The California-based accessible luxury brand Citizens of Humanity has become a mainstay in upscale women’s clothes. But the company saw a gap in the broader menswear market, and it’s gearing up to fill it.
According to Amy Williams, CEO of Citizens of Humanity Group, which oversees Citizens of Humanity and its younger-skewing sister brand Agolde, men’s fashion is highly bifurcated. On the one side, you have high-end luxury brands with price points climbing into the four figures. On the other side are fast-fashion brands with low quality and low prices. In 2024, 40% of U.S. customers shopped at a fast-fashion brand, while higher-end brands have continued to raise their prices to chase more affluent customers.
Citizens of Humanity’s men’s business at both brands aims for something in the middle, with pants priced at $200-$300, competing in the same space as brands like Percival and Maison Kitsune. Citizens of Humanity’s newly expanded menswear product catalog focuses on elevated, quiet luxury styles using materials like linen and cashmere, while Agolde offers bolder, more fashion-forward designs in Gen-Z-friendly cuts like ultra-baggy jeans.
The group has different strategies in place for building up the men’s audience for both brands. At Citizens of Humanity, where the men’s business has existed for over a decade but makes up just 5% of total sales, it’s about deepening the relationship with existing shoppers.
“In Selfridges’s men’s department, we’re already one of the top-performing brands,” Williams said, noting that that’s with a relatively small selection of products. “The Citizens male customer already exists, so it’s about wanting the people already shopping us to buy more.”
Williams said encouragement from retail partners like Bloomingdale’s and Holt Renfrew, who communicated that the men’s product was in high demand, convinced the team that an expanded Citizens of Humanity men’s push was possible. That encouragement, combined with the overall growth of the menswear market, was behind the timing of the investment. Wholesale will be the main sales channel for Citizens of Humanity’s expanded menswear assortment.
The men’s marketing push for Citizens focuses on what the team calls “Fabric Stories,” which are campaigns featuring real men discussing the quality and material of Citizens goods. Artist and skateboarder Steve Olson, for example, has been featured in a campaign targeting existing fans of the brand and posted to Citizens of Humanity’s social accounts, where it has nearly 300,000 followers.
“The Citizens men’s marketing message is very much around quality, make, product and craftsmanship,” Williams said.
Agolde, on the other hand, has a much less established place in menswear. Its men’s business launched less than two years ago, and so Williams and her team are relying more on the support of retail partners to grow it. Agolde launched an exclusive new indigo color for its men’s jeans with Mr Porter in May, which was later released in other retailers and Agolde’s direct channels. Agolde’s men’s marketing has focused more on staying “on the pulse of fashion, culture, art and music,” Williams said. For example, the brand held an IRL event at its newly opened Paris showroom during Paris Men’s Fashion Week to debut its latest men’s collection.
Citizens and Agolde aren’t the only brands looking to capitalize on the growth of the menswear market. Saks Global announced last month that it saw “untapped potential” in young, luxury-inclined men and was investing heavily to target that cohort at both Saks Fifth Avenue and Neiman Marcus. The global menswear market is expected to reach over $900 billion by 2030. Citizens of Humanity is privately held and doesn’t disclose revenue, but its sales were projected to be around $100 million when Citizens of Humanity Group bought full control of the brand back from a private equity firm in 2017. Williams has said business has roughly doubled since then.
On the product side, Williams said Citizens of Humanity is fortunate enough to own its own factories in Los Angeles and Turkey, which has made the process of expanding into a new category far easier and tariffs a minimal concern. Turkey, for the moment, is set to have the lowest level of tariffs set by the U.S. government. However, the machines had to be re-engineered to accommodate wider and larger sizes, with thicker waistbands and higher stitch counts.
“We could reconfigure our own machines to support new techniques like making larger pockets or adding J stitching on the fly of pants,” Williams said. “We have no shortage of ideas, but they’re not always executable. Having our own facility means we can make smaller runs of products without having to worry about mandatory minimums; it lets us be much more nimble.”
The design teams for both brands included people with prior experience designing menswear, and men from the company’s marketing department provided input on early concepts of the new men’s products — they weighed in on details like fit and the number of pockets featured.
