The two words most often heard from the mouth of Billy Reid are "Hey, buddy." As the clothing entrepreneur strolls around Florence, Alabama, his adopted hometown, this refrain continues when he sidles up to the owner of a hunting-provisions store, a venerable music producer at FAME Studios, or a Crimson Tide football hero who lives a few doors down from his house. Hell, he could even been talking to his friendly mutt, who happens to be named Buddy.
That buddy-buddy vibe is what Reid and his line of clothes give off. The father of three started his first label in New York City 10 years ago with his model-gorgeous wife, Jeanne. Now he makes ready-for-anything linen blazers and twill pants and canvas coats that convey a Southern gentlemanliness even when they're meant for rougher weekend pursuits. Reid's modern staples also have some historic roots, situated as they are in a Confederate colonel's stately house where Andrew Jackson often slept and the ghosts of wounded soldiers have been known to linger. In his flagship Billy Reid store (there are others in Charlotte, Dallas, and Houston — and soon enough, New York), customers enter into a grand foyer with painted family portraits and, weather permitting, a crackling fire in the room next door.
Colonel Pickett's former abode is similar to the shop Reid's mother owns in Amite, Louisiana, where he spent his boyhood assembling boxes during busy phases — just as his two preteen daughters and preschooler son do now. Reid's customers can get a head-to-toe outfitting: shoes, belts, wallets to go along with the elegant clothing staples his tailors sew in Italy. (Prices range from $135 for a simple oxford shirt to $1,000 for a suit.) "At the end of the day, guys have to be comfortable," says the Jeep-driving dad who sings along to Waylon Jennings and caps off a day in the duck blind with a rib eye and a Beck's draft at his country club.
A few years back, a twist of fate sent Reid out of Manhattan and back in this southerly direction. He had just won the Council of Fashion Designers of America Perry Ellis Award and secured capital to expand to women's clothes and stage his first major runway show. The clamor of all that acclaim is echoing in his head when he describes the event. It's as if he can still see the models passing by: gray-and-white seersucker on the men, and all the women stately but sexy, carefully honoring his mandate: "No Texas hair."
The morning after the show, two planes flew into the World Trade Center. Reid was unharmed physically but not psychically or financially. Orders disappeared. Rattled, he returned to the house in Florence he had just bought — and gutted — near where his wife grew up, and slowly regrouped. The business, he eventually decided, should be scaled down, with a regional focus, and an abbreviated name — up to then, he had been known professionally as William Reid.
