Dive Brief:
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Venerable menswear retailer Louis Boston will close in July after more than 85 years. Owner Debi Greenberg says it is time for her to exit the retail business and pursue other passions.
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It was Greenberg’s father, Murray Pearlstein, who in 1925 took over his own father’s haberdashery and transformed it into one of America’s first and foremost retailers of European fashions for men. The family’s retail business began as a pawn shop in Boston that catered to immigrants.
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The upscale retailer has been a fixture in Boston, the go-to retailer over the years for the likes of Ted Kennedy and other prominent men of Massachusetts and the East Coast, and has had a reputation for discovering designers like Giorgio Armani before they were known to most others.
Dive Insight:
Louis Boston was revered not just by its toney customers, but also by influential designers, including Ralph Lauren, who called Murray Pearlstein “one of the leading creative minds of the men’s specialty store world.”
The retailer launched the career of one of its former employees, Joseph Abboud, who began there as a salesman at 18 and became a successful designer and retailer in his own right. For Boston and for American menswear retail, it’s the end of an era.