Slim Fit

During my shopping trip last weekend, I discovered that there is now a Ruehl store in the Burlington Mall. Ruehl is another branch of the hydra-like Abercrombie & Fitch family of brands that starts with (lower-case) abercrombie for the youngsters, then moves on through Hollister for the teens and the original A&F for college kids. Ruehl seems to be for the post-college years; does this means that eventually they'll have a brand aimed at hipster senior citizens? And what does "Ruehl" mean, anyway?

(Does anyone besides me remember when A&F was just a store for outdoorsy adults, kind of splitting the difference between L.L. Bean and Orvis? Those were the days... their marketing people have spun this whole mythos around the various brands; the Ruehl storefront is supposed to look like a Greenwich Village brownstone, but honestly, when you're walking down the mall past stores with plain, ordinary plate-glass fronts, and you come upon what looks like a really fake soundstage backdrop from a 1940s movie set back several feet from the corridor, it just looks weird and out of place. Same for Hollister, which is meant to look like a beach cantina, which I'm sure is exactly where parents would want their teens to be.)

I first encountered Ruehl over a year ago, when I went to check out the Natick Mall's then-new addition with all the high-end stores. At the time I wasn't terribly impressed; the clothes seemed pretty similar to the merchandise available in A&F stores, only made with nicer fabrics and priced higher. At the time the Ruehl web site was not selling anything (it was nothing more than an online window display) and I never made it back out to Natick, so I kind of forgot about the store until maybe four months ago, when I happened to hit the site to see how many more stores they had opened. At that point I found that they were open for business online.

I still didn't necessarily think I wanted to buy anything from them, but I like to know what my options are. I saw a couple of things that were interesting, and thought I'd like to check them out in person. Okay, when I say "things," I mean shirts. I admit, I have something of an obsession with shirts. I have dozens of them. The Mrs. likes to periodically count them, just to know the number; I don't keep count myself. I just like shirts.

So, finding the store in the mall last weekend gave me the chance to get another look at the merchandise. I discovered, to my surprise, that they had a clearance section in a corner of a back room. I was surprised because, unlike most web sites, there was no sale section on the Ruehl site (A&F is notoriously averse to marking down merchandise, so I just assumed they hauled the slow-selling inventory out behind their warehouses and burned it), so I wasn't expecting to find any markdowns in the store.

Some of the shirts had been marked down more than once (a good sign for someone like me who's always on the lookout for a good deal) and were only $19.90 after starting at $78. Jackpot, I thought. But as I've discussed before, size creep has become pretty rampant, so I was wary. I pulled a size large shirt out of a pile to use as a sort of baseline gauge. I held it up: it looked like it might fit a 14-year-old boy, or one of the anemic-looking MassArt dudes I see on the E line.

I moved on to extra large, which has sort of become my default size even though my neck size still corresponds to a large. This one looked like it might actually fit, so I held it up against my torso. I could tell that it was barely wide enough to make it around me; I'd estimate that if I had about a 32 inch waist, it would have fit me okay.

But what was much more strange and surprising was that the sleeves came down to about the knuckles of my fingers. I wear a 34 sleeve in a dress shirt, so I'm not short of arm, which made this all the more ridiculous. I'm guessing that the thin dudes who wear Ruehl shirts are required to keep their sleeves stylishly rolled up at all times (the shirts on the site are all shown with their sleeves rolled), but it's pretty much winter now, and regardless of the season, sometimes I simply want the look I present to the world to be one that has its sleeves rolled down and buttoned.

I didn't bother checking out the XXL shirt, figuring the sleeve cuffs would probably touch the floor. But now I've gone and looked at the size charts on the Ruehl site, and looks like I may have been wrong. While the chest measurement on the XXL is slightly bigger than on the XL, the sleeves are actually a little bit shorter. Maybe this means I could wear an XXL after all. I also noticed that they now have a sale section on the site, but I'm not sure I care anymore.

I hated walking away from something that was 75% off the original price, but I think I'm just too old, too thick in the middle, and too unhip for this place. Upstairs at Martin + Osa, which is quickly becoming my favorite clothing store, I got a V-neck cashmere sweater and a great pair of gray jeans. Both fit me really well, they were at least 50% off their original prices, and I had a coupon for an additional 30% off. Also, one of the clerks said he recognized me from a previous visit, which was sort of nice. And their XL shirts fit me just fine.