“I have been dreaming about this store for years,” says Eric Jennings, walking through the double front doors that lead to Saks Fifth Avenue’s new downtown men’s store, which sprawls across 16,000 hip square feet, nearly 70 blocks south of the company’s original flagship.
Young office workers, clad in desk-job suits, crane their heads to peek inside the new Brookfield Place offering — they’ve been watching its construction for the past two years.
Jennings, the retailer’s vice president and men’s fashion director, points to a 20-something-thousand-dollar display of gold-plated Athletic Propulsion Lab sneakers — part of a storefront installation called “World of Shoes,” which will soon be replaced by a series of designer pop-ups.
“We examined the neighborhood and curated an experience for the downtown New York [man],” Jennings says. “This edit does not exist anywhere else down here.”
Indeed, myriad delights cover the porcelain chevron floors of the grandiose store. Five hundred musky leather belts dangle near 390 pairs of designer glasses. (Trendy Korean eyewear brand Gentle Monster will tip that tally to more than 400 when its shipment arrives in the coming weeks.)
Other brands new to Saks — such as Saint Laurent, Maison Margiela and Dries Van Noten —join longstanding favorites such as Brunello Cucinelli, Salvatore Ferragamo, Canali, and of course, the store’s eponymous in-house line.
Further inside, an expanded grooming counter mixes classic offerings from Proraso and Creed with young favorites like Malin + Goetz and Grown Alchemist.
The fully bespoke experience crescendos at the north end of the store, where an intimate three-room chamber known as the Fifth Avenue Club has been decorated as a walk-in closet. Here, made-to-measure services are offered courtesy of tablets and mirrored screens.
If all that browsing leaves you hungry (or shaggy), drop by the store’s cut-and-coffee hybrid shop from London’s Sharps Barber and Swedish café Fika. Those with less time to spare can book the Power Lunch, an express, master-of-the-universe combination of catered bites, a private-style consultation, and a grooming session.
Compared to Saks’ regal uptown flagship, the vibe here is appreciably younger: Beside the store’s Leather Spa — where any leather-based product can be magically restored — an in-house DJ transitions into his next song. It’s very downtown, very cool. And it perfectly suits the retail giant’s third NYC outpost, a brother to Saks’ women’s store at the other end of the Brookfield complex.
First slated for the basement, the men’s shop was eventually elevated to its own palatial, freestanding space — evidence of Saks’ devotion to the gentlemen of New York.
Says Jennings: “We knew we wanted to create a store dedicated to men, created with men in mind