Hard Times At J. Peterman

By LANCE MORROW

When I heard last week that J. Peterman was filing for bankruptcy, I searched for a predictable joke in the Peterman style.

I said that, with Peterman gone, I felt the way I had when Gerald and Sara Murphy closed down the Villa America at Cap d'Antibes--Scott was sober and unavailable to make scenes, anyway, and Zelda was crazy and the magic was gone.

Or--trying again--I said I felt as I had that night at the Muthaiga Club when Karen Blixen told us the coffee plantation was finished; hadn't been the same since Denys died.

But it is not so easy to compose a parody of the Peterman catalog. Its style, a bubbly kitsch of knowingness, creates surprising little fantasies that are part Harlequin Romance, part Cole Porter lyric, now and then a touch of the bodice-ripper; or when flying high, of Evelyn Waugh--a soigne escapism that is a parody of sophistication, so bad that it is great fun. All that literary ingenuity gone to sell clothes in the mail...and to end up bankrupt, besides. Sunt lacrimae rerum, as an unforgettable 'Cliffie whispered to me that night in the Club Mt. Auburn, just before Joanie Baez came on...

Here is an item from Peterman's "Owner's Manual" No. 72, Fall '98: "Sir Rupert met him just beyond the gate of Penworth House. At first he thought he recognized the man. An old mate from Rugby ...No, that would have been foolish. MI5 wouldn't have chanced it. Not like this anyway. Still, the man had the right look about him. The windowpane blazer. Nicely non-bureaucratic." Windowpane Blazer. $225. Too much Bond, I think--a little over the top. So is this, from the same catalog: "Fabiana whistled for the stable boy. He came. She whipped her crop against her boot. 'Saddle my horses.' (Tie-back chiffon blouse. $135.)" Then there is the turtleneck sweater from a "Bohemian aunt...says Dylan Thomas gave it to her at 3 a.m. outside the White Horse Tavern."

The trick of the catalog, as art form and selling tool, is to create an idealized world. On the planet J.Crew, for example, it is always the weekend of the Princeton game; translucent blond girls, clones of Mia Farrow long ago, smile at guys who don't tuck their shirts in, and touch the guys (on the calf, for example) in a lightly intimate way that is somehow proprietary. For the summer catalog, the setting switches to some Martha's Vineyard of the mind that, similarly, will know neither death nor gingivitis.

The universe of L.L. Bean resembles Maine, with a suppressed memory of hard winters in the woods long ago. Bean's world, robustly cozy, is subliminally less privileged and more autonomously practical than Crew's: the young people are off-beautiful and went to state schools; no undercurrent eroticism here, no touching except for Mom's hugs at Christmas and Thanksgiving. Clothes are called "good-looking" or "comfortable," and at the most extravagant, as an inside joke, "wicked good." A rosy-cheeked geezer and crone trudge around in Thinsulate snow sneakers--this last is a touch of AARP, Mia Farrow in real time, that would never make its way into J.Crew.

J. Peterman's world, on the other hand, has never been one particular place. Rather, Peterman retails an evoked time, a diffuse, multifaceted past located somewhere between the two World Wars, sometimes drifting back into the Edwardian. A thought along these lines appears in the text presenting an Indian Elephant Caftan (No. AAF7744. Silk crepe de Chine. $180. Bangalore, India): "Comeliness and the passions of the past happen to mean a lot to me, perhaps you."

Seinfeld parodied Peterman--the tribute, perhaps, of one insubstantial '90s style to another. Illusion is everything, self-deception is indispensable, and Peterman works behind a scrim of pastness, sometimes hilarious but curiously sweet nonetheless. Peterman sells interesting and fairly good-quality stuff (though he lately got caught in a crunch of high inventory, debt and cash-flow problems). The danger, of course, is that you may get the thing in the mail and try it on (a Sherlock Holmes hat or cape, say, or one of those flouncy, too-much-by-half fin-de-siecle velvet gowns: "We drank Veuve Cliquot...") and find you look absolutely ridiculous in it. I always thought it would be risky to go out in the classic horseman's duster that was one of Peterman's hottest items when he started the business 12 years ago. Even if you look like Clint Eastwood, the duster is not advisable. Though we all like to dress up--and the baby boomers especially, for they sprang from the costume party of the '60s--you must beware lest some kid in the crowd may be laughing and pointing, not at the emperor's nakedness, but at your Peterman outfit.

I am speaking of Peterman only at his extreme, though I confess I think the Peterman contribution has been more to the culture of fantasy than to clothing. I search for Peterman moments in real life. For example: A foreign correspondent, old Asia hand, Brit I've known for years, has us up to his tiny, steamy Manhattan apartment for dinner. He makes Peking duck, and when he notices an awkward pause in the conversation, pops his head out of the kitchen and begins an anecdote in that fluting voice of his: "You know, once when I was playing fan-tan in Macau..."