Allen tries on a few pieces and looks incredible. (BR, you should hire him to model). In the mix, there is a nubby flannel, a white T-shirt that says “Banana Republic” on the pocket, a Southwestern geometric shirt jacket, and a hunky henley T-shirt with a vintage BR logo. At first glance, a lot of these pieces look like carbon copies, but there are minor changes: The Western jacket has leather buttons and not the original wooden ones. Aside from these small details, everything feels like it’s genuinely plucked from the past. As for the new pieces and their prices, well, the money factor is very decent, given that the quality is still stellar; that fun geometric shirt jacket is going for a cool $250, while that sturdy, bias-cut plaid flannel is $100. “Accounting for inflation, it’s actually probably less money nowadays for your purchasing power than the original,” says Grady. Not bad!
Another treat are the hyper-detailed, illustrated catalogs, which BR began in 1979 and ran until 1990. Banana Republic quit doing it in 1990 until 1998 and then restarted it for four years. “It wasn’t as successful because it [the catalog] was now photographed and not these beautiful hand drawings. The original BR really focused on the artistic quality and actually had a creative art,” says Grady. “They hired artists to draw and design a lot of these things. So when they started doing the photographs, it obviously just didn’t have the same look and feel.” The catalogs are the key to Banana Republic’s storytelling roots. After all, the brand was founded by Mel Ziegler, an artist and writer, along with his wife Patricia. One description I appreciate from a catalog is about the “Impressionist Sweater,” which Banana Republic has reissued: “In creating this sweater, we used yarn the way Monet, Sisley, and Cezanne used daubs of paint: to reproduce the shimmering effect of light in the natural world. Thus, each ‘color’ is really a palette of complementary hues–and as many as six shades in a single thick-and-thin strand of all cotton yarn.” That’s true wardrobe poetry.
