John Varvatos Brand Returning to NYFW With a New Creative Director and High Hopes
Four years after the John Varvatos brand exited bankruptcy with a new owner and bid goodbye to the man whose name is on the label, the company is ready to take a higher profile. It rehired a designer with a long history at the brand as creative director and is returning to New York Fashion Week with a presentation on Friday6.
Now owned by the private equity firm Lion/Hendrix Cayman Ltd., which paid an estimated $97 million for the company in 2020, it is being operated by the same team that runs its AllSaints division in the U.K. Pete Wood serves as chief executive officer and Catherine Jobling is its chief operating officer.
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In their first formal interview since taking control of the brand, the management team outlined how the brand has been transformed over the past four years and how it envisions the future as it prepares to celebrate its 25th anniversary next year.
“Our brand has got so much to celebrate, and it holds such a unique space in the market,” Jobling said. “A modern, masculine brand that has an edge and yet is still luxurious.”
She said the company believes now is the right time to break its silence, due in large part to the addition of Karl Aberg as vice president of creative.
Aberg, who joined the brand in May, worked with John Varvatos at Ralph Lauren when he was just starting his career, served as design director for John Varvatos when it launched, left to join Marc Jacobs as global men’s design director for 16 years before rejoining John Varvatos to serve as design director of the Star USA collection. After the bankruptcy, he followed Varvatos to On This Day, the collection he launched after leaving his namesake brand. That venture failed and he was hired by the AllSaints team this spring.
“I met John at Ralph Lauren where he needed someone who could sketch. I was available to do that and we got along really well. I love what he wanted to created and I started at John Varvatos in 1999,” Aberg said. “I was his first employee.”
Jobling said when the AllSaints team was looking for a creative director, Wood sought someone who had not worked for the brand in the past and could provide a fresh perspective. But Jobling agreed to meet Aberg as a courtesy and was immediately blown away.
“He reached into his bag, and picked up his catalog from 2000,” she recalled. Then he spread out catalogues from many of the subsequent years. “It was really beautiful to see how the brand had transitioned over the years,” she said. “He worked with the brand when it was really contemporary and oversize and when it was rock, raw and skinny.”
That institutional knowledge would be invaluable to the future of the label, she believed, and it didn’t take much convincing to get Wood on board as well.
By the time Aberg started, the in-house team, many of whom are also veterans of the brand, had essentially completed the spring collection. “It was already baked in the oven,” he said with a laugh. “I was really happy with the foundation that I saw there which was already very similar to what I would have had in mind. And even beforehand, the fall 2024 collections had already taken a step in the right direction where I think the brand needs to go. So it wasn’t a horrible place to be — it was a good place.”
Even so, he was able to make a few tweaks and get the collection ready to make its return to New York Fashion Week.
“There were some silhouettes that were not as strong as they should be,” Jobling said. “So Karl just added the icing.”
The line still has much of the same DNA as it has had in the past — a rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic but one that has been updated and modernized.
At the show on Friday, Aberg said the collection will “honor our past, but will be a little cleaner, a little more safe.” Instead of skintight skinny silhouettes, the pieces will be roomer and more comfortable.
The lower-priced Star USA collection is no longer being produced and the team is instead including some opening price point pieces under the John Varvatos Collection umbrella. The entry-price pieces tend to be the bestsellers at wholesale for retailers such as Bloomingdale’s and Nordstrom, Jobling said. “It’s for someone who really loves John Varvatos but can’t afford to spend $2,000 on a blazer,” Jobling said. “It’s very unusual for one brand to do high and low, but hopefully this can introduce a younger contemporary gentleman to the brand.”
Among the pieces that will be shown at the presentation are linen-blend knit jackets, a half-lined Italian linen overcoat in a herringbone pattern, a French linen knit polo with a Johnny collar, a linen tank top, a cropped suede jacket with braided embroidery and a black silk button-down shirt with a pleated front. There’s even a boot-cut dress pant in tropical wool.
Footwear has also been updated. “We’ve always been known for our sneakers and boots,” Jobling said, “but not our sandals. Since we’ve introduced them, we’ve had a tremendous reaction.” But even the boots have been tweaked with one model featuring a square toe rather than the traditional rounded front.
The color palette has also been updated. In the past, the collection was very dark, but now, pops of color have been introduced, another way of updating the assortment.
Jobling said the presentation will feature 25 looks as a nod to the brand’s 25th anniversary next year.
Interestingly, Jobling said Wood had actually offered Varvatos the opportunity to stay on as an ambassador to the brand but the designer declined. In fact, Jobling said she has never actually met him but would welcome the opportunity.
Turning to the business, Jobling said that while she is unable to provide figures, the numbers have been good and the first half of this year has been especially strong, which she attributes in large part to the leadership team at the brand that is allowed a lot of autonomy. “They’ve got guardrails, but it’s an incredible team,” she said, many of whom have worked for the company for 15 or 20 years.
“As our profit has grown,” she said, “you can feel the confidence in the team. And Friday is our first step into reintroducing the John Varvatos brand.”
Direct-to-consumer still represents the bulk of the brand’s business, or about 80 percent. The rest comes from the company’s 16 full-line stores and four outlets as well as its e-commerce site which has been redesigned to “feel more luxury,” she said.
Going forward, the brand will open two stores later this year in Brickell in Miami and the Belmont development in Queens, N.Y. A new SoHo store will be coming next year as well as a reloacted store in San Francisco. There are also three concession sites in Asia and Jobling sees opportunity to expand the brand in the Middle East and Mexico. “Plans for international are coming along nicely,” she said.
Wholesale too may begin to increase in importance going forward. Jobling said that category of business will end the year up in the double digits with Bloomingdale’s its largest customer.
David Thielebeule, men’s fashion director for Bloomingdale’s, said: “John Varvatos and Bloomingdale’s have long been icons of who New York City’s style. As [the brand] returns to NYFW, they demonstrate that dreaming big and staying rooted in the city’s chic, modern vibe can transform menswear and set new standards of cool.”
Jobling added that the wholesale distribution has really been “cleaned up,” with very little clearance pricing as the new management team ensures that whatever is produced is sold and there’s very little left over. “It’s made us a lot more profitable,” she said.
Items in leather continue to be the most popular, Aberg said, followed by tailored pieces. “And we sell a lot of underpinnings to create the ‘look,’” he added.
The customer is “an affluent gentleman with a free spirit,” he said, or as Jobling refers to him: “The dentist who wants to be in rock ‘n’ roll.” And by expanding the breadth of the brand beyond that rock ‘n’ roll aesthetic, the future is bright, she believes. “There is a gap for this customer all over the world. It is a unique aesthetic that caters to a unique individual who wants to look rock ’n roll, but with a contemporary edge.”
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