photo by Nina Leen, 1954

"Although Brooks Brothers is generally identified with impeccably conservative male plumage, the staid New York store has recently become a shopping haunt for sophisticated women. This trend was started when the store opened a counter, placed discreetly at the rear of the main floor, where tweedy young women from college or the suburbs could buy the Brooks Brothers man's shirt many of them had begun wearing. Given this opening, more and more women have encroached upon the whole store, greedily discovering other items of male apparel that they can take over for themselves." —LIFE magazine, 1954