Brooks Brothers Targets New Generation With Modern, Heritage-Inspired Preppy Style

Brooks Brothers, the 200-year-old home of crisp Oxford shirts and tailored suits, launched a new brand positioning called "Make It Yours" this month, placing its bets on a cultural moment when collegecore and preppy style have re-entered the fashion conversation with genuine force.

The campaign, developed under the creative direction of Michael Bastian, is the clearest signal yet of where Brooks Brothers intends to go: a more casual, youthful aesthetic that doesn't abandon its classic American roots so much as reframe them. The positioning articulates a "lifestyle-meets-heritage" mindset with a directness that reads more like a manifesto than a tagline: "Suits can be his and hers. Classic is bold, not boring. Timeless style can be personal and adaptable."

The strategic priority beneath that messaging is specific. Brooks Brothers is courting affluent women who show high purchase intent but currently represent less than 30% of its customer base. That gap between demonstrated interest and actual conversion is precisely the kind of untapped opportunity a repositioning campaign exists to close, and the gender-crossing framing of "Make It Yours" is clearly designed with that audience in mind.

Photographed by Coliena Rentmeester, the campaign makes its generational ambitions visible through its cast. Actor Leslie Bibb, fashion entrepreneur Nick Wooster, comedian and television writer Alex Edelman, fashion influencer TyLynn Nguyen, model and athlete Nick Arrington, and advocate and director Bethann Hardison represent a range of disciplines and ages that collectively argue the brand's appeal isn't fixed to any single era or archetype. It's a deliberate corrective to the stuffy-boardroom reading of preppy dressing, and the casting does real work in making that argument visually.

Bastian's influence on the brand has been incremental but consistent: loosening silhouettes, softening the formality, and keeping the heritage signifiers, the Oxford cloth, the tailored structure, present enough to anchor the evolution without calcifying it. "Make It Yours" names that process explicitly and invites the customer to complete it.

Whether the repositioning translates into meaningful share growth among women remains the open question, but the cultural timing is difficult to argue with.