June 24-30, 2004

naked city

We Was Robbed

LIFE OF LEISURE: Known for, among many other things, carrying a list of his favorite dirty jokes in his wallet, Krass was more than a suit salesman -- he was a Philadelphia icon. Photo By: Zoe Strauss

Thoughts on the passing of Benny Krass.

by A.D. Amorosi

When Philadelphia clothier Benny Krass died during the fervor of Ronald Reagan's passing — the lionizing, the lambasting — the first thing I thought of was how alike they were.

Each was a colorful man who, whether loved or despised, lived a life too full to have it cruelly robbed by Alzheimer's. Each came of age during the Great Depression, learning how to make a buck huckstering his wares. Each marked his own spot. Each influenced his particular landscape, whether with awkward slogans, hammy television appearances or an overall schmaltzy demeanor. Each had weird hair. No matter. They were both giants — this despite the fact that Krass couldn't have been more than 5 foot 4 or weighed more than a stalk of celery.

Yet, Krass did something Reagan couldn't.

Photo By: Zoe Strauss

Krass defined oddball cool in ways that mixed performance art, theater, sartorialism, advertising, kitsch, disco, entrepreneurialism and clubdom.

As a media interpreter, fashion writer, club guy and someone whose life has been lived as performance art, I don't mean this lightly: Knowing Benny Krass changed your life.

Ask your parents about a once-ravaged South Street. In the late '40s, when Krass and his brothers arrived on South, it was nothing but flophouses and boarded-up properties. Like Stephen Starr aiding the renaissance of Old City and Washington Square, Krass turned South Street around with a bizarre blend of street-barkering and sharp, albeit plastic, suits that drew people to the area to buy and to stare long before the hippies, painters, The Orlons, fashion victims and punks would come. Krass made an entire block universally iconic. It wasn't Fred Segal's in Los Angeles. But South Street wasn't Melrose Avenue. Surely, Krass carried big names — the Pierre Cardins or Sy Devores of his time — along with the midrange Botany 500s. But ask any local haute-men's clothier currently selling Boss, Brioni or Boateng: Philly don't dig designer prices.

So he sold to celebs. The myth begins.

With a love of brightly colored polyester and strange tastes in lapels (his signature suit by the end of the '60s, the one he — literally — wore to his grave, had no lapels), Krass made that store, and himself, an equally colorful icon of Rat-Pack cool. He outfitted the likes of Joey and Sammy and with his snazzy suits, then, in turn, outfitting his own stores on South Street with their photos. Whether they were solo snaps (like the shot of Dino that stayed in their window past the store's closing in 2002) or those tattered black-and-white glossies of stars posing with Krass, that image of proximity is what lent Krass Bros. its sobriquet, "Store of the Stars."

What better way to pursue that image than to take huckstering up a few decimal levels: loud cars, louder living and the loudest commercials, those famous commercials he filmed in the back of his store, with their bare-bones backdrops and cheap props (like the coffin he popped out of more frighteningly than Screaming Jay Hawkins). And, in the end, that image was all about Krass himself: a skinny, bulging-eyed, arms-flailing tiny mite of a man, standing next to his bevy of tall, busty beauties, their high bouffants dwarfing him; Krass dressed in diapers and crying; Krass wearing cowboy hats and hooting; and, of course, those no-lapel suits. And those commercial texts, as hokey as the visuals: noisy and filled with bad puns and topped off with the tag line: "If you didn't shop at Krass Bros., you was robbed!"

They were brilliant — a cross between black-box theatricals any performance artist would envy and a blend of Ernie Kovaks and Soupy Sales.

Today, Krass might be considered crass — that brazen televised loudness, the fact that, up until the last few years, he wore his wealth ostentatiously on his tight French-cuffed sleeve during his nightly discotheque jaunts (and he went everywhere), with his yellow Rolls-Royces, his statuesque escorts, and his painted-on tan.

Sounds brash. But at this moment, if half of Philly's wannabe fashionistas, promoters, hangers-on and such had the balls to afford to drive a Rolls, live on Rittenhouse Square and buy ad time on television, they'd sell their souls in what would become a reality-show race toward Faustian indignity. Besides, unbashful brashness is a Philadelphia signature — perhaps that perception is aided in part by Krass' theatrical chutzpah. That's what made Benny Krass a prescient icon of cool — he knew the signs.

Flaunt it, baby.