The Most Magical Fall Catalog Season of Our Lives

J. Crew (print catalog) is back!

Autumn is a tricky subject for me because it’s my favorite season, but living in New York often means I get, at best, a week or two of pure fall. I’m talking about the Billie, Ella, or Frank (choose your fighter) version of “Autumn in New York,” inviting, first nighting, sitting on benches in Central Park, Harry and Sally kicking up leaves sort of autumn. There just isn’t enough of it, so I do a lot of mental cosplay between Labor Day and Halloween, and most of it is with the help of print aid. Like dads and grandpas of yesteryear who cracked open Playboy for the chance to see some (by today’s standards) softcore nudity, I use autumn catalogs to dream of a cozier existence. And few things bring me as much joy as when the L.L. Bean autumn catalog is waiting for me in my mailbox. But the truth is I’m a sucker for any nice catalog. If I had to guess the one thing my wife hates that I collect over all others, it might be old catalogs. This past summer, the Niwaki catalog was added to my list of favorites. I bought a pair of Japanese scissors from them that cost about $40 more than a cheap pair I could have picked up at the dollar store near me, but it was worth it since I’ll receive their catalogs from now until the end of time.

If you’re like me, you love print. Perhaps you listen to the occasional audiobook instead of lugging around a hardcover, or you get all your newspaper subscriptions sent to your inbox instead of the doorstep. And that’s fine. Hell, maybe you buy most of your clothes online. If that’s the case, congrats on having what the fashion industry deems a “normal” body because my ethnic ass needs to try everything on to know whether it will fit my weird proportions built for lugging around carts filled with cabbage, hunching over to read holy books, and running from Cossacks. I’ve never bought anything from a print catalog, but I’ve sure as hell bought things because they were featured in a catalog.

This is a lifelong obsession that I could trace back to the Service Merchandise catalogs my grandparents used to get. I don’t recall them ever buying anything from the catalogs, and I found out there were actual Service Merchandise stores just a few years ago, but flipping through those things was ASMR long before I knew what the hell that was. Looking at all that stuff as I flipped through that cheap, flimsy paper those catalogs were printed on was calming when I was 7 or 8. I don’t know why, and I’ve thought about asking my shrink to explore this with me, but I need the world to calm down a little before I ask her to play Freud on my catalog love.

Just like anything else that could transfer from paper to the web, catalogs went from something you held in your hands to something that you clicked through. It makes sense: catalogs cost money to make and ship out. Some estimates say a catalog ends up costing 2-3 dollars per customer a company reaches when they send them out. A little over a decade ago, the home furnishings company Restoration Hardware (now RH) sent out catalogs that could easily hold any door in your home open. The company’s “Source Books” rivaled Great Expectations and Moby-Dick in terms of page count, and there was a time around Obama’s first term when you’d walk past apartments in New York and see stacks of them getting delivered to apartments on a Monday, then in the trash by Tuesday. It was overkill in the Internet age, but it was also one of the last times a print catalog was news.

That all changed this week when Chavie Lieber of the Wall Street Journal broke the news that J. Crew was resreucting their print catalog for the first time since 2017. The catalogs have taken on sort of a legendary status in the last few years, collectables people snatched up for glimpses of the preppy looks of yesteryear. Speaking to Esquire recently, Brendon Babenzien said bringing back the print catalog was at the top of his list since he assumed the role of men’s creative director at the company. Personally, I thought J. Crew had done a great job with the digital, specifically when Emilie Hawtin was at the helm, but I still yearned for a print version. Everything online feels so fleeting; anything you can hold in your hands is going to be better. I would have gladly looked through a little catalog/magazine supplement for the Eric Ripert shoot the company did for their Barbour collab, for instance.

Print catalogs didn’t go totally extinct over the last 20-or-so years, but the quality and care decreased greatly. They became an afterthought as print was dying and everything was going digital. Companies took to social media or rolled out fancy online lookbooks to entice people to buy their stuff. Every now and then you’d see some brand roll out a one-off magazine with some interesting editorial and great photos, usually printed in limited quantities, and basically aimed at people who’d be willing to spend their money after feeling coming away feeling like the brand represented the lifestyle the reader wanted to live.

Eventually, this all led to the same problem we’ve seen in any industry that turned the dial all the way up on the content creating machines, and things got watered down. A person could go on Instagram and get served ads from a dozen brands they’d never heard of thanks to the dark magic of the algorithm, and while the stuff they’re seeing might look cool, it only waters things down more. That, and the vintage thing has grown so popular that looking at new clothes can sometimes feel a little tiresome. If I had to guess, we’re going to see a lot of brands follow J. Crew’s example and put more resources and care into their print catalogs, because that’s a way to stand out now. It’s one of the ways I think we’re going backwards, but in this case, it’s a good thing. I’m more inclined to look through what a high-end home furnishings brand like Scully & Scully is selling because they get an artist like Tug Rice to illustrate their covers, just like Sid Mashburn’s continued commitment to print is one of the reasons I love the brand so much. I make plenty of jokes about how “J. Crew is back” after a few years of boring collections, but now I’m pretty sure it’s true, and it’s all because they resurrected their print catalog.