Store gallery: A new look for classic brand Daks

Think Daks and the first thing that probably springs to mind is well-tailored gents swanking around Mayfair and Piccadilly with rather smart squares sticking out of the breast pocket of their doublebreasted blazer. The ensemble is completed with a pair of swish slacks. Slacks? Yes, the word does sound a mite old-fashioned, but then apocryphally it is part of the reason for the Daks name, being a conflation of Dad and Slacks, or so Daks retail manager Danny Pyne relates.

Pyne is standing in the middle of the freshly refurbished Daks menswear store on Jermyn Street, directly across from the art deco masterpiece that is now the Waterstones flagship but which used to be Simpsons of Piccadilly – source of all things Daks.

Today, there are just three Daks stores in the UK – the Jermyn Street branch, the flagship on Old Bond Street and an outlet store at the McArthur Glenn scheme in York. The 2,700 sq ft, two-floor Jermyn Street store launched a couple of weeks ago after a 10-week makeover.

The first thing that anyone standing outside this store will notice is that, in spite of this being a time-honoured name, the use of white neon to spell out the message ‘One look tells you it’s Daks’, gives a sense of the contemporary. This could, of course, be taken several ways, but as this is a shop window, the assumption must be that it’s a generally positive legend.

Modern twist

What is interesting about it is that a brand on Jermyn Street, which is home to the shirt-makers that tend, as a tribe, to play upon a traditional view of Britishness, should go for something more modern. The reason is straightforward. Daks, like so many other overtly British brands, has a rather stronger following in the Far East than it does in the country from which it stems.

So much so, that it is Japanese-owned, having been acquired by the Sankyo Seiko Co more than 20 years ago, in 1991.

While the UK has just the three stores, China, Hong Kong and Korea have multiple standalones and shop-in-shops and the brand’s real power and customer base is a long way from London. Which is why the refurb of the Jermyn Street store follows a concept that has been created for Daks branches thousands of miles away.

Yet it still manages to feel slick in a 007 Connery, rather than Craig, sort of way. “The whole package [for the store design] was sent in a box – samples of the tiles, wood for the floor and so on. And then our in-house designer sourced all the materials as closely as possible,” says Pyne.

Aside from being a reverse of the usual route taken by store design at present, in which blueprints for Oriental emporia take shape in this country and are then sent east, the notion of a shop-in-a-box is an unusual one. Yet in spite of its brand provenance, the interior of this store feels ersatz British.

Investment pieces

In part this has to do with the sober palette that has been deployed, in which the signature Daks check (created in 1976, apparently) is replicated as a design on the floor with dark wood blocks set among lighter wood. After which, the store is something of a by-numbers trot through the matter of creating an interior that will fit in with the well-heeled, but inherently conservative, shoppers who tend to investment-dress in Daks clothing.

From the front of the shop therefore, it’s shirts and ties to the right, contained within the usual perimeter dark-wood pigeonholes, while on the opposite side of the floor an open-fronted wardrobe, framed by soft strip lighting, plays host to some sports jackets. Between the two, a pair of tailor’s dummies on a plain wood plinth are used to display a trench coat and a jacket in the house check.

Beyond this, there are more open-fronted wardrobes, a screen that should have been showing the autumn ranges but which wasn’t working, and a few mood(y) photos of men wearing the product. A choice then follows – head up a few stairs into an area filled with padded Barbour-esque jackets and a fitting room, or downstairs to the suit department.

On the assumption that it’s easier to head towards the upper part of the ground floor, the most high-profile element in this male, clubby environment is a mid-floor glass box with a pair of wooden tennis rackets inside it. Decals detailing the connection between Daks and sporting events of yesteryear have been applied to the outside of this feature and, while it may be reassuringly low-key, the rest of the area does stray uncomfortably close towards being hotel-lobby bland.

Downstairs, the brand’s back catalogue of advertising sketches has been raided to create graphics dotted around the perimeter. The heritage card is also played with a perimeter module being devoted to old-looking books, a bowler hat, a leather briefcase and a wooden box in a sort of visual merchandising fusion between public school and old-style City gent.

This is hardly surprising as the whole of this floor is about selling formal suits and the fact that in a single-breasted world, the double-breasted suit is pretty prominent as the shopper looks around, indicates that this may be a shop for those who value things as they once were. And in case the potential Daks customer should harbour doubts about the merit of paying from around £500 up to £7,000 (for a fully bespoke job), white plaques have been attached to certain styles bearing retro-style messages. ‘Daks is your answer for a superb town suit’, is one of the more eye-catching of these and could have been taken directly from the handbook of a 1970s advertising copywriter.

Leaving the dark wood and cream carpeted world of the basement and arriving once more on the ground floor, the visitor will probably pause to admire the three royal warrants that Daks holds.

In the current climate, where discounting and clothing that is sold on price as much as looks are the norm, menswear is a hard sell. The fact is perhaps reinforced along Jermyn Street, where retailers contend not just with the vagaries of the marketplace, but with cut-throat rivalry from each other.

There is little doubt that Daks is a famous name that has featured in the wardrobes of generations of men who want a particular British look. That said, the fact that it is Japanese-owned and that greater importance seems to be set by the brand in China than here in the UK, does pose a question mark over who this shop is aimed at.

It is a perfectly respectable Jermyn Street contender and yet, in spite of the nod paid to modern times by the window’s fluorescent tubes, it is hard to see it standing out from the herd. Couple this with pricing that is at the top-end of what’s on offer in the area and it may still be a while before this one enjoys the popularity of nearby neighbours such as Charles Tyrwhitt and Thomas Pink.

Or perhaps, like English as some believe it should be spoken and which many now regard as being alive and well in parts of New England, this is an approach to tailoring and retail atmosphere that represents an overseas view of what English style is all about, but which is rarely found here.