John Varvatos didn’t start out with plans to become a fashion designer, much less the multi-million-dollar global brand he is today. In the beginning, he just wanted to impress some girls.
“I grew up in Detroit in a humble household. It wasn’t a very fashionable town, especially in the seventies when I was growing up there,” Varvatos, now 67, recalls. “I didn’t have a lot of clothes. When I became a teenager, though, I became interested in girls and I wanted them interested in me. And when I would wear certain things, I would get all kinds of comments from them and I thought, ‘Well, that’s cool.’ So, I got a job at a men’s store, first back in the stock room and then in sales,” he says.
Still, he could have never predicted his game-changing career in the industry. “My degree is in education in the sciences,” he explains of attending Eastern Michigan University. “But I worked my way through college in retail menswear and by the time I graduated, I realized my passion really was less about what I had gotten my degree in and more about fashion. That was the real beginning of it.”
Noel Kleinman
He opened his own men’s shop in Grand Rapids, which caught the eye of a few executives from Ralph Lauren, piquing their interest so much, Lauren himself invited Varvatos to New York City to meet in person. Lauren offered him a job, landing Varvatos first in Chicago and then in Manhattan. Not long after starting at the company in sales and merchandising, he caught what he refers to as the “bug” for design. Says Varvatos: “Ralph heard about that and said, ‘If you want to get into design, you’re everything we want. You have the aesthetic we look for.’ So I just kind of fell into it later in my twenties.”
Next, Varvatos took on a lead role at Calvin Klein, where he’s credited with inventing the iconic men’s boxer brief. “I wish I had a dollar for every one of those units,” he laughs. “I was head of design at Calvin and the underwear business was a relatively small business at the time and Calvin wanted to make it bigger. One of the things I kept thinking about was new silhouettes and how we could do something different. I was just kind of playing around in the studio with some vintage long underwear pieces and cut off a big portion of the leg. Something seemed to look interesting when we put them on. It went to prototypes and when we got the garments on the models, Calvin flipped out. We got Mark Wahlberg – who was Marky Mark at the time – to be in our ad and the rest is history.”
“I walked away from Ralph always wanting to raise the bar, always wanting to push the walls out. He continues to be such a great storyteller,” he notes. “Calvin was a very different environment. It was about making noise and being more aggressive with your marketing. There was a sexiness to it. Both really made me think about my own brand and what I wanted to be.”
He did just that and, in 2000, launched his eponymous John Varvatos menswear label. Described by The New York Times as clothes that seem “intended for the kind of guy who has moved into a salary bracket that no longer confines him to Banana Republic,” it was quickly a critical and commercial success, earning him CFDA (Council of Fashion Designers of America) awards two years in a row and prompting the launch of flagship retail stores in multiple major cities. “Every guy wants to be a little rock & roll,” Varvatos told The New York Observer a few years later. “In our clothes, they can feel cool without trying, yet also totally professional.”
Photo by Greyson Tarantino
The reference to rock music is no surprise. It’s been a major force behind his creativity from the start. “It goes back to my earliest roots in my youth. I grew up in a little house with three very small bedrooms. It was seven people, five children and one bathroom. And music was the thing that transported me away, putting on those headphones and reading music magazines like Cream and Rolling Stone. It was also the thing that connected me with my own fashion style as early as a teenager. It had a very large influence in terms of the way I look at clothing. I didn’t want to be Calvin Klein and I didn’t want to be Ralph Lauren because they’re already great at what they do. I needed something different. The musical influence wasn’t there. It was an aura, it was a vibe. And it was the electricity that drove me and continues to drive me.”
Since launching John Varvatos, some of the biggest male names in music have worn his designs, attended his runaway shows and starred in his campaigns including Alice Cooper, Steven Tyler, Ringo Starr, Bruce Springsteen and Nick Jonas — the latter of whom partnered with Varvatos on both a tequila and a cologne. Varvatos also started his own record label in 2017. And cementing him even further in the rock and roll history books, he rescued legendary downtown New York performance space CBGB on Bowery Street from bank foreclosure in 2008 by opening a shop in the location while leaving much of the original décor, memorabilia and equipment intact. The venue has even held live concerts featuring bands like Guns N’ Roses, ZZ Top and The Wallflowers.
Noel Kleinman
“I loved it as a music club, I wish it would have stayed that way. Two years after it closed, somebody approached me who had taken over the lease. I thought maybe there’s something special we can do here to save music on the Bowery and, at the same time, do something special with our brand. I made that decision within 24 hours, that I wanted to do it and came up with the concept for it. Music had always been a big part of my brand until then, but it became a much bigger part of it. We did so many great things and so many live concerts there. We never charged for any of them,” Varvatos says.
When it comes to exploring new avenues of business, Varvatos says he leads with instinct. “It’s got to be something I’m totally passionate about,” he confirms. “When I was pursued by Universal Music, I said to them if it’s going to be a fluff label, I’m not interested. I have to be passionate about every artist we sign. It’s been the success of the music label and any other thing I’ve done — bringing something different in the category and value to the consumer. Anything I touch, I want it to be the best in its class.”
Right now, he’s focused on his new line, OTD (On This Day), a multigender label of clothing and accessories with stores in New York and Los Angeles and available through its website. “The John Varvatos brand is men’s only,” he explains. “With On This Day, we’re doing women’s, unisex and men’s. I really look at the customer who blurs the line in their wardrobe choices, whether it’s a feminine girl who still wants to have a tomboy influence or things that are genderless in their appeal. The customers that come in are anywhere from 20’s to 60, it’s very broad. It’s more about their lifestyle than it is their age and more of their point of view on how they want to dress than anything else.”
As we move into autumn, Varvatos anticipates self-expression will be more important than ever. “We love the idea of dressing up again,” he says. “But it’s got to feel new. It can’t feel like we’re rehashing. It’s how you style it, how you put it together.”
“People would ask me during COVID, how important is fashion when we have all these issues with health? And I said, in the end, fashion isn’t the most important thing in your life — friends and family are. But if dressing up a certain way makes you feel confident, makes you feel sexy, makes you feel good about yourself, there’s nothing wrong with that. And I think it’s a time where people want to do that again.”
Photos by Mark Seliger