Six Things I Learned About Life Selling Men’s Clothes

Taken from Volume 5 of Common Thread, available for free in our Savile Row and Canal St stores.

Text by Michael Hainey 

It was the summer after college and I had no plan. I was waiting to hear about grad school, so Chris, my big brother, suggested I get a job where he was working part time: Mark Shale. 

At the time – this was the late 80s – Mark Shale was the coolest men’s clothing store in Chicago. It had seven or eight locations, and it was almost as though the owners had gone to New York, seen the Ralph Lauren mansion/store, and then decided to replicate its aesthetic. This was, after all, the age of peak prep. 

So, four or five days a week, my brother and I would get in the red 1977 Chevrolet Chevette we shared and drive up to Northbrook Court, a mall on North Shore of Chicago – an area I still refer to as John Hughes territory, as it was the setting for Sixteen Candles, as well as Home Alone, and most of his other comedies; a world of broad lawns and rambling houses that to me all seemed filled with beautiful yet unattainable girls. It was a land of WASP style and a place I yearned to belong to. 

In the end, I wound up selling clothes with a bunch of men who might as well have been cast by David Mamet. Yet the lessons I learned there, and from them, stick with me to this day. 

1. It’s the Hidden Details That Really Matter. 

For my interview, I was asked to make a rig – pull together an entire look for an imaginary customer: jacket, trousers, shirt, tie, pocket square. This was how my prospective boss, Ed, would judge my eye. Decide if I were worthy of walking the Mark Shale floor. 

I spent a half hour gathering the pieces, and arranging them on a table. When I was ready, he walked over and idly scanned my work, and silently nodded. Then he flipped the jacket open. 

“Braces?” he said.

I had laid in a pair of maroon braces. This was, after all, the 80s. Full on Gordon Gekko, man. And I had done so thanks to a tip from my brother. “It’s what he always looks for,” he told me that morning as we drove to work, both a bit too tired from the night before. “Everyone forgets: style’s in the details they can’t see, but you know are there.”

As Ed walked away from me, he said, “Go see HR. You can start tomorrow.” 

2. But don’t forget the best thing you can do sometimes is throw off the whole look.

There was the time I was working with a customer and his wife. I had him in a grey pinstripe suit, standing before the three way mirror. Bengal blue stripe shirt and a yellow tie, and a pair of black lace ups. 

He kicked off the shoes and stepped into his old beat up cordovan loafers. It was the first time I understood the idea of refined… and rugged. The idea that too matchy-matchy, too new-new says the clothes are wearing you, rather than you displaying your style. 

3. Know Who TF George Dickel Is

Bob was a part time salesman who drove our boss nuts. He couldn’t give a fuck about style. He peddled insurance policies during the day but dressed like the manager of a grocery store. Short sleeve perma-press white dress shirt and dark tie. Gray slacks that were pilled in the thigh. Black shoes. He also couldn’t give a fuck about the job, or to be more exact, making sales. He seemed to have taken the job to make a few extra bucks but as he later told me the real reason was to get away from his wife three or four nights a week. 

He spent most of his time not sharking for customers – that was what we called it when you slowly followed them around the store – but giving a running commentary on life and the people who wandered in. “Would you look at this jamoke?” He also took great pleasure in trying to piss off Dave, the perpetually pissed-off lead salesman who, by right, had first crack at all sales. Bob would usually steer the jamoke who had just come in and asked if someone could help him find a tie. “Oh, our top tie expert happens to be here today. Mr Dave, sir, your tie talents are required.” Then Bob would turn away. “I love breaking that guy’s balls.’

But Bob really lived for after-work. That’s when he’d invite my brother and me to meet him at Charlie Beinlich’s. It was an old restaurant – what we called a road-house – built back in the 50s when this area north of Chicago was nothing but woods and horse country. Charlie Beinlich’s looked like a house from the outside, but inside it was a bar with pinewood walls the color of amber, small tables, low lights, and a jukebox. It was hidden in the woods, and when you drove in the gravel crunched under your car wheel. An old neon sign said Food & Tap. They served burgers in plastic baskets and the waitresses always smiled. Bob loved it.

What’ll you have, the waitress asked me the first time he took me there. 

I said I’d have an Old Style – a brand of beer brewed in Chicago that was nothing special, but cheap. 

Bob’s eyes popped out of his head. “The fuck you will!” he said to the waitress. Or, really, me. “Time this man knows the pleasures of George Dickel.”

What’s that, I said?

“The god damned official sipping whiskey of Merle Haggard”

At the time, Haggard was in magazine ads, shilling for the booze, usually under a headline that said, “Water’s for teardrops. Dickel’s for drinkin’.”

When the drinks came, the three of us raised our Dickel’s, and Bob smiled and said, “Here’s to Merle.”

I’ve thought about Bob many times in my career. A reminder to not always take the whole thing so seriously. And to make sure you have an official sippin’ whiskey.

4. Jazz: Good For Parties, Bad For Salespeople. 

There was the afternoon when Arnie, a thin guy who looked like Richard Belzer but without the acne scars, came into the back room where I was unpacking boxes and kicked a hole in one of them. 

“What the fuck is with this music? Every goddamned day we’re playing Miles or Mingus. I feel like I oughta be laying on the floor with a needle in my arm, or shooting dice!”

Our boss Ed never did change the music.

5. You Will Live (and Die) by Your Relationship With a Tailor.

True then, true now. 

We had three tailors on staff. All from Italy. Amazing, when I think of it. They also hated to come out on the floor and measure customers. Mostly because the fulltimers treated them with little respect. 

Or so the three of them later told me. They felt the sales guys were telling them what to do, rather than  asking them – men who rightly considered themselves craftsmen – what they felt should be done to make the suit or the pants fit and look best. If you called them, they’d walk slowly, very slowly, to the floor, while you tried to keep your customer from getting impatient. 

So, they did everything they could to stay parked in a tiny room in the back of the store, hunched over sewing machines, piles of clothes around them. 

One day I walked by and heard someone yelling in Italian, the voice coming from the transistor radio they never turned off. 

“World Cup?” I asked one of the guys.

“You know it?” he said. A question which seems obvious now, but back then soccer was still exactly that – something exotic that you had to seek out on a transistor radio. At least in the U.S. Even the World Cup.

“I do.”

He waved me in and we all  listened to the match. Sadly, Forza Italia was knocked out in the fourth round. This was the year Argentina was unstoppable. The year Maradonna scored his “hand of god” goal against England in the quarter finals, 

as well as his “goal of the century.”

But after that afternoon, even though I was the junior guy on the floor, they always came when I called them. And after that summer, I never forgot: find a tailor, make friends with them, get to know them. Life’s a lot easier when you do. 

After all, they have the true “hand of god.”

6. Get to Know the Girls at the Register.

At the store, we made the sale, but sales associates didn’t get to ring it up. Instead, there were three or four girls stationed at a row of registers. The drill went like this: I’d walk up with a pile of clothes, put it on the counter and say, “Cathy here will now take care of you.” And Cathy would punch in my sales code, so I got the spiff. 

But if you were smart, you were nice to the girls. Not to make time with them, but because inevitably a customer holding a purchase would walk up and get asked that old question “did anyone help you today?” If they answered no, the girl would punch in the code of a salesperson on duty  and that guy’d get the spiff. Sometimes they chose at  random. But, as I learned, if you showed some kindness – didn’t just dump a pile of clothes on their counter and expect them to deal with it all – well, sometimes they might just give you the spiff for the guy who walked up with $2000 in clothes that no one helped him buy. 

But maybe I was being nice to the register girls for other reasons. Reasons I didn’t even know. Decades later, while I was in Milan for the men’s shows. I met a girl from Chicago. We soon learned that we both had worked at Mark Shale, though at two different stores. 

Reader, 

I married her.