MKTG/Tech Post #1 - Clothes for "Petite" Men

Being short runs in my family, so I've stood witness to the guys in my family struggle to find clothes that actually fit them without going to the boys' section. In the end, they usually end up bringing their clothes to the tailor, which can get pretty expensive. And not only is it pricey, but tailoring down clothes to fit smaller men can sometimes ruin the original design. Short men need clothes that are cut proportionally to their size. The retail industry has picked up on this a while ago when they created petite sizes for women. I've always wondered why the industry has not done the same for short men. Stores will sometimes carry men's suits in "short" sizes but the selection is usually sparse. According to the article Measuring Up, "an estimated 30 percent of all men between 20 and 60 are under 5-foot-8," so it's surprising there aren't more mainstream designers and stores that offer clothes sized for shorter men.

Here is the full text article from the NY Times:

Measuring Up
By GUY TREBAY

LOS ANGELES

BACK in high school in Spring Valley, N.Y., Joe Carbone barely knew the word defeat. As captain of the football team, star of the wrestling team, a power lifter who competed on a national level and an athlete with the kind of physique that tends to be featured on magazines with cover lines like "Perfect Abs in 7 Days," Mr. Carbone was a textbook specimen of American manhood.

He even had a tryout with the New York Giants before deciding to take up a career for which he was an ideal candidate: as a strength coach for professional athletes, people like Kobe Bryant, who was Mr. Carbone's exclusive client for nearly a decade, and then as a general strength coach for the Los Angeles Lakers.

But there has always been one area of Mr. Carbone's life where failure is a given, and that is at the suit rack of a department store.

"Look, I know I'm shorter than most people," said Mr. Carbone, who stands a hair over 5 feet 3 inches in stocking feet. "I've never really had a problem with it, but you just have to accept that you can't buy clothes."

You have to accept that, in a super-sized universe, even the smallest of regular garments tends to be scaled wrong for Joe Carbone and also for the legions of other men under 5-foot-8, a stature that denotes the point below which the term off-the-rack becomes a joke.

It is a sartorial arena where shoulders tend to be scaled to linebacker dimensions on suits whose labels say 38 Small, where blazers have armholes the size of kiddie pools, where shirt pockets float just above the waistband and where belts often wrap around one's waist like a lariat.

In this world, shirttails hang so ridiculously long that short men are sometimes forced to tuck them beneath the crotch in the manner of onesies. Zippers on jeans are so long that waistbands ride above the navel, geek style. Inseams droop so that they leave a wearer with little choice but to roll and cuff like Howdy Doody or else to hack at the hems with the manic vigor of Edward Scissorhands.

These are just the broadest outlines of the dilemma, according to a number of men under 5-foot-8 and also to Web sites devoted to their sartorial challenges. "Even my shorts have to be tailored," Mr. Carbone lamented. "Try shopping in the Lakers shop for sweats when you're 5-foot-4."

Both census figures and common sense suggest that Americans are growing ever larger: the average height of an American male age 20 to 74 increased to 5-foot-9½ in 2002 from just over 5-foot-8 in 1960. Still, according to the most recent census data, an estimated 30 percent of all men between 20 and 60 are under 5-foot-8, a figure that seems to indicate the existence of a hidden-in-plain sight market to which few in the apparel business have given much serious thought.

"The reality is, it's easier not to go after that market if you can go after something that's a bigger market, which is the regular sizes," said Alan Victor, the president of Jack Victor Limited, a company based in Montreal whose suits are sold in 700 stores across North America. "Oftentimes salesmen will sell shorter men something that requires a lot of tailoring because they don't have the product. And stores just don't want to invest in special inventory for men under 5-foot-8."

In a nation that increasingly resembles Gulliver's Brobdignag, coffins are now scaled like piano cases, there are chains that cater exclusively to men as tall as grandfather clocks or as unabashedly hefty as walk-in refrigerators, but nothing for people of more modest dimensions. This news may fall hard on the ears of men under 5-foot-8, although there is no denying that it fills their tailors with glee.

"Basically it has driven me into the whole bespoke category, as expensive as that may be," said Robert Burke, the fashion director for Bergdorf Goodman, who stands 5-foot-6 and is given to wearing double-vent suits luxuriantly molded to his trim frame. In the industry Mr. Burke is known as a particularly natty dresser. He should be, considering that much of his wardrobe, shoes included, is custom made.

"Part of what happens as a retailer is that, if you're buying 8 or 12 of a given garment, you can only put so many in small, medium, large and extra large," Mr. Burke said. "Inevitably the smalls are the first to go, which probably shows we have hit a niche."

Yet it is a niche the fashion industry does very little to fill. And this seems particularly odd given that specially sized apparel is one of the fastest growing segments of the retail men's wear market.

Casual Male Retail Group, for instance, the country's foremost retailer catering to extra-large men, now has 495 locations around the country, a catalog and an e-commerce site, 13 Casual Male-at-Sears stores in Canada, and 22 Rochester Big & Tall stores in the United States, all of them built around a niche that a mere decade or two ago was almost totally overlooked.

Before Casual Male and Rochester Big & Tall appeared, it was the George Foremans and the Yao Mings of the world who felt abandoned by fashion, doomed to wear high-water trousers, blazers styled by Pee-wee Herman and shoes that resembled lace-up galleons, as styled perhaps by the Herman Munster atelier. All that has changed, of course, if one may judge by the number of pro basketball players posed stylishly wearing Prada and Gucci in GQ fashion spreads.

But what about Mike Smith, the jockey who rode Giacomo to victory last month in the Kentucky Derby? What about actors like Jason Alexander, Michael J. Fox, David Spade, Danny DeVito or Mark Wahlberg, or the figure skater Scott Hamilton? Are these men, and others like them, doomed to a lifetime of Gucci privation?

Given that millions of men are under 5-foot-8, why aren't there also specialized stores coast to coast for them? "I think there's still a lot of stigma about the issue," said Richard Novoa, a retired parole officer and community organizer in Santa Maria, Calif., who is 5-foot-3. "It's kind of funny and kind of sad at the same time, but I still encounters a lot of 'hey, little man; hey Napoleon; hey Mickey Rooney' attitude."

Who then, is to tend to the sartorial needs of short men? Is it Dean and Dan Caten, the diminutive twins who design cropped jackets and crotch-hugging jeans for Dsquared? Is it Alexander McQueen, Jil Sander or Prada, whose modish short-skirted jackets and cropped armholes make a plausible solution to the problem this season, but could easily become zoot suits with the next revolution of the wheel of taste. "In a way you have to be an insider in fashion to know who cuts for your size," explained Andy Lopez, a salesman at Dior Men on 57th Street in Manhattan who had already reached his full adult height of 5-foot-8 by age 17. "Not every guy has that advantage," Mr. Lopez said.

And given that the average price of a suit there is roughly $1,800, it seems that Dior is an unlikely default for the majority of America's short men, for most of whom the issue is likelier to be how to find a reasonably priced suit that does not look like it was borrowed from Dad or else a Tommy Bahama shirt less voluminous than a spinnaker.

"Really, no one is systematically addressing it," said Mr. Burke of Bergdorf Goodman. "So consumers often end up making alterations, shortening jackets, taking in shoulders, things that should never be done to a garment, dreadful things."

Tucked into a mall in the San Fernando Valley is Jimmy Au, a man who approaches short men's fashion with the zeal of a missionary. A former race track tailor who cut velvet Edwardian suits for Eddie Belmonte in the days when that legendary jockey had five winners in a single day at Aqueduct, Mr. Au, 63, eventually moved to the West Coast, and brought his bespoke skills to the retail market, opening an emporium catering exclusively to short guys.

Mr. Au's first store was located in a shopping center not far from the famous Santa Anita Park; there were other, later ones in Chinatown and Beverly Hills. The stores were known as Jimmy Au's Short and Small, in an echo of the Big and Tall chains, until customers still stigmatized by the small-man label balked. Now the haberdashery at the Woodlands Hill Promenade mall is listed under the blameless rubric of Jimmy Au's for Men 5'8" and Under (jimmyaus.com)

"It's a misconception to think that we cater just to small guys," said Mr. Au, a genial native of Hong Kong who moved to the United States to study at Brigham Young University in 1959 and who has shrunk a bit from his original height of 5-foot-3.

"We go from the biggest guy to the smallest guy, provided that they're short," said Mr. Au, whose store stocks suits of his own design and also from those few labels (Armani, Calvin Klein, Kenneth Cole, DKNY and Ralph Lauren) that even bother to venture into a market where sizes can range from 34 Extra Short to 48 Extra Short for men under 5-foot-5, and 35 Short to 50 Short for customers who occupy the subsequent three-inch niche.

So Jerry Garcia, a movie industry executive who stands 5-foot-4 is delighted to make regular pilgrimages to Mr. Au's store in a San Fernando Valley mall. It beats skulking around in the boy's department at Macy's.

"I work in a high style business, and this is a big problem for me," Mr. Garcia said. Shopping at mass market retailers like the Gap inevitably ends in discouragement, "because I'm always cutting three feet off the pants." Even with Levi's, Mr. Garcia ends up "hacking up the jeans" because the 26-inch inseam he requires is two inches less than shortest length available in the average pair of jeans.

"Face it," Mr. Garcia said, "the world is designed for tall guys."

Fashion would certainly seem to be. Or at least it is in coastal America. "In talking to other retailers, I've found that New York and California have more smaller men than anywhere else in the country," Mr. Burke of Bergdorf Goodman said. "This is completely unscientific, but for some reason men are just bigger everywhere else."