• by Thom Forbes , May 6, 2011

There's a bigger story at Gap than that of a designer losing his job after four years, but when you get right down to it, it seems to be more about the gristle and sinew of the bottom line than anything juicy that the tabloids can gossip about. A Gap press release yesterday morning was straightforward, giving the blogosphere and mainstream media all day to cook up tales of fiery creative conflicts and stultified visions. But they didn't.

"Gap Inc. (NYSE: GPS) today announced that Patrick Robinson, executive vice president of Gap Global Design for Adult and Body, is leaving the company, effective immediately," the release matter-of-factly begins. "'After spending the last three months in New York with the Creative team, I've made the decision to make a change within our Gap Adult design team,' said Pam Wallack."

Wallack, who is head of the Gap Global Creative Center in New York, will manage the design teams on a day-to-day basis as the company searches for a successor.

One common sentiment of observers seems to be that Robinson is a talented guy who no doubt will land on his feet while the Gap has to get on with the business of being a midstream retailer that needs to get the masses excited about its products, as it did in the 1990s when it ruled the world of "business casual," as Elizabeth Holmes points out in the Wall Street Journal. That's not easy.

"They need to be so many things to so many people," Needham & Co. retail analyst Christine Chen tells Holmes, adding that Robinson brought a "needed coolness factor" to the retailer but failed to "deliver consistent takes on trends."

Robinson is a widely admired insider who has worked for Paco Rabanne, Perry Ellis, Giorgio Armani and Anne Klein, and was nominated for a Council of Fashion Designers of America award, the industry's equivalent of an Oscar, Stephanie Clifford reports in the New York Times. But despite some successes here and there, his overall approach flopped. "Tops never seemed to go with bottoms, and dresses and outerwear were puzzling, too. Gap's merchandise today is an unlikely mix of pants in khaki and olive green, and floaty, ruffly tops in peach and beige," she writes.

Clifford's piece references her own story from February, "Postholiday Clearance at Retailers Includes Some Senior Executives," in which she makes the observation that dismissed fashion executives are usually euphemistically said to be pursuing other options. But Robinson was clearly terminated. There's evidently a lot of that going around, including some earlier top-level makeovers at Gap, as the recession recedes.

"A whole bunch of people got away with murder because the recession was a convenient excuse," Columbia Business School professor and former Sears Canada CEO Mark A. Cohen tells Clifford, "The party's over. The promises made were either delivered or not."

"Patrick Robinson is out at Gap ... but why?" asks Fashion blogger Meagan Wilson. "With his own experience as a designer, working everywhere from Armani to Paco Rabanne to Anne Klein, and industry connections (he's married to Vogue's fashion market and accessories director, Virginia Smith), it seemed like it had all the makings of a successful re-brand when he was hired on in 2007."

Robinson had done a good of "injecting the company with doses of elevated aesthetics" Wilson writes, but concludes that "maybe the Gap is the one place customers are after nothing but the basics."

Maybe so. As one of the generally impassioned -- one way or the other -- comments on New York's "The Cut" blog put it: "I'm a big fan of their jeans, they are the only ones that fit and the fit stays standard from year to year. As far as everything else, it is usually hit or miss." Indeed, "1kristenw" was not the only one who liked the cuts of the Gap's jeans, if not their jib, but others echoed "elizabethdarlington," who wrote: "I think they need to close some of their millions of stores and do a HUGE overhaul starting with their crazy cheap manufacturing and awful fits and sizing -- who makes their patterns??"

Jezebel editor Jenna Sauers calls the news "almost totally unsurprising" as sales continued to drop but she is amazed that they made the announcement without having a successor to trot out. What's the rush?

"Sales have been mediocre and products have been inconsistent at Gap for years," Sauers writes. "With no new talent in easy reach, and what with that ridiculously mismanaged 'new logo' launch a few months back, it seems like Gap may continue to flounder aesthetically for the foreseeable future."

And financially, too, although its April same-store sales actually rose 8%, with all three of its brands (Gap, Banana Republic and Old Navy) posting positive numbers. But it forecasts first-quarter earnings below market estimates due to rising commodity costs and the earthquake in Japan, where most of its Asian stores are located, Reuters reports .