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Not every mens retail clothing store comes with a pedigree, with personal histories as varied and colorful as some of the meticulously matched furnishings on display. Fairfield Mens Stores Naresh Mansukhani owned a haberdashery in Bridgeport called In Style for eight years before deciding to move to a more upscale location and a more sophisticated clientele. He chose his present location in Fairfield on the Post Road in 1995 and by his own admission sold clothes that were average, nothing special. That was before he met designer cum stylist cum manufacturer Eugene Venanzi whose 35 years of mens clothing experience included time with Christian Dior and Leo Cerruti. Ammanicato by Venanzi, as the Italians say, taken by the hand of, Mansukhani embarked on what amounted to a post-graduate study and experience in fine fashion. Venanzi had been exposed to fashion aesthetics early on as a child through an aunt who ran a dress shop in Princeton, New Jersey. I would sit there and look through the magazines like Vogue and Harpers Bazaar and try and select the most beautiful picture, Venanzi said. So I was interested in color, fabric and beauty in general at a young age. As a teenager he fell under the spell of Alan Langrock, an innovative retailer of traditional American clothing. An architect by profession, Langrocks philosophy was to build beautiful, Gothic-style retail stores and place them in towns with Ivy League schools. In the 1920s he had amassed 35 stores, including those in towns that housed the traditional Ivy prep schools like Andover and Lawrenceville - all supplied by a clothing factory in New Haven, CT. I was so taken with the place as a teenager that I apprenticed there for no salary, Venanzi recalled. It was at the store that I met people like Sinclair Lewis and T. S. Eliot. It was there that he also learned to fit and measure and to select clothing for customers that accommodated their lifestyles simply by talking to them and finding out about their professions. He continued to work at the store through college when he came home for weekends and vacations from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. When he graduated in 1965 he applied for a job at Genesco, the leading retail and manufacturing company in the U.S. at the time, owners of Henry Bendel and Bonwit Tellers among others. He eventually landed a job as an executive trainee at Frank Bros. Whitehouse and Hardy, easily the most prestigious mens store of the time with four stores in New York, one each in Chicago, Detroit and New Haven, Cherry Hill, N.J. and two in Florida. They sent me around the country and I wrote a report that was on the whole critical of the way we were doing business and my boss was responsible for most of what I was criticizing, Venanzi said. Carnaby Street fashion in London was starting to happen about then and I just sensed we should be positioning ourselves better with more of an European influence. After all, we had prime real estate locations and were a mens retail leader.

 

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