THE JOURNAL
A brand for all seasons, Salle Privée has everything you need – whatever the weather.
The dusty road leading to Mr Patrick Munsters’ Tuscan holiday home doesn’t get much passing traffic. On reflection, that’s not such a bad thing. If anyone were to drive by, they might stop to wonder what on earth the 52-year-old Dutchman is doing. It’s late summer, and southern Europe is in the grip of its most prolonged heatwave since 2003. At a time of day when the torrid heat has sent even the hardiest of sun worshippers scurrying indoors, Mr Munsters is posing in a white shirt, ivory chinos, Gucci loafers... and a single-breasted, cashmere-blend overcoat.
When the founder of Salle Privée agreed to model his new menswear brand for MR PORTER, there was no way he could have predicted that the shoot would fall on one of the hottest days of the year. Still, it’s hard to feel too sympathetic. That’s just a risk you run when you start up a “seasonless” menswear brand, one that departs from the traditional model of seasonal collections every six months to offer a single, permanent collection – swim shorts in December, overcoats in August, and so on.
If the image of a man wearing an overcoat in a heatwave seems ridiculous, then it only holds a mirror up to the realities of the traditional fashion calendar, a system that Mr Munsters himself is keen to see dismantled. “Under the current model, winter clothes arrive in late summer, when it’s still hot, and summer clothes arrive in late winter, when it’s still cold,” he says. “So, what do customers do? They wait for the sale. They buy their coats when it’s actually cold, and their short-sleeved shirts, swim shorts and so on when it’s actually warm. They save 50 per cent of the retail price or more, while retailers lose out.” This is the topsy-turvy system that Mr Munsters is challenging with his new brand.
In the world of Salle Privée, there is no autumn/winter, no spring/summer, no sale. The collection exists in perpetuity, a thing of permanent style, not whimsical fashion. The silhouettes will not change; newness will be injected into the collection by way of fabrics alone. “Fashion is all about the new,” he says. “I want to create a men’s fashion brand where nothing is new. If I’ve designed the ultimate white shirt, why would I change it? Why would I sell it at half price just because everyone else is doing the same?” In a bold step, he plans to never put Salle Privée on sale. If his stock doesn’t sell, he’ll simply buy it back. It’s not subject to seasons, so it should, in theory, hold its value. Will his plan work? On paper, it sounds like a risky formula. But then, ah, you see the clothes.
Salle Privée is no ordinary menswear collection. As the brand’s ebullient founder takes us on a guided tour of the rails, which have been set up on the terrace of his converted farmhouse, it becomes clear that this is the work of a perfectionist, a man whose eye for detail borders on the obsessive. “Look,” he says, eagerly holding up a goatskin bomber jacket for inspection. “There are only eight panels in this jacket. Two at the back, two at the front, two on each of the sleeves. It’s hard to make a jacket like this. You need bigger, better quality pieces of leather. The more seams you include, the easier it gets. But I like working this way.”
This sublime jacket is typical of his design process, which involves endlessly streamlining, paring down, distilling and perfecting. If he decides that a detail doesn’t need to be there, it goes. His white shirts, for instance, are tailored slim without the need for darts. He removed the external chest pockets from his overcoats because, in his words, “I realised one day that I never use them.” Later that evening, over a glass of local montepulciano wine and homemade pizza cooked in his wood-fired oven, he reveals a deep-seated distaste for pocket squares. “That’s one thing I will never produce.” In his eyes, embellishment is a cheap trick, a distraction technique; an opinion that might ruffle a few Pitti peacock feathers. “Adding things is easy,” he explains. “What’s difficult is taking them away.”
Mr Munsters’ rejection of fast (or even medium-paced) fashion is all the more interesting given that, only a few years ago, it made him a fortune. Prior to founding Salle Privée, he was one of the four majority shareholders of Scotch & Soda, an Amsterdam-based high-street fashion brand that was sold to an American investment vehicle in 2011 for €350m. He had worked at Scotch & Soda for the majority of his career, joining straight after university in 1990. He left a decade later, only to return within months to take over and relaunch the brand. “The time was right for a new vision,” he says diplomatically.
Scotch & Soda flourished under the leadership of Mr Munsters and his associates, growing into one of the Netherlands’ most successful labels. When the time came to sell, though, he wasn’t afraid to walk away. “The brand had been my life,” he explains. “I needed a new challenge.” As luck would have it, an opportunity was just around the corner. In 2010, the UN officially recognised access to clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right, and called on businesses to help. In 2011, an inspired Mr Munsters founded Marie-Stella-Maris, a water and beauty brand that contributes a share of its profits to clean-water initiatives. To date, the foundation has raised more than €500,000, funded nine projects – eight in Africa and one in Bangladesh – and provided drinking water to around 20,000 people.
The sale of Scotch & Soda set Mr Munsters, his wife and his three children up for life. Another man might have retreated to a life of leisure. But not Mr Munsters. “I love projects,” he admits, with a bashful grin. “I can’t help myself.” There are, of course, the attendant luxuries of being a newly minted millionaire. A 1968 Maserati Ghibli in gold with a green leather interior. A farmhouse in the Tuscan countryside, bought from the current owner of the La Foce estate and lavishly restored. A collection of contemporary art. (He likes works that reference cities, such as the map-based artworks of Mr Gert Jan Kocken.) A yacht. (He speaks fondly of the clean lines of the Vandutch 55.)
But the heart of a serial entrepreneur was still beating in his chest. While he was in the process of setting up Marie-Stella-Maris, he happened to walk past a cookery school in Amsterdam. “I saw the name ‘Salle Privée’ on the door,” he says. “I didn’t have the concept for a seasonless menswear brand at that point. But there was something so elegant about the name. It had balance. It had symmetry.” And so, with no idea of what the name “Salle Privée” would become, he registered it. The revelation for a concept came later, as he witnessed the rise of so-called fast fashion. “Everything was changing so rapidly,” he explains. “It just didn’t make any sense to me. My friends, when they buy something nice, want more or less the same thing next season. Where were the brands doing this well?”
The truth is, they didn’t really exist. With Salle Privée, Mr Munsters has fulfilled the ultimate goal of any entrepreneur by spotting a gap in the market. In turning away from the fashion industry’s obsession with newness, he has created something that feels… well, new. It might be described by its creator as “seasonless”, but Salle Privée is remarkably on-trend. It’s hard to see how other brands won’t follow.