on a foundation of effortless chic. Established on Ocean Avenue in 1969, the shop sold everything from LPs to Levi’s, painting itself as the purveyor of all that was cool in culture. It was only after Gap's decision to offer private label merchandise in the early party of the seventies that the brand began to take a hold of the fashion industry. After hiring its star CEO Mickey Drexler, Gap was on its way to becoming a multi-million dollar juggernaut.
IMAGE: REED SAXON/ASSOCIATED PRESS
Julie Zerbo, a fashion attorney and founder of The Fashion Law, says the downturn of sales snowballed after the replacement of Drexler in 2002.
It was, she says, a statement that unintentionally set a precedent for the lack of vision for the company to come.
“Gap has been in a tough spot for years,” she says. “It was close to bankruptcy. Since then I think a significant source of problems has been in the brand's musical chairs of executives and management, and creative directors, and the resulting lack of consistency in terms of direction.”
Zerbo is referring to several creative directors and executives who came and went — from Drexler’s immediate replacement Paul Pressler to Patrick Robinson to Rebekka Bay — each of whom failed to turn the brand around.
“Robinson was arguably a bit too fashion-y for the brand, but was tapped to save the brand,” Zerbo says. “Then, a year after he was ousted, they hired Bay, who has also since been let go with Gap eliminating the creative director role altogether. If nothing else, in terms of design and strategy, Gap does not appear to have a forged a path of its own to which it is committed. This is obviously problematic.”
Everyone in Khakis!
Then there was everything else, says Bentz.
“It was bad advertising,” she says. “’Everyone in Khakis!’ was set over buildings. Bad fashion. Not keeping up with big data and technology. Antiquated merchandising. The list goes on and on.”
Indeed, in the past few years, the brand has had issues that went hand-in-hand with its identity crisis.
Gap was once highly profitable. But with the changing times and the flailing economy, the retailer was unable to keep up with the millennial-dominated market. Sales were down 7.9% in 2009, at the time when e-commerce was in its infancy.
Instead of capitalizing on technology and appealing to millennials, Gap attempted to maintain its fading Gen X customer-base, who were now less inclined to shop and settled down to focus on their burgeoning families. When they did shop, they couldn't find their favorite basics at the Gap anymore as the retailer went through frantic fashion reinventions, tweaking t-shirts, sending out strangely printed trousers and losing its way in a sea of too-bright colors and cheap fabrics.
With the new decade came even more competition: One hailing from Spain, the other from Japan. In a matter of a few years, the Gap, along with multiple other retailers saw both Zara and Uniqlo become major forces that would hit the American business with painful blow.
“I’ve said forever that Uniqlo should buy the Gap and use the North American footprint to roll out its brand,” says Bentz. “Uniqlo is what the Gap should be. It’s fantastic tailoring, quality product at a great price.”
Zerbo agrees with the sentiment but adds that the retailer has failed to forge its own path.
“This is obviously problematic,” she says. “With this in mind, in its many attempts to revamp and profit, the brand is simultaneously losing touch with its core DNA and being pitted against new competitors in a sect of the market that is already crowded.”
Gap misses normcore
One trend that Gap missed — and it could have owned — was the height of last year’s normcore, a style that was based upon a clean, seemingly boring palette: Basic tees, khakis, button-ups, a nod to what Gap used to be.
Instead, everyone from fast fashion retailers to contemporary brands like Acne, ATM, Steven Alan, among others, created their own basic line of staples that were better fit and made with superior quality than those from Gap.
Neither here, neither there, Gap has now found itself in an uncomfortable predicament in the fashion game. Once the purveyor of basics, the brand has now become the basic of basics. To put it brusquely, and in the favorite put-down of chic people, Gap has become fashion's basic bitch.
Now, with fashion turning to mobile commerce, and the advent of new technology aimed toward the Gen Z set, Gap seems to be catching up, though two decades behind. In a new world where Instagram has become the new shopping platform, where apps like Spring continue to gain popularity, where fashion and tech are now strong allies, Gap is finding that perhaps it’s too late to catch up and fill that widening gap between what it was and what it could be.
