The most ironic thing about J.Crew’s downfall is that the brand was built without stores. In 1947, Mitchell Cinader and Saul Charles founded Popular Merchandise Inc. to sell a line of simple and affordable womenswear, Popular Club Plan, using door-to-door salespeople and at-home demonstrations.

Popular Merchandise Inc. was relatively successful over the following decades, adding a menswear offering, too, but the ’80s saw a new trend emerge in American retail: Catalogues. The likes of Land’s End and L.L. Bean enjoyed explosive growth in the early ’80s thanks to their catalogues and mail-in order business. The success of its competitors brought about important changes for Popular Merchandise Inc. In 1983, the company rebranded to J.Crew, in a bid to position itself more squarely within prepwear and compete with the likes of Ralph Lauren. Simultaneously, the company’s first catalogue was sent out to American households.

It was with the catalogues of the ’80s and ’90s that J.Crew built its reputation as a purveyor of affordable American prep fashion. With 14 catalogues a year, each with about a hundred pages, J.Crew managed to grow its sales by roughly 25 percent year-over-year in the ’80s. It went from being a couple-million-dollar business to a hundred-million-dollar business in but a few years.

It’s important to note: The catalogues weren’t just crucial to offering a in-depth look at the garments through detailed photos—think different angles and close ups of fabrics and patterns—they sold the J.Crew ethos. They were colorful and youthful; they exuded an effortless elegance; made Oxford cloth button down shirts look at home on New England beaches and streets alike. In those catalogues, pyjamas, T-shirts and bathing suits looked chic, while the tailoring and shirting looked unpretentious—but still based on the established codes for menswear.

In other words: J.Crew was classic American menswear with a youthful twist—and the brand showed customers exactly what that would look like.

What really endeared the brand with a new generation of customers was the price. Even as J.Crew gained cachet and market share, it didn’t price itself out of popularity. It was comfortable existing as a sort of Ralph Lauren-lite, with a similar prep-wise look at a fraction of the price.

As we all know now, though, catalogue retailing did not prove to be as revolutionary as it first appeared in the ’80s. By the turn of the decade, J.Crew was the subject of industry-wide rumors—it was, purportedly, up for sale, unprofitable and struggling to grow after explosive growth in the middle of the decade. The company sought new streams of revenue by pivoting to brick and mortar retail in 1989, opening its first store in Manhattan. Organizationally distinct from the catalogue operation, J.Crew’s retail arm grew steadily throughout the ’90s and by the turn of the millennium, there were over 100 J.Crew stores and outlets in the United States.

It was these physical outposts that helped pave the way for J.Crew’s renaissance in the late-2000s and early-2010s. In 2008, just as the prep menswear revival was gaining momentum, J.Crew opened its Liquor Store—a bar converted into a menswear-only outpost—in SoHo. The catalogs of yore offered a snapshot of the J.Crew ethos, but the Liquor Store in particular allowed customers to become immersed in the J.Crew life. J.Crew may have been laying the performative masculinity on a little thick, but it created a sense of community—like walking into the store conferred membership into a secret club of men’s style.

J.Crew’s womenswear business had always been on solid footing. The brand started off selling to women, with menswear only coming afterwards. Even in the late-2000s and early-2010s, the masses probably knew J.Crew from dressing Michelle Obama or the brand’s chic creative director Jenna Lyons. The womenswear line offered elevated classics for the modern woman’s wardrobe—timeless dresses and sweaters that worked on weekends or for work. But the Liquor Store put J.Crew’s menswear business on the front foot for the first time. Rather than just being a store where men might shop alongside their partners, it became a destination for men on their own.

Alongside the affordable J.Crew-branded goods were a tightly curated selection of pieces from third party labels like Alden, Baracuta, Barbour, Globe-Trotter and even Nike. Even without the successful revival of Nike’s Killshot 2, a regular collaboration with New Balance fused the two brands’ New England-prep aesthetics and brought the everyman into the sneaker game in a way that Jordans never could.

The stores were staffed with knowledgeable salespeople eager to nudge customers further into the J.Crew world, and, thus, deepen their interest in menswear. Beyond explaining what pieces were, hey were also able to explain simpler things—like how to wear chambray or where madras came from. As such, J.Crew’s stores became a place where men could go not only to get dressed, but to learn how to dress.

J.Crew offered men an affordable and less stuffy alternative to the likes of Brooks Brothers, Gant, J. Press and Ralph Lauren, at a time when men were pivoting back to preppier menswear. The recession brought about a newfound desire to buy better and thus buy less, in the long run. This turned out to be fortuitous for J.Crew, where men could dip their toes into style’s proverbial waters—slowly ease into more refined pieces—without breaking the bank.

A glance at the trends of the early 2010s show just how influential J.Crew became. Hedi Slimane is often credited with bringing the über-skinny slim suit to menswear, but J.Crew arguably did more to slim down tailoring with the masses than anybody else. J.Crew’s Ludlow suit became ubiquitous among a new generation of price-conscious young professionals in the early 2010s and ushered in an era where men’s shoelaces were visible (and their socks weren’t). But even outside of traditional offices, J.Crew became the de facto uniform of the creative class—easy-to-wear, elevated staples that worked in open-concept workplaces and bars alike.

No single J.Crew piece better exemplifies the brand’s broad appeal than its gingham shirt. Yes—that gingham shirt. It was the gingham shirt that early “#menswear” aficionados paired with selvedge denim and Red Wing boots. So ubiquitous, it was also the gingham shirt you’d spot at college fraternities. You’d have been as likely to see it in a hip SoHo bar, as a bar in Idaho in the mid-2010s. It became one of fashion’s first memes. While not necessarily as cool as the Ludlow, or some of J.Crew’s other wares, the gingham shirt—and, to a lesser extent, the bar collar chambray shirt—exemplified just how broad J.Crew’s reach was. If one out of every ten men who bought a gingham shirt ended up taking an interest in Alden or traditional American prep, that was one more acolyte of the J.Crew ethos.

The problem, though, was that it takes more than a singular shirt, or a single localized customer, or one immersive retail experience to keep an expansive retail and catalogue business afloat. J.Crew’s golden years towards the end of the 2000s and early 2010s came with the formidable trio of creative director Jenna Lyons, menswear designer Frank Muytjens and CEO Mickey Drexler at the helm. They honed in on a formula that worked, from both a business and aesthetic standpoint. When Lyons, Muytjens and Drexler left J.Crew, in 2017, the company was already in a worrisome position, but at least they had some semblance of creative direction.

J.Crew has been unable to replace the trio in any meaningful way and those that have tried to fill their shoes have tried to replicate what Lyons, Muytjens and Drexler accomplished. All of this was enacted under the misguided belief that what worked in 2010 will work in 2020; it’s only a decade of difference, but things have changed considerably. J.Crew’s casual cool, the brand’s identity—the, “I look good without looking like I spent a month’s pay on this shirt and pants”—owed a lot to the leadership group demanding that the brand’s staff, from the head office to the stores, live and breathe the J.Crew lifestyle. Since their departure, that hasn’t been the case and now J.Crew is left with an identity that gets ever murkier.

Of course, it’s not solely a personnel issue. J.Crew’s declining fortunes owe a lot to changing consumer trends. While men were dressing up in the first part of the decade and discovering things like selvedge denim, madras and chambray, the second half of the 2010s was defined by Supreme, tracksuits and sneakers—none of those being things that paired particularly well with J.Crew’s staples. With then-J.Crew CEO Mickey Drexler—coming off the rise and fall of Gap—actively moving J.Crew away from “athleisure” as it was beginning to percolate in the early-2010s, J.Crew was setting itself up for failure in the long term. Couple that with the decline of malls—where countless J.Crew stores are found—and you have a recipe for relative irrelevance.

J.Crew’s history should have offered the brand lessons. Its initial successes were rooted in selling the J.Crew way of life, which was as much the focus of the brand’s catalogues as the garments themselves were. To boot, J.Crew did this without an outsized brick and mortar presence. Even the success of the Liquor Store exemplified the brand’s winning formula—a smaller, specialized outpost that sold a mood as much as it hawked wares. Unfortunately, J.Crew’s national presence as a “mall brand” made it hard for one-off concept stores and a move to increase the quality (and by extension, the price) of its garments to have any significant impact.

Instead J.Crew found itself saddled with debt—more than a billion dollars worth—and stores that bled money, and without something that set it apart from competitors. The quality of the products suffered, too, with the company less able to afford strict quality control measures and better production facilities. From 2017 until now, the downward spiral has done nothing but gather pace, with the forced closure of the brand’s stores being the straw that broke the camel’s back.

Rather ironically, it appears that menswear is headed back towards the kind of world where J.Crew would have tremendous success. Men are dressing up again, but in a way that’s casual. The Lyons-Muytjens-Drexler-era J.Crew would have had a field day, but, instead, the brand has been outpaced and replaced. Brooks Brothers, J. Press and Ralph Lauren remain as the longstanding Americana icons, but a new caste of brands like Rowing Blazers, and, to a lesser extent, Aimé Leon Dore and Noah have emerged to fill some of cool prepwear void left by J.Crew. Of course, none of them do so at the same affordable prices J.Crew once offered.

It’s important to note that bankruptcy protection does not mean that J.Crew is folding—the brand is still around, but it’s hard to see it returning to the place it once occupied, even as the trends swing back in its favor. J.Crew sold a dream and it educated customers. It no longer does the former well and we’re living in an age where customers are already extremely knowledgeable—the internet having replaced brands and salespeople as chief style educators.

If J.Crew wants to be successful again, its best bet is probably to downsize; to lean into its history as a New England prep brand and not try to dress everybody and anybody; to close most of the stores and ensure that those that remain ooze the J.Crew ethos and not that of whichever mall they happen to sit in.

But that probably won’t happen. In all likelihood, J.Crew is poised to become but another brand that lacks a defining ethos, selling chinos without a purpose—irrelevant save for its history and deeply discounted outlets.

The saddest part is that’s not what J.Crew once was.