Susan Cripps-Campbell was a punk-rock teenager when she started working at Jean Machine in the 1980s. Her manager was 26.

“I thought … I’m not going to be here at that age, and then it’s like holy s---,” she says, drinking an iced coffee in the food court below the store that has felt like home for the better part of three decades.

She has been here exclusively since 1994, an endless cycle of skinny and wide fit, low- and high-rise, near the escalator bank that whisks shoppers toward Nordstrom, Sears or Eaton’s, depending on the decade. She has seen retailers come and go, and now after four decades of being Ontario’s most enduring denim sommelier, it is Jean Machine’s turn to exit the Eaton Centre.

On a recent weekday, the metal hangers click softly as office workers on lunch browse the 60-per-cent off jeans. Once bursting with Levi’s, Silvers and Mavi’s, the place is hollowed out from the glory days.

“That is such a good price, you’re going to freak out when you try it on,” Cripps-Campbell says, upbeat and smiling, to the woman holding a summer dress. It rings up at $2.80. The woman is shocked.

The teenagers of the 1980s and 1990s flocked to this store, with its graffiti-covered walls, phone booths with free local calls, and otherworldly blue mannequins. The teens grew up, and while many were still loyal, one analyst notes that the next generations didn’t have the same connection. Modern teens still roam the Eaton Centre but they also shop a virtual mall where celebrity influencers peddle jeans with coupon codes on Instagram.

Back in the day of flared Silver jeans and wide-legged JNCOs, Jean Machine was understated and outrageous at the same time, and staff helped you navigate the denim maze. They were the influencers.

In Paris there was once an actual jean machine. A trio of Corsican entrepreneurs installed the vending machine at a metro station in 1986, offering Levi’s like peanuts. They sold 78 pairs in one month, and the beauty of the machine was the lack of overhead, one of the inventors said. “Jeans Libre Service,” the sign said. With no staff or rent to pay, the jeans were $10 cheaper than stores.

Ontario’s Jean Machine took the opposite approach: staff, and lots of them.

“It’s like looking for a needle in the haystack if you’re on your own,” says one of the chain’s founders, Roy Perlman. “But we were always overstaffed … it paid to give the service, because that’s what made us.”

When it came to slinging denim in North America, the United States was dominated by department stores, but Canada always had these “wonderful entrepreneurial, independent chains of varying sizes,” like Pantorama, Jean Machine and Below the Belt, says Michael Silver, the CEO of Winnipeg-based Silver Jeans.

Roy Perlman and his wife, Anne, moved to Toronto from South Africa in 1976. Roy’s older brother, Malcolm, was already in Toronto, working as vice-president, finance, for Capitol Records Canada. Roy was 29 when he arrived in Toronto, a chartered accountant with a background in real estate. His older brother had spotted an opportunity when a small chain of denim stores called Jean Machine went out of business before Roy’s arrival.

In 1976, the Perlmans took over the lease of one Jean Machine location at the Cedarbrae Mall in Scarborough, on the east side of the shopping centre, near an Orange Julius and Mr. Music. Thrifty’s was the big name in denim. Roy drove in early every morning, and his wife took the bus from their North York apartment a few hours later, and together they worked the floor. Most suppliers said they wouldn’t last six months.

“When you come as an immigrant, and it’s suggested to you that you’re not going to make it,” he says from Miami Beach, where he and his wife are spending the winter, “it makes you work even harder.”

He drove to the Spadina Ave. wholesalers whenever he had cash flow. Inventory was his game, and he kept it tight.

The Lee painter pant, a wide-legged number with a nifty loop to hang a theoretical hammer, was the first break. “You dropped about three sizes when you wore it,” he says. He ordered them in smaller sizes than normal, while other retailers “were buying the wrong breakdown because they sat in offices looking at figures.”

The word began to spread. If you wanted the right size, you had to come to the Cedarbrae Mall.

In the 1860s, any fellow who rested his hands in his pantaloon pockets played a dangerous game. Over time, the strain on the fabric caused the seams to tear, which meant another trip to the tailor. In the early 1870s, a tailor named Jacob Davis in Reno, Nev., had been asked to build a sturdier pant by a labourer’s wife. He came up with the idea of using metal rivets at the edge of the seams, to prevent tearing.

He didn’t have the money to file the patent, so he teamed up with a businessman named Levi Strauss, and in 1873, their patent for “fastening pocket-openings” was approved, and the modern jean was born. For the next century denim was a rugged and practical uniform, designed primarily for the working man.

In the 1970s jeans started to become fashionable, with branded offerings from the likes of Gloria Vanderbilt. In 1977 a Winnipeg company came out with Chic jeans, designed especially for women, and sold millions of dollars’ worth. Subcultures like punk began to influence the fashion world.

“Everywhere you look — at parties, sports events, shopping centres, even at work — Canadians are wearing jeans,” the Toronto Star noted in 1981. “The war-baby generation grew up with them, fell in love with them and turned them into part of a national lifestyle.”

Manufacturers and retailers rushed into the market, and oversaturation created turmoil in the industry in the early 1980s. The bankruptcy of the Jean Junction chain in 1982 was a game changer for Jean Machine. The Perlmans took over four of the company’s prime leases, including Eaton Centre and Square One. By the end of the decade, Jean Machine had expanded outside the GTA, eventually landing in malls in London, Peterborough and Sarnia, giving teenagers in smaller cities and rural centres a chance to feel just as cool as Toronto teens.

Roy Perlman became synonymous with the stores. The brothers had purchased a Sunrise Records store on Yonge St. in 1978. Malcolm had left the Capitol label and was in charge of the administrative side of both chains (they sold the final five Sunrise stores around five years ago), while Roy was in charge of inventory control and operations at Jean Machine, among other things.

Roy was good at hiring staff who understood the consumers in their “micro-regional areas,” Michael Silver says. “He listened to them all the time, and he listened to what the consumers said they wanted.”

Susan Cripps-Campbell knew the cuts of all of the different brands, and when a customer walked into the store, she knew what would look good. Perlman said if a pair of jeans didn’t suit a person, staff would say so, even if it meant losing a sale.

“Makes you look like an animal, a pair of jeans?” Perlman says by way of illustration. “We can’t let you go out. That’s not Jean Machine.”

Perlman spent his weeks at the North York warehouse, and visited the stores on Saturday. Iggy Eterno, now a district manager, remembers those visits, Perlman sorting through a bag of jeans, asking: “What do you think of this? Try it on. What’s the feeling?” On Sunday he ran the numbers, and Monday he called the suppliers. Trends changed quickly and he didn’t want to be caught with a dud.

“That was what retail was to me: find the right garment at the right price at the right place.”

Sometimes, Perlman brought his children with him. Eterno remembers when a 6-year-old Darren Perlman pointed to a Tommy Hilfiger jacket, navy blue with yellow lining, and asked Eterno if he could have it.

“Roy said, ‘Never!’ Iggy will never give you that coat, Iggy is going to sell that coat!” Eterno says.

“I froze that winter,” jokes Darren, now the director of operations for the chain.

The stores were tightly packed, with orange PVC loveseats to sit on (“What a feel,” Roy says in an email), custom graffiti by a local artist, and old mannequins spray-painted blue. That was an idea from a manager in the late 1990s, and so were the payphones with free local calling. Kids were lined up to call their parents at the mall, so why not bring them in and let them call home for free?

Longtime employee Eterno was in charge of recruiting. He looked for people that “sparked,” the kind of teenagers who recorded the family’s voicemail message. “We wanted personality. We had a lot of challenging employees,” he says, “but God were they fun.”

There were pranks, like the time staff convinced a co-worker that Mariah Carey was going to make an appearance, that Roy had already sent the limo to pick the singer up. It wasn’t hard to believe.

Every Christmas, the company sent limousines to transport employees from Windsor and Sudbury for the Christmas party at the Opera House in Toronto. Every summer there was a barbecue at the warehouse. The names behind the jeans like Sal Parasuco and Michael Silver came to launch their fall lines.

The store at the Eaton Centre attracted an interesting mix of celebrities. Staff said Alice Cooper dropped in for black Mavi’s, and there were sightings of Ice-T, Phylicia Rashad, Missy Elliott, Carole Pope and Drake over the years. (His friend worked at the store.) Reached in Los Angeles, Pope said she remembered the name, but not the store. “I think maybe I bought jeans there once but I don’t even know,” she says.

The New Kids on the Block had a connection to the Machine — or at least their mothers did. The Perlmans knew the people who did the licensing for the group and arranged for the band members’ moms to sign autographs at Giggles Jr., which was essentially Jean Machine for kids. Yorkdale was flooded with teenagers, but the store was too packed to make sales.

“It took me back to thinking about the Beatles,” Perlman says, remembering the hysteria. “If somebody saw the old sock they wore and they’d fight to get hold of the smelly sock.”

They had Ticketmaster outlets in stores in the 1990s, and when newspapers earnestly explained the lingo of cellphones and pagers, Jean Machine offered discounts to people who had purchased pagers at Bell Mobility. They launched their website in 1998, telling customers “whatz hot” and “whatz not.”

Eterno used to tell himself that he wouldn’t be at Jean Machine forever. He had offers, but he didn’t leave. This was a family and they were all growing old together. At the helm, Perlman was “completely fearless,” Eterno says. “Everything he was, he transcended into the business.”

“The jeaners were these independent free thinkers,” Silver says. “That might have come from the Woodstock era ultimately.”

Before the launch of Silver Jeans in 1991, Winnipeg-based Western Glove Works made private-label denim — everything from Mark’s Work Wearhouse to Marc Jacobs. That’s how Michael Silver first came to know Perlman.

In 1995, Silver Jeans had a blockbuster pair of flared jeans called the Frisco. It was one of the first jeans to be offered with an inseam measurement from the crotch to the bottom of the leg, Silver says, so that a woman could have the flare hit just below the knee, no matter her height.

Perlman and Silver both agree on the jean’s relevance, but the old friends disagree on the genesis.

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Perlman says he sold second-hand Levi’s at his Yorkdale location in the 1990s, and noticed that a flared style that looked worn out in the knees was a “cool look” among teenagers.

“I couldn’t get more through my middle people, they were all being shipped to Japan,” he says. “I went to Silver Jeans in January 1995, and I took a jean to them … I asked them if they could create them.”

Silver says “I’ll bet at a cocktail party he’s claimed responsibility for helping us develop it,” but he says it was really himself and designer Allan Kemp. He does point out that Perlman was one of the most important denim retailers in North America, and one of the “key guys” who influenced what the company ultimately offered in variations of colour and wash.

“I’m certain Roy influenced us in subsequent years on how Frisco grew. He certainly sold a lot of them.”

Perlman says that his friends in the denim industry are “big talkers” and that’s what he expects, but the “truth has to prevail.”

“They will say they came up with it,” he says. “They forget where it came from.”

Jean Machine had a few stores in the U.S. (a venture that began in 1995 and ended in 2008) when the Frisco launched. The jeans sold out that first day at the Pentagon City mall in Washington, D.C. Across Ontario, Jean Machine couldn’t keep them in stock. Silver remembers the late-night phone calls from Perlman, “screaming for more.”

“It was good for us and brilliant for them,” Perlman says.

On a quiet morning at the store, Darren Perlman brings a handful of his father’s old photos and places them on the front cash. The team flips through and talk about the light-wash Santana jeans and the triple-X fly of Manager jeans like they’re long-lost friends.

Time has a way of making you forget the old rises, Iggy Eterno says. He recently found his favourite pair of Pepe Jeans from 1997 and tried them on. They went “well above the navel,” he says, laughing. “Ridiculous.”

When the Frisco jean hit stores, it was considered low-rise, but there was about 12 inches of fabric between the centre crotch and the waistband (which is considered high-rise today). “It went down to six inches when everything was super-low-rise,” Silver says.

Jean Machine had its own private-label brands and “Big 7” was its jean for the Britney Spears era: a low-rise, tight-fitting pant that Perlman developed in Brazil. Eterno remembers the fly was 2.5 inches.

As rises went lower, stores like Old Navy and American Eagle entered Ontario malls, and competition began to change, in the mall and online. Around 2014, yoga pants and athleisure were clearly taking a bite out of the denim market, says Farla Efros, the president of the consulting firm HRC Retail Advisory.

But it wasn’t a death sentence. As the world became more casual, a nice pair of dark denim jeans began to replace black pants at the office, she says. Fast-fashion retailers had cheap and easy options, and there was premium denim at places like Nordstrom. The market was crowded and Jean Machine was in the middle.

They had online sales in 2011, but it was a small portion of the business, Darren Perlman says. While other stores like American Eagle were more “shoppable” with clear direction about fit and size, in a tightly packed Jean Machine, “you really did need a savvy salesperson to help you through that because it was almost too much,” Efros says.

Bissy Waariyo, 28, doesn't agree. She discovered Jean Machine as a teenager and was a loyal customer because she could always rely on jeans that fit properly. She didn’t find the store hard to navigate because she knew her measurements and what she wanted. (She has no idea where she’ll buy her jeans now. “That's partly why I’m so sad about it.”)

Anika Kozlowski, an assistant professor at Ryerson’s School of Fashion, says when she moved to Toronto in 2003, she felt like the chain had “already perhaps lost its lustre.”

Jeans are a key part of the wardrobe that everybody wants but “dreads” buying because there are too many choices, she says. Jean Machine had solved the problem, but the brands she saw seemed a little dated. “It’s just my personal opinion … to me it just looked like the 1990s.”

In 2019, fashion is more gender-neutral, vintage-inspired and curated. For jeans, most people go the “quick and dirty route” and get something from Zara and H&M, or they go high-end. She mentions the Re/Done label in the U.S., where they take old jeans apart and remake them with modern cuts, retailing their “heritage inspired” looks for $300 to $500 a pair online.

Jean Machine never had anything that pricey. They carried the “mid-range of good product,” guided by what customers wanted, Perlman says. (Yoga Jeans were added around 2010, and every year Perlman made a trip to the San Pedro market in Los Angeles, where he found the maxi skirts and dresses that were popular.) They had higher-priced denim, but it wasn’t a big seller. Volume was key, and the average sale was around $90.

Perlman prided himself on being a rational accountant but “a lot of emotion” crept in during the final years. There were locations he probably should have closed sooner, and they should have been “heavier” into athleisure, he says.

Legal records note that the windup of Sunrise Records in 2015 caused “significant losses” to the Perlman family companies, and “capital injections” were needed to keep Jean Machine going. The summer of 2016 had prolonged stretches of “very hot weather,” the records noted, which led to a “precipitous and unprecedented drop in sales.”

“It was hard as hell,” Perlman says.

The children of the original customers didn’t have the same relationship to the store, Efros says. The world had changed, and “they were just unfortunately too late for the game,” she says. “There were so many different pieces that were going on at the same time. It was almost next to impossible.”

In early 2017, Jean Machine filed for bankruptcy protection, and its 30 stores were purchased by Comark Services Inc. (owned by Stern Partners).

Comark, a company that also owns Bootlegger, Ricki’s and Cleo, eventually closed six locations and brightened up the remaining 24 shops. They felt denim was ready for a comeback.

“Retailers are by definition optimists,” says Comark’s CEO Gerry Bachynski, noting that there were probably some “more competitive aspects” that offset the gains in the denim market.

There had been rent relief for some of the locations, but that was due to expire, and 10 leases were up for renewal in 2019. The forecast was not promising, he says, and Comark decided in the summer of 2018 to shutter the chain. Staff will be given severance based on years of service.

Late last summer, when staff found out the stores would be closing, Eterno called Perlman: “I said this is a testament to you and what you created and how good you really were,” he says.

In the second week of January, Eterno drove to Sudbury to close his first store. When he arrived at the mall with the store manager, the lowercase sans-serif sign was already down. “She just started wailing,” he says.

The Eaton Centre — Store 24 — closes Jan. 31. The store is half-empty, and the jeans are arranged by size, so customers can find their final bargain with ease. But staff are still asking if they can just make one suggestion.

“They’re called the Marilyn,” Shida Dastoom says, offering a darker-wash jean to a woman. “Aren’t they so sexy?”

The customer agrees, and as she stands at the cash register purchasing the Marilyn, she says she is sorry the store is closing. “You'll be fine,” she tells Dastoom, and then the two strangers hug.

On the phone from South Florida, Roy Perlman says he’d do it all again, if life recycled like fashion trends. He still wears jeans every day, except on the beach, where he finds twill shorts a better fit.

“When you see me walking along the beach you’d say, ‘Who is that young guy walking along there?’ ” he says. “That’s me, because the marketplace kept me young and the people I worked with have always kept me young.”

When asked if she’ll keep a souvenir, Susan Cripps-Campbell points to a metal rack beside the cash. It is one of the only things that’s been here longer than she has. She doesn’t want it, and technically it belongs to Comark, but it’s a point of history, that rack.

“It will totally hit for me when we have to switch the light off,” she says. “Like blowing out a candle.”

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