Stripes Are Solid - Haspel Featured in the Times Picayune
- 07/23/2004
Haspel was featured in the Times Picayune for it's exciting selection of men's suits, particularly the seersucker suit. Below is the entire article.
Stripes are solid
Those dimpled, pinstriped suits that have long been favored by your father's father are back in fashion -- and not just in New Orleans.
Friday, July 23, 2004
By Karen Sommer Shalett
The tradition of seersucker is so deeply rooted in the South that Mississippi senator Trent Lott holds a "Seersucker Thursday" on the floor of the U.S. Senate every year. This year, the women of the Senate joined the crop of male politicians who flaunted their dimpled suits for the traditional day.
Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu was among them, as she should have been, given that the seersucker suit's Southern roots can be traced to an origin quite close to home. It was actually created in New Orleans -- in a factory where Mayor Ray Nagin's father once worked.
However, the female senators are hardly the only new group putting a wrinkle in the traditional striped suit. Trendy urbanites have begun puckering up as well. By breaking the suit apart, wearing the jacket as a blazer with jeans -- and wearing the pants as, well, pants -- the latest generation of twenty- and thirtysomethings is making its own stylish statement.
Gone too are the white bucks and saddle shoes that usually accompany seersucker with preppy abandon. In their place are Puma and Adidas trainers in colors often reserved for the boutonnière associated with the suit's afternoon wedding appeal.
With the rise of pocket squares and neckerchiefs, you can still expect some dandy flourishes with spates of color -- although Huey Long-inspired bow ties have been replaced by four-in-hands, be they skinny '80s shapes or '70s wide ones.
While this style may have been adapted, like so much retro fashion, for a mod appeal, it is firmly fixed in history.
The term seersucker describes the fabric, a cotton that was based on a silk derivation from India popular during the British colonial period. In Persian it is called "Shir Shakkar," which loosely translates into the English "milk and sugar." The milk described the smooth parts of the material, while the sugar was a metaphor for the texture commonly referred to as "crinkles," "dimples" or "puckers."
In 1907, New Orleanian Joseph Haspel seized on the cotton and set out to create a suit whose primary selling point would be wash-and-wearability.
"My great-grandfather was known for starting the wash-and-wear suit," said Laurie Aaronson, president and co-owner of the Haspel clothing company. "In one of his ad campaigns there is a picture of him wearing a seersucker suit and he walks into the Atlantic Ocean. Then he wrings it out, hangs it up and when he puts it back on he goes straight to a cocktail party that night."
The lightweight nature of the material and lack of creases also appealed to him because of the weather in which he found himself. Suit creases fall in New Orleans' humidity.
It is said that the low cost and rumpled state of the often-pinstriped garment made the cognoscenti initially look down on it. But soon after World War I, presidents Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, as well as movie stars Clark Gable, Humphrey Bogart and Cary Grant, were seen wearing not just seersucker, but Haspel seersucker.
"Gregory Peck wore a Haspel seersucker suit in 'To Kill A Mockingbird,' " Aaronson recounts.
While dapper Southern men continued to make the seersucker suit mainstays of their summer wardrobes, the company was bought and relocated several times beginning in the 1970s. The family reacquired it in 1996 when Richard Lipsey, the husband of Susan Haspel Lipsey and Aaronson's father, purchased the company that his daughter, trained at a Fortune 500 men's tailored clothing firm, now runs and co-owns with him.
"It's not just a Southern gentlemen's suit anymore," Aaronson said. "Warm weather is warm weather. The company is now based back in Baton Rouge, but some of my biggest customers are in New York, like Lord & Taylor and Frank Stella."
The retro redux in both men's and women's fashion have sent the look North. The runways are rife this season with seersucker looks from fashion brands such as Salvatore Ferragamo, Perry Ellis, Marc Jacobs and R.E.D. by Valentino.
This September, Luke Wilson will be seen playing the title role of "The Wendell Baker Story," wearing a seersucker suit for much of the film. Bradley Whitford, who plays Josh Lyman on "The West Wing," recently bought a Haspel at a celebrity auction in Los Angeles.
And while the seersucker never went out of style for many older New Orleanians, younger men have taken note of its presence on the fashion runways and men's magazines.
"In our re-launch, we are focusing on the under-40 set," Aaronson said. "Not only are we starting to see the seersucker suit coming back, but also a big part of the fashion trend is suit separates."
The members of the Bay-Area Indie rock band Hometown Hero were recently photographed wearing three versions of the look. At Essence Music Festival, seersucker jackets paired with faded jeans, button-down shirts and wide ties made up the uniform in the suites section of the Superdome.
And there are signs the trend will pick up steam in 2005. Last week in Milan, Helmut Lang debuted his men's spring 2005 collection with khaki and white seersucker skinny pants shown with white shirts and matching white ties, as well as long seersucker jackets paired with white denim.
Haspel's spring 2005 collection tweaks the tradition further, expanding on its blue and white, gray and white, and khaki and white striped offerings, and moving into pinks, greens and other colors. Additionally, Aaronson is launching another traditional Southern pattern that is quickly becoming the next big thing: madras.
"In addition to what we are doing for spring 2005, at the New York Collective men's clothing trade show, I saw a lot of seersucker in madras, as well as seersucker in a lot of color," Aaronson said. New Orleans clothing traditions, she said, are turning into "trends for the rest of the world."
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