Frank Muytjens

A game some of my fashion friends and I like to play is "What Happened to American Apparel?" That symbol of the aughts' stock is currently trading at just over one dollar, one fifteenth of its 2007 high. And there are a number of reasons why: poor management, spotty trend spotting, over-expansion, lack of investor confidence. Another reason is J. Crew. American Apparel presented a unique challenge to the market, and while Gap kept making the same old crap and used the same old advertising, J.Crew took a different route and went up-market. It started looking for a more sophisticated customer, constructing tailored, comfortable menswear that didn’t look or feel like each item was just one of hundreds of thousands that had come off the line.

Can J.Crew do no wrong? Sometimes, it feels that way. And it sure seemed like it at Thursday's Fall 2010 presentations, where men's design head Frank