L.L.Bean x Todd Snyder Brings Heritage Menswear Squarely Into 2020
It’s like there’s a glitch in the Matrix. Except instead of Keanu (beautiful, sweet Keanu) muttering “déjà vu” at a black cat, it’s guys catching a glimpse of a Goodyear-welted boot or a flash of buffalo plaid and thinking, Wait, haven’t I seen this before? Yep. Heritage menswear—the sturdy, historically inspired stuff of late-2000s obsessions and early-2010s Tumblrs—is making its way back into how we dress now.
“It definitely feels familiar,” says Todd Snyder, who fueled Heritage 1.0 when he was helping popularize Ludlow suits and Red Wing boots at J.Crew before launching his namesake label in 2011. This time around, though, instead of mashing up suits and boots, we’re mashing up down vests and chamois shirts with sweatpants and sneakers. The vibe is still informed by the classics, but there’s enough sportswear-flavored modernity at play that this moment feels distinct from its predecessor. Call it Heritage 2.0. Why not?
You can see it on city streets, bubbling up as both counterpoint and complement to streetwear’s past couple years of dominance. And you can see it in Snyder’s new collaboration with L.L.Bean—available now through both Snyder and Bean—which flips Bean mainstays into pieces that might upset the purists (he changed the pockets!) but feel fresh and free of the fustiness that sometimes comes with diving into the archives.
A shirt-jacket gets done up in high-pile fleece with big hits of safety orange (inspired, Snyder says, by Bean’s hunting clothes). The Bean boot gets a similar color treatment on the sole or, in a brand-new move, is transformed into a bold knitted graphic on a crewneck sweater. These aren’t gigantic, wildly transformative design decisions. Instead, Snyder says of his collabs, which range from Champion and Timex to this new one with Bean,“what I try to do is tweak it ever so slightly that I don’t ruin the sauce. That’s annoying; I started using food analogies. But I do think that is how I design.”
Modern fashion moves fast. It can be tiring. Depleting, even. But Snyder doesn’t think we have to play that game. And this moment, this resurgence of interest in things that are meant to last and have a story to tell, feels optimistic in its trust that we can keep building on that story. “I think what’s nice about this,” he says, “is it’s kind of a return to grass roots that makes you feel good inside.”
A version of this story appears in the October/November issue of Esquire magazine.
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