The Scoop with Nordstrom’s Jian DeLeon

Welcome to the Scoop: a weekly email series in which we quiz fashion insiders on the stories of the week. This will be a way for the Vogue Business community to synthesize and reflect on the latest headlines and get a little inside scoop every Friday.

This week’s guest is Nordstrom’s men’s fashion director, Jian DeLeon. After holding editorial positions at nearly every magazine responsible for the menswear renaissance of the last decade (and the hypebeasts that came with it), Jian decamped to retail in 2020. Which is an interesting move. I had a stint at Selfridges post-pandemic, which I loved, but found very different from media, pace-wise.

I could have spoken to Jian endlessly about that, but it’s menswear season, so we focused on the latest from Nordstrom and Pitti, where he’s been since the beginning of the week.

Hi Jian, what’s the scoop?

I’m in Florence for Pitti, where a lot of action happens during aperitivo hour. So after this call, I’m going to an event held by this New York-based tailoring company, J. Mueser. The founder, Jake, has built a really strong business in the last few years, gaining a very diverse audience. We are about to launch the brand at Nordstrom. We are their first major retailer, and I’m really looking forward to celebrating that partnership. Especially as there’s going to be a new creative director announced soon at J. Mueser, who is also a dear friend of mine.

How did the partnership come about?

Menswear is like a big community. So Jake and I had a lot of mutual friends. I’ve been keeping track of how he’s been building his business. We went and saw him at [menswear trade show] Chicago Collective, then back in New York. In the end, it was just a matter of figuring out the best way of working together and the timing.

He brings a younger approach to tailoring, and his audience just runs such a broad swath of everyday people, all the way to people in the industry. He makes suits for the guys from ‘Throwing Fits’; he made a suit for GQ global correspondent Sam Hines’s brother’s wedding. It’s such a great brand for me to be involved with because it feels exactly like what a modern, bespoke suit maker out of New York should look and feel like. It’s a great suit to get after your first suit.

What are the characteristics of a modern suit?

What I like about what Jake does is that it’s a classic-fitting suit that’s not too skinny, but also not particularly oversized. There’s like a snap-button Western shirt and like a Tencel, as opposed to a super severe spread collar shirt underneath. It encourages guys to have fun with their tailoring, or at least dress it down in a way that it’s not so stuffy. As you know, the best way to get guys to wear anything is to get them to feel comfortable in it. How do you dress down a suit to make it feel like something you actually want to wear, rather than something you have to wear?

This Pitti featured a suit walk. Our generation has been dressing very casually, even at events or the office. But are men about to start dressing like my dad, who wore a suit every day at work in the ’90s?

I feel like guys are rediscovering and liking the art of getting dressed. You see this on the red carpet too — this classic sense of elegance in a different way, whether it’s with accoutrements like brooches or different textures and patterns like velvet and checks. Or plainly by being open to different colorways.