San Francisco Examiner / Archivalĭespite the aversion to excess, by 1970, Plain Jane was raking in a healthy amount of money - about $2 million in sales - allowing them to move their headquarters to the rapidly gentrifying Potrero Hill neighborhood. “We want to contain our size, and just grow a little with each collection.” ‘A very aggressive individual’Ī 1975 legal notice in the San Francisco Examiner.
“We don’t want to be a giant company,” the pair told Kirby in an interview just months after the brand launched. That same aversion to largesse was reflected by the tiny showroom they went on to open, which stood in between two “topless sideshows,” Kirby said at the time. The simplicity of their designs went against the ethos of many other dress designers of the era, such as Oscar de la Renta and Leo Narducci, who were playing with the same Depression-era nostalgia but refracted it through the lens of maximalism, with splendorous bell sleeves and lots of taffeta and silk. Their dresses were cute and trendy - as an early ad said, “plain janes in name only.” Their style drew both from San Francisco’s stoned, nonchalant hippie culture as it did from the everyday fashions of the 1930s and 1940s, with lots of florals and what San Francisco Examiner fashion critic Maureen Kirby called “LOL,” or little old lady, prints.Ī photo of Jane Tise, left, and Susie Tompkins at their Plain Jane showroom in San Francisco. Both would later become key company shareholders. Even when they convinced department stores like Joseph Magnin to stock their goods in-store and host pop-ups, they kept the company, hiring just two more people: Allen Schwartz for sales and Duncan Dwelle for operations. Susie Tompkins and Tise were in charge of packaging, and Doug Tompkins ran the business side of the company. Soon, Tompkins’ husband, Doug, joined the venture, using $50,000 from the sale of their outdoor apparel shop - a little place called The North Face - to cover a garment factory producing their designs in lots of 100. In 1968, Susie Tompkins and Jane Tise called their new company Plain Jane and began selling dresses to local boutiques out of the back of a Volkswagen Bus. The story of Esprit began with San Francisco’s Summer of Love in the rearview, when two 20-something friends decided to make dresses they actually wanted to wear. ‘Plain janes in name only’Ī 1968 ad for Plain Jane. What began as a humble dress shop founded by two women operating out of a Broadway showroom ballooned into a multinational conglomerate worth $800 million at its height, before the decades to come hollowed out the brand - leaving its place in America as a relic in vintage shops and the imaginations of Gen X kids. By the mid-’90s, mirroring the rest of Boomer culture, the Bay Area hippies had fully transformed into take-no-prisoners capitalists, complete with brutal corporate takeovers and tumultuous divorces. It’s one of San Francisco corporate excess and office trampolines. The couple seemed to personify the Esprit ethos: Susie would later become a prominent Democratic donor and activist, while Doug would go on to be one of the greatest environmental stewards of all time.īut underneath the splashy magazine profiles and heavy-handed political messaging lies another tale. The brand’s idiosyncratic, publicly forward-thinking co-owners, Susie and Doug Tompkins, were at least as vital to the brand’s image as the clothes and the ads. With the logo’s omnipresence at the time, it may as well have been Supreme for the teens of the late ’80s and early ’90s. Their tote bags and T-shirts hung from all the coolest shoulders, adorning fashion plates with the legendary Esprit logo. Wild prints, bright colors and baggy silhouettes reigned.
In a country still grappling with the AIDS crisis, the Rodney King riots and the Gulf War, the “What Would You Do” campaign (featuring a young Gwyneth Paltrow) would turn out to be the brand’s biggest and most remembered, pushing boundaries and bringing San Francisco cool to the masses.Įsprit appealed to the youth with a message of lefty, post-racial harmony.
#Allen schwartz clothing free
“I’d keep a woman’s right to choose, unless George Bush is free to babysit.”
“I would distribute condoms in every high school in America,” read another. “Give back the land stolen from Native Americans,” one ad demanded.
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