How Gap's New Designer Plans to Revamp the Brand
Fresh from a stint at COS, Gap's new designer, Rebekka Bay, proves she has the chops to restore the sportswear giant to its glory days
Gap’s new creative director, Rebekka Bay, was born in 1969—the same year that Don and Doris Fisher opened a jeans and record shop in San Francisco, naming it after the “generation gap.” Slowly, and then faster, Gaps multiplied, eventually becoming the mainstream behemoth of specialty retail we now know so well. But while Americans Bay’s age spent their teen years wearing—and perhaps also trying to escape from the ubiquity of—the store’s well-designed, deftly marketed wardrobe building blocks, the native Dane herself isn’t a part of what could be described as Generation Gap, because, well, “there was no Gap in Denmark.”
Bay didn’t set foot in a Gap, in fact, until her midtwenties, when she left Denmark for London. By then, she says, Gap was “sort of on the verge of being very iconic and very cool. Then it kind of disappeared into nowhereness.”
Bay is speking metaphorically, of course. The Gap brand is everywhere, from the back of your closet to the front of a flagship store a couple of blocks away from NYC’s Museum of Modern Art, where she and I met up for lunch. (There are 1,600 stores worldwide—more than 850 of them in the U.S.) Lately, however, Gap has been outmaneuvered by a flashy flotilla of fast-fashion competitors, who’ve behaved something like cigarette boats smuggling in the latest trend to be worn, then disposed of.
Under Patrick Robinson, the fashion insider’s fashion insider who was the company’s head of design from 2007 to 2011, Gap sometimes seemed to be emulating its smaller rivals, conjuring quick, trendy looks that disappointed and confused customers who counted on the brand as a dependable destination
for, say, warm holiday-season plaids.
“Gap is such a solid company, and it’s such an American institution,” Bay says. “There’s a responsibility that comes with that.” That responsibility was felt no more keenly than in 2010, when Gap redid its skinny-serif logo, adopting Helvetica (also the font of the American Apparel logo); the company was forced to change it back within a week in response to customer backlash. “I don’t think the customer base ever lost his or her desire to see Gap succeed,” she says. But at the time, Bay suggests, they seemed to be saying: Please, no sudden moves.
Bay doesn’t like wardrobe surprises herself. “I have friends who question how I can work in fashion, since I always look the same,” she says, describing her uniform—a variation on jeans, boots, and a dress shirt (she’s a big fan of Jil Sander, at least when Sander herself was designing it; Sander quit her eponymous label for the third time this past October). “I’ve never owned a lot.” She’ll wear the same jeans every day for a week. “If it gets to a point where there’s more in my closet than I can kind of wear in one week, then it stresses me out. Because then I have to organize it in my head, and I can’t.
“I’m not a hoarder,” she continues, with marked understatement. Her husband, Ricky, an art director and also from Denmark, is more of a stockpiler, however: “And so is my eight-year-old son. When they’re out, I’ll sift through their stuff, put it in boxes. If they don’t ask for it within the next three months, I throw it out.”
After lunch, Bay and I walk up Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, past the great high-and low-retail showplaces—Abercrombie & Fitch, shutters enhancing its dark interior; Uniqlo, friendly and logical seeming; Prada and Gucci, their opulence almost quasi-religious; the Apple Store, a big transparent cube—pausing briefly at the little Gap concept shop next door to the company’s flagship. For a moment, we admire a two-tone riff on the on-trend motorcycle jacket in the window, before heading off for the Children’s Zoo in Central Park, where Bay does her real work: fashion reconnaissance. Passing the throngs of tourists looking at the seals, she scans the crowd, taking in what everyone’s wearing, what styles are moving the masses. “I don’t have a muse,” she says. “But I like looking at how people dress and who they are.” She enjoys the Sartorialist but avoids most blogs: “All those voices, all those opinions, it just makes you…less confident.” She also admires Bill Cunningham’s Sunday street-style shots in The New York Times. “I like seeing five different girls wearing the same pair of denims, but in very different ways.”
Bay wants to refocus Gap on its essential self, on what is “iconic,” as she likes to put it. The other word she likes to use is democratic. As when, back in the late 1990s, the company convinced us all that khakis could be transformative. Or when Sharon Stone paired a Gap top with a designer skirt at the Oscars—twice. “Gap is one of the most iconic brands. So how do we make sure that the product is equally iconic? Because that has probably been lost over the past decade.”
But what does it even mean to be iconic these days? Since Gap Inc. was at its zenith, under legendary CEO Mickey Drexler, who was shown the door in 2002 (and now runs J.Crew), the world has changed. The 1990s witnessed the last gasp of TV commercials and print ads—epitomized by Gap’s Individuals of Style campaign—as integral to popular culture. These days, those kicky Gap khakis ads would need to go viral. The Gap spots of late—Alexa Ray Joel and Dhani Harrison (son of George) in the #BackToBlue series, singing their parents’ songs—are an effort in that direction, though the hashtag is what really matters. Other attempts to connect with millennials include Instagram and in-house Web efforts such as styld.by.
“If you look at our campaigns in the past year and a half, we have moved away from a traditional model of just beautiful clothes, beautifully shot,” says Gap’s chief global marketing officer, Seth Farbman. Since coming on in 2011, he has steered the company toward featuring nontraditional models being “more themselves” in Gap clothing. This spring, for instance, the ads focus on Birdy, a 17-year-old English singer, and the rapper Theophilus London—“He’s a character, and a personality,” Farbman says of the latter. “All of that optimism and energy and hopefulness. So when we put him in product, it’s about trying to show him in what’s most naturally him.” And of course not just in photographs: “We also did a dozen Vines and filmed him inventing a new rap on set. Everything is delivered socially.”
Bay’s initiative as creative director is broader than that of her predecessor Robinson; she works closely with colleagues in merchandising, marketing, and advertising. And Gap executives are hoping she can keep the brand’s restored fortunes going—sales for the third quarter of 2013 were up 4 percent over the same quarter last year—as the company expands internationally, says Gap global president Stephen Sunnucks. “Rebekka and the team have reinvented classic pieces,” he says, “while bringing an authentic, relaxed style to the latest trends.”
Put another way, the woman who so values a uniform now wants to sell you yours.
Bay is a thoughtful Scandinavian pragmatist. There’s nothing glossy or grandiose about her. She was raised by her father, a photographer, and having watched him work, she didn’t want a creative career, she says. “I don’t think I wanted that creative struggle, where your heart wants to do one thing, but in order to make money, you need to do something else.”
After dropping out of college, she went to design school. (She had already made some of her own clothes on occasion, such as a sequined skirt for a B-52s-themed party.) “In my interview before enrolling, I told them, ‘I’m not sure I want to make clothes.’ ” Nonetheless, a year in, she heard there was a retail
men’s chain called Mister that was hiring a head of design, and she decided to apply. “I have always been super inspired by menswear, and I think women are really beautiful in it.”
Soon she became more interested in “looking around and trying to figure out why we suddenly all want the same thing.” And so, after graduating with a BA, she quit her design job to move to London for a position in trend forecasting with her boyfriend (now her husband).
Within a few years, she was a consultant for brands that included Volvo (which was trying to sex up its “stale and safe” image), Davidoff, and Marks & Spencer. By talking to businesspeople about creative things, a skill at which she excels, she learned to combine “quantified research and pure intuition,” she says.
Eventually, H&M came calling, asking her to oversee the launch of a new line of uniform basics for work, COS. Again, she initially hesitated about taking the position: She didn’t think of herself as a designer. Plus she was very pregnant at the time. But her husband encouraged her—she jokes that he’s always been more ambitious for her than she is herself—and the idea of raising her son in Denmark, where the job was located, appealed to her. She launched COS in 2006.
She describes the line as having a “very European high-fashion aesthetic” (think Céline, but affordable; it will come to the U.S. later this year). Her concept for COS sprang in part from her personal experience shopping for clothes to wear to the office. “I felt a little bit stupid sometimes paying a premium price for something that really shouldn’t come at a premium price point,” she says.
When Gap approached her to fill Robinson’s position, which had been vacant for more than a year, Bay didn’t vacillate. “It was like if IKEA came knocking, asking, Do you want to redesign everything we are?” she says. “It was too good a challenge to turn down.”
When we meet at her office in TriBeCa—sparsely decorated with a Saarinen white marble oval table surrounded by Eames chairs—I notice high-influence fashion magazines stacked about: Fantastic Man, The Gentlewoman, Kinfolk, as well as some titles from Japan. “The Japanese men’s magazines have a much better understanding of what is true, authentic American than do the Americans,” Bay says. Also on display is a copy of Take Ivy, a 1965 Japanese field guide to the style of Ivy League students—an interesting choice of reading material for someone from outside the U.S. who’s working to revive a classic American brand.
COS, she tells me, is much more avant-garde than Gap is or should be. “None of us are interested in speaking about a Gap revolution,” she says. “High-fashion pieces normally decrease in value. Casual pieces live with you and get better over time. You don’t want them to die; when a piece falls apart, you return for a new version of that piece.”
She fanned out photos of the looks from the spring collection on the table. What stood out immediately was that it looked unmistakably like Gap—the stripes; the boyfriend jeans; the jackets; the modest, wholesome clean-lined cuts. The uniform pieces were all there too: the web belts, the modest shirtdresses. The bomber jacket, in several variations. The jean jacket. She’s big on showing the ankle for spring.
“Early on, I developed a very simple matrix, with heritage to modern on one axis, fashion to basic on the other,” she says. “At Gap, we do basics really well. We’re not that good with fashion, and we’re not that modern.”
So there will be fewer types of jeans, many shirts and jackets, and some more-daring prints; overall, there is a sense that any of the items probably would work with anything else. Much of the color was inspired by a trip to Florida for Art Basel Miami Beach, after which Bay said she went to her design team—which numbers around 200—and told them, “Here’s the color palette,” and then let them play within it. The result isn’t the vivid hues of Miami, but what those colors would look like if “you bleach them out with light,” she says. (This past December she was back at Art Basel Miami Beach: Gap partnered with the fashion and art publication Visionaire to create arty T-shirts. Maurizio Cattelan designed one, available for $29.95.)
She believes some of the collection’s pieces will always be in the store, while others might sell out or be limited to three or six months on shelves; with that mixture, she hopes to create something familiar and dependable, but with a flash of the always new. Just no fast fashion.
“We can own these pieces: the khakis, denim, and the shirt. They make up a uniform for both men and women. It’s just proportion that changes, the wash.”
Her new idea, the first fruits of which hit the stores this spring, is to bring them all together in one coordinated effort. “What we will see from spring is that all the divisions—men’s, women’s, kids’, and baby—will all work from the same concepts. So if it’s about the blue shirt, then it’s about the blue shirt everywhere.”
Which comes back to the “iconic” idea, what Bay calls “stuff that’s timeless, seasonless. It’s almost generationless. It’s almost genderless.”
The concept certainly sounds Scandinavian in its rationality. And whether it’s actually about the Gap of yore—the one that was at one point so utterly successful, before it lost itself trying too hard to be something it wasn’t—doesn’t matter much.
Sometimes, as for the postwar Japanese photographers trying to puzzle out the dress codes of the Ivy League to decode America itself, what’s most interesting is what is slightly misunderstood. And Bay believes in her idea of Gap with the fervency of a convert. Last February, when she was only a few months into her new job, there was an exhibition of early-’90s art at the New Museum in New York City; the invitation featured a group photo of young artists dressed in matching Gap outfits (because it was the ’90s, they were doing so to critique mass culture). Bay, fascinated, went to see the show: It’s not every clothing store that is so influential, after all, and Bay is as proud of the company’s heritage as anybody. “I want it to be more Gap than Gap has
ever been.”
I'm really excited about this news. Take Gap back to the well-made basics, much like COS is synonymous with and Gap used to be, ditch the cheesy graphic tees currently occupying half the Women's site and all the flimsy made pieces. Onward, let's go Bay!
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