Stepford Husbands

Do Real Men Wear Pink?

By CHRIS SCHMIDT

The candy colors are all over SoHo's Apple Store. At the top of the stairs, celery green. Next to the cash register, pumpkin. Royal blue is by the printers. And at the Genius Bar, not one, but two kelly greens.

It's not the new shipment of iPod minis -- though their rainbow hues have a similar appeal.What's brightening up the store, and the streets of SoHo, are men's polo shirts: the short-sleeved, piqué cotton garments once confined to the country club, popularized in the 1980s by the likes of Alex P. Keaton, and now resurrected as a staple of young urban male dress.

It's fashion's trickle-down effect. Jake Gyllenhaal appears on the cover of June's GQ magazine wearing a clingy red polo. In Vogue magazine earlier this year, hip-hop producer Pharell Williams debated the virtues of a lime-green Ralph Lauren polo, finally opting for orange for his photo shoot. Downtown at the Brian McNally hotspot Schiller's, Lazaro Hernandez, one of the young designers of Proenza Schouler -- who rarely appear without at least one of them wearing a classic Lacoste pique -- glides through the rooms wearing a green polo, collar down. Are we edging onto the precipice of preppy overexposure? Or are we already in the midst of a polo epidemic?

For some, polo shirts or golf shirts -- a casual Friday staple -- never went away. But what's making the look hip again are the tropical-fish colors of the new designs, which harken back to the golden years of preppy fashion, when Ralph Lauren dressed his all-American models in lime khakis and pink polos, with canary yellow cable-knit cashmere sweaters tied around their necks. Grosgrain was the rage.

For his spring/summer 2004 collection, Mr. Lauren has returned to his sartorial roots, turning out preppy classics like the madras blazer and the oxford shirt, this time with the pumped-up colors he marketed to such success in the 1980s -- lime and pink.Tommy Hilfiger, meanwhile, sent out runway looks for men that compete with Lily Pulitzer in pastel and floral prints.And J. Crew has boosted flagging sales by coming back to its original mission: prep style for less (though they're perhaps overdoing it with their "Nantucket" and "Martha's Vineyard" printed tees). The company has also revived a rather dubious icon of prep: the woven tie.

"Preppy style is an inherently relaxed attitude to dress," said Kurt Ehrig, part-owner of Seize sur Vingt, the 4-year-old NoLIta store that has made a name selling bespoke but brightly colorful dress shirts and custom-made suits (243 Elizabeth St., 212-343-0476). (Aptly, Mr. Ehrig pairs his Seize sur Vingt striped shirt with jeans and casual, horse-bit adorned loafers.) So popular are the store's polo shirts and short-sleeved plaid and multi-hued striped button-downs this June that there are barely any designs remaining. "We've been killed," he said. "By tomorrow, we'll probably only have two left."

Yet despite the popularity of his preppiest garments, Mr. Ehrig is reluctant to affiliate his store with a Stepford Husband look. "We have some customers in Connecticut, but our primary customer is based in Manhattan," he said, describing the store's aesthetic instead as "Euro-preppy" (hence the French name). He will, however, admit that a couple of plaid shirts ($160) on their racks were "inspired by a certain catalog company popular in the Northeast that shall remain nameless." Also rather Nantucket are the seersucker striped suits ($1,200) in pink, tan, and one version with an unusual three hues of blue. With some prodding, Mr. Ehrig finally revealed his New England provenance: he knows his business partner, James Jurney, from when they "attended high school together in New England" -- a prep school, perhaps?

If the luxurious fabrics and bespoke cuts at Seize sur Vingt exhibit a have-your-cake-and-eat-it-too attitude to prep style, Prohibit NYC (269 Elizabeth St., 212-219-1469), just up the street, traffics in a heavier kind of irony. There, golf clothing mingles with hip-hop Tshirts. A fedora by Gorrin is made of madras plaid ($29).

The same cultural mix is in evidence at two similar NoLIta stores, the "skater shops" Supreme (274 Lafayette St., 212-966-7799) and Stackhouse (276 Lafayette St., 212-925-6931). There, mixed in with the hooded sweatshirts, are a number of preppy styles. In fact, in both stores you'll find almost identical navy blue gingham, shortsleeved button-downs. The stores offer merchandise with a cultural and ethnic mix that the clientele lacks.

Back at Prohibit NYC, while 50 Cent plays on the stereo, and a coffee table overflows with books on African-American and Latino culture, the only customers in the store are white.

Bloomingdale's SoHo is currently doing double duty as a polo shirt outlet: an entire corner of the men's floor is devoted to the pique classic in all its rainbow-hued glory. Featured there are Burberry ($80),Lacoste ($69-$80),and,interestingly,terrycloth polos from Juicy Couture ($79), the company that made sweatsuits for women so popular a few seasons back. Mingling with the other clothes on the floor are even more polos, from Le Tigre, Ralph Lauren, and a company called Modern Amusement, which I asked the salesperson about.

"I don't know where they're from, but we just got them in, and they have the cutest buttons," she told me. Indeed they do, in argyle, as well as a Dodo-bird logo.

Will men accept all this color in their wardrobes? As I contemplated this, a man walked down the Bloomingdale's aisle in a powderblue, royal-blue, and canary-striped polo shirt, which just happened to be identical to the Penguin polo I held in my hands. Okay, but will real men wear pink?

Back in the Apple store, where there's a rush on a newly arrived shipment of the iPod minis, salesperson Alexsie Diax had an answer: "Don't be surprised if you walk out of the store and see five men carrying the pink one. People don't discriminate with color."

But when I asked the cashier the same question, she responded, "It takes quite a man to pull off pink."

The man at the head of the line,a redhead purchasing a silver iPod mini, added, "Didn't anybody tell you redheads shouldn't wear pink? It's too much. "Which just might prove that men not only are embracing color, but are being savvy about it, too.