Photo Wilkes Bashford putting together an outfit in 2009. Credit Darcy Padilla for The New York Times
Wilkes Bashford, a clothier whose eponymous emporium is famous for having dressed affluent, elegance-conscious San Franciscans for the last half-century, died on Saturday at his home in San Francisco. He was 82.
The cause was prostate cancer, said his brother and only immediate survivor, Bruce.
Mr. Bashford established his store as a high-end men's shop near Union Square in 1966, a counterintuitive business move perhaps with hippiedom on the rise, though it rapidly paid off. He added women's wear in 1978 and moved the store to its current location, in a seven-story townhouse nearby at 375 Sutter Street, in 1984.
Known for a keen antenna regarding emergent fashions for the well-heeled, Mr. Bashford described the store's sartorial aesthetic as "bold conservative"; it was often given credit for being among the first retailers to feature Italian designer labels like Versace, Armani and Zegna.
If critics sniffed at the store as unhip — "Much of the men's wear is the stuff of a bygone Fitzgeraldian era," Cintra Wilson wrote in The New York Times in 2009 — its defense was that good taste and the highest standards have always been and always will be cool.
Hollywood celebrities have been spotted there with some regularity, and the store's most famous regular customer has been the dapper former mayor of San Francisco Willie Brown, who had known Mr. Bashford since walking into the shop, reportedly on the day it opened, and buying a Brioni blazer.
"This town was devoid of any attention to quality of fabric or style until Wilkes came along," Mr. Brown said last fall to The San Francisco Chronicle, for which he writes an opinion column. "The first time I walked into the store, I was frankly blown away." (On the eve of Mr. Brown's first inauguration, in 1996, Mr. Bashford told The Chronicle that the incoming mayor "was in Nehru suits before he met us, but he's been fine since.")
Mr. Bashford himself was a fixture in San Francisco. A city booster, he was the board president of the War Memorial and Performing Arts Center, home of the San Francisco Ballet, the San Francisco Opera and the San Francisco Symphony.
For decades he was part of a high-profile Friday lunch a t Le Central, where he discussed politics, restaurants and real estate and exchanged gossip with the likes of Mr. Brown, the architect Sandy Walker and the columnist Herb Caen (who died in 1997).
The original Bashford store was in a building owned by the city. Through the 1970s, as the site of glittery fashion shows, it was a focus of the San Francisco fashion world. But it also became the center of a scandal in the mid-1980s, when Mr. Bashford and two partners were accused of bilking the city in a rent-evasion scheme.
Mr. Bashford pleaded no contest to felony theft charges and was sentenced to five years of probation and 1,200 hours of community service. He also had to pay $750,000 in back rent.
Mr. Bashford was born on May 17, 1933, to Byaly Bashford, a draughtsman for General Electric and later an International Harvester farm machinery dealer, and the former Dorothy Wilkes. His place of birth is uncertain. The Chronicle reported that he was born in Manhattan, but Bruce Bashford said in an interview that his parents were living in Yonkers at the time and that he did not think his brother was born in New York City, though he was not sure.
The family eventually moved to Hillsdale, N.Y., just west of Great Barrington, Mass., and Wilkes graduated from high school there. He attended the University of Cincinnati and started in the retail business by working at Shillito's department store in Cincinnati while he was in school. Mr. Bashford moved to San Francisco in 1959 and got a job at the White House department store there, where he later became the men's wear buyer.
He opened his own store with timing that might be termed quixotic; at the time, long hair and frayed jeans were the emerging fashion tics, and the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood, the counterculture hotbed not far away, was nearing its freaky peak. But Mr. Bashford saw an opportunity with the kind of customer who wanted to dress well in a contemporary mode — Carnaby Street meets Madison Avenue.
"In 1966, career men wore single-breasted suits, flat-front pants and skinny ties," Mr. Bashford recalled in a 2006 interview with The Chronicle. "We sold pleated pants, double-breasted suits and wide ties."
Business waxed and waned over the decades. Mr. Bashford opened — and closed — a handful of satellite stores in and near the Bay Area, and a downturn after the 2008 recession resulted in his filing for bankruptcy protection.
In 2009, the San Francisco store and its affiliate in Palo Alto were purchased by Mitchell Stores, an upscale retailer based in C onnecticut. The company renovated the Sutter Street location and allowed Mr. Bashford to continue working there, which he did until nearly the end of his life.
Correction: January 22, 2016
An obituary on Thursday about the clothier Wilkes Bashford misspelled the given name of his father. He was Byaly Bashford, not Bialy.
