Menswear tastemaker’s views in touch with Generation Y
Nickelson Wooster could easily be described as a misplaced millennial.
The tattooed menswear tastemaker may have been born in 1960, but his view of topics such as career paths, style conformity and social media easily mirrors those held by Generation Y.
“In a certain way, I have been the unlikely beneficiary of appearing today how a lot of kids are appearing — meaning these social media influencers,” Wooster says. “But the difference is, I’m twice their age and with a lot of experience under my belt.”
Perhaps that’s why Wooster (who goes by Nick) boasts a following of more than 600,000 on Instagram and is a fixture in street style coverage from fashion weeks around the world.
But it’s not just his edgy-chic appearance and online presence that endears him to a younger set (although it certainly helps). It’s also his career trajectory. To say his fashion work experience has been varied — if a tad volatile — would be an understatement.
“I always say, I have been fired from more jobs than most people would ever have had in their entire career,” he says.
Wooster’s lengthy success in the industry is not an accident, though. His nearly 30-year career in the fashion industry flitting between several high-profile positions including as a buyer at Barneys New York; men’s fashion director at Neiman Marcus; the director of retail merchandising at Calvin Klein and design director at Polo Ralph Lauren have all been calculated jumps.
So, what drove him to make the leap professionally so many times?
“For me, it’s pure ADD. I have just been interested in a lot of different things,” he explains. “But I was also ambitious. I wanted to try different things.”
But Wooster’s leapfrogging hasn’t always been viewed as a bonus. In fact, as one might expect, it was often a point of concern for prospective employers.
“It was interesting because Karen Katz, when I met her at Neiman Marcus, was very critical of my jumping around a lot. And headhunters have also said the same thing,” he says. “And I would say, ‘OK, if that’s the filter by which you’re looking at success, is longevity, which is absolutely a metric. But I don’t know that it’s necessarily the right one. Especially today.’ ”
Wooster pointed to the recent departure of Justin O’Shea after just six months as creative director at Brioni as an example of modern careers being less about staying put in one job and more about embarking on a serious of “projects.”
“Good or bad, right or wrong, I just think that’s how it is,” he says.
Wooster’s latest project is designer of a capsule collection for the Italian fashion house Lardini. The release includes coats, cardigans and drop-crotch trousers, each piece with a little something different and unique about it — just like the man who created them.
“What I’ve tried to do with the clothes that have my name on them, is every item is a little different take on something that’s out there,” he explains of the designs. “For the most part, I would expect or assume that no one is going to wear head-to-toe me because I don’t believe that head-to-toe anything is very interesting.”
Instead, Wooster hopes the collection offers customers classic pieces with a twist such as patchwork shirts and a blazer with dot details — and a few comfort-pushing pieces as well.
“I’ve tried to develop pieces that, each standing on their own, would be a variation on something familiar so it could be imagined that if you wear this it could fit into your wardrobe,” he says.
So, who is Wooster’s target customer?
“I really believe there are three guys that shop in better stores,” Wooster explains. “One is a guy who is style aware but fashion averse, so someone who is interested in looking good but the minute you give him a look that is identifiable, he’s not interested; the second guy is absolutely a fashion victim, somebody who loves labels, loves fashion and wants to tell the world I know what I’m doing; and the third guy is super classic and would only wear Brioni.”
Wooster is confident there are enough pieces within his Wooster + Lardini collection to appeal to those first two types of shoppers.
Chatting with Wooster gives one the impression it’s a good time to be a man interested in what he wears. Basically, it’s no longer considered less masculine if a guy wants to think about what he is wearing.
“That divide, 25 years ago when I started, it was exactly this: gay and straight. Gay guys would wear designer clothes and be, let’s say, peacocks, and straight guys would never want to do that,” he says.
“I always say that MTV Cribs is what brought straight men into the fashion world. Once they sort of saw sports guys and music guys had like a billion sneakers, they realized, ‘Oh, you mean I can have more than one?’ ”
He says it wasn’t until the early aughts (or 2000s, for those not in the know) that men expanded their footwear thinking to go beyond a black shoe, a brown shoe and a pair of sneakers.
“I think, for most men, because barriers have come down, there are so many more options,” he says.