Hartmarx

Hartmarx Corporation was the Chicago tailored-clothing company behind Hart Schaffner Marx and Hickey Freeman — founded in 1887 when Joseph Schaffner joined the Hart and Marx partnership, renamed Hartmarx in 1983, and for more than a century one of the defining names in American men's suits. The company dressed Barack Obama for his 2009 inauguration, and filed for Chapter 11 on January 23, 2009, days later. Emerisque Brands and SKNL North America bought Hartmarx out of bankruptcy that August and ran it as the HMX Group; after HMX's own bankruptcy, Authentic Brands Group acquired Hart Schaffner Marx, Hickey Freeman and most other HMX assets in 2012, and the tailored brands continue under Authentic.

Company Profile

The industry firsts claimed for the Schaffner era are about selling as much as making: standard pricing, selling from swatches instead of cumbersome trunks, the first national men's-apparel magazine advertisement, and in 1936 the first zippered trousers. Together they describe the moment tailored clothing became a national branded business rather than a local tailor's trade — the business Hartmarx then spent seventy years defending against casual dress.

The bankruptcy narrative in the summaries is the casual-dress story arriving at the balance sheet: a substantial decline in consumer and retail sales, liquidity pressure from its lenders, and workers threatening to occupy the Des Plaines plant to stop a liquidation. The plants' survival under successive owners — HMX, then Authentic's licensees — is why the brand names outlived the corporation that created them.

The range behind the name is men’s and women’s tailored clothing and sportswear, including suits, golfwear, shirts and ties. Its customers are professional customers through department and specialty stores (in its operating years). That combination — what is sold, and to whom — is the simplest way to place Hartmarx in the industry: it explains the company's costs, its competitors and the kind of news that moved its shares when it had them. A change in either half of the combination, a new product category or a new customer, is usually the first sign that the business described in the older summaries is turning into something different.

Scale should be read from the dated summaries with their dates attached. Store counts, sales descriptions and market positions quoted there were the company's own account of itself in that year, and they are the right basis for comparing Hartmarx with the other companies in this section — a component supplier against a retailer, or a catalogue house against a mall chain — as long as each figure is compared with figures from roughly the same period.

Because Hartmarx no longer operates independently, there is no current company website to link from the snapshot, and enquiries that would once have gone to its head office belong with the successor named in the status line — or, where the business closed entirely, the record here is the end of the trail. The dated summaries remain useful to researchers precisely because the company can no longer update its own account of itself.

Company summaries of this kind were the working tool of the apparel trade as much as of investors: a buyer, landlord or supplier checking Hartmarx could see its scale, its headquarters and its own description of its business in a few paragraphs. Those dated descriptions are kept with their dates, because a store count from 2013 or a strategy statement from 2019 is evidence about that year, not about today. The current position is the one given in the snapshot: closed as an independent company.