120-Yr-Old Haberdashery Finds New Home On Elm St.

Back in 1902, Richard Press’s Latvian immigrant grandfather Jacobi knocked on the doors of Yale dorm rooms to sell the students custom-made clothing. 

Word spread about the stylish jackets with their unpadded shoulders and snazzy vents. 

J. Press was born.

On Thursday afternoon, a mere 120 years of button-down shirts and shaggy dog sweaters later, Press’s relatives and friends gathered with city officials and the clothier’s Japanese owners at 262 Elm St. to celebrate the formal ribbon-cutting of J. Press’s new storefront. The celebration also marked the company’s century-plus-twenty haberdashery presence in New Haven.

The spacious (1,780 square feet) and (of course) classy threads emporium has been open since May right around the corner from the previous home store on York Street, which was severely damaged by winter storms in 2013.

Despite the woes of the economy, ​“overall business has been very good,” said Robert Squillaro, J. Press’s chief merchandising and design officer. Perhaps not surprisingly, the recent new trend is that ​“pre-Covid the online business was 35 percent; now it is 65 percent,” he added.

“Both my grandfathers shopped here,” said Town Green Special Services Director Win Davis in the moments before Thursday’s ribbon cutting. ​“We know a successful restaurant (in New Haven) runs for seven years.” By that Elm City measure, ​“J. Press is one of the most successful haberdashers ever,” he said.

In a phrase playing on the traditional Yiddish blessing, Davis and several other speakers wished the Press family and J. Press parent company CEO Michinobu Yasumoto ​“another 120 years of success.”

A reporter who doesn’t think as much about his clothes as he perhaps should asked Squillaro to define what has made for the J. Press look and its success.

“We stay out of fads,” he replied. ​“There’s not a lot you can do (by way of introducing new items or styles) if you are true to the Ivy League tradition.” 

Especially if you invented it.

He said that look, developed over the years, has several main features: Jackets that have a sack or straight fall, as opposed to the tapered look (they stay away from the Italians); natural, unpadded shoulders; and three buttons, but with the top one not used, the lapel rolling over it for a looser casual message.

The button-down shirts were imported from a trick English polo players did to keep their collars from flapping. And the ties are generally what Squillaro called ​“regimental,” or straight lined and ​“classic in width,” about three-and-a-quarter inches. We never go skinny or fat.”

In short, classic. Got it?

Yasumoto, whose team flew in from Japan for the occasion, said: ​“Our opening shows our continuing confidence in New Haven and we look forward to being part of its future.”

Press, 84, grew up in New Haven but did not attend Yale (“I did not want to be known as the son of the haberdasher.”) However, with ​“tweeds in my blood,” he did stay in the business. After managing J. Press’s store in New York City, now located in the Yale Club building near Grand Central, and after producing some off-Broadway plays, Press returned in recent years as a consultant for the company’s new owners. He’s now the company’s official historian. 

His two books, Threading the Needle, I and II, (available through the J. Press online site) are both a company history and a charm bracelet of tales on commerce, immigration, and Jewish life in New Haven for, yes, the past 120 years.

After the ribbon was cut, Press smiled and declared, ​“Boola boola.”