Ask a clothing brand owner what they do for a living and they’ll often respond with “yeah, I make clothes”. But often times, that’s not really the case, is it?
If someone were to tell you that they’re a woodworker, you’d assume that they build their own furniture. Speak to a painter and you’ll rightly conclude that they paint their own paintings. Yet I so often hear people in the fashion industry claim that they “made” an item of clothing when really, they just designed it. Don’t get me wrong, I’m just as guilty as the rest of them. Even when people ask me about my collaboration with Livia’s Denim, I’ll catch myself saying “oh these? yeah I made them with this guy Joey Livia…” before correcting myself. I din’t make those jeans, Joey did. I helped design them, model them, promote them, but Joey is the one who spent countless hours in his garage sweating over 100 year old machines to bring those jeans into the physical realm.
So, why is it that we so often conflate designing with making in the world of clothing when we’re much more aware of the difference in other fields? Jewelry, furniture, decor, ceramics, glassware, metalworking, leather working, all of these fields have their share of owner-makers and designers who outsource, yet the boundaries feel a bit more defined. Why is it that a solo operator is a) more rare in the world of fashion compared to other fields and b) that we’re more reticent to make that distinction?
To give credit where credit’s due, a lot of clothing brand owners have made clothes before; they started out by making their own clothes out of necessity. After all, the best way to learn and understand design and pattern making is getting your hands dirty, this is a well established best practice when becoming a designer. Up until recently, it’s been very cost prohibitive to go through the sampling process and manufacture a small product line off the jump. It’s been getting far more accessible thanks to overseas factories offering smaller minimums and lower development costs (hence the big rise in “instagram brands”). And yet, making your own clothes is only seen as a stepping stone in most people’s journey into the industry. Barring a few niche examples, such as a gown maker or bespoke tailor, most folks will make their own clothes until they can afford not to, and then they scale. And to be honest, I can’t blame them.
Making your own clothing is incredibly difficult, tedious, and time consuming, not to mention trying to sell it at a price that would fairly compensate you for your time, materials, and equipment. Achieving this level of production and expertise as an artisan takes time, but it’s not as impossible as a lot of us are led to believe. A lot of people want the stability, the financial gains, the reach, and the notoriety that scale can afford. There are also people who want to make clothes that are more accessible from a quantity and price point perspective. These are understandable and valid reasons for scaling a clothing business beyond an artisanal scale, I’m not some deluded idealist who thinks we should all be walking around in hand stitched hemp smocks and wool undergarments. The point I want to illustrate here is that you don’t need to scale a clothing business if you don’t want to.
This was a big takeaway from shooting Episode 4 of In House with Gideon’s Jeans. After teaching himself how to sew, Gideon slowly start accumulating knowledge, skills, machinery, and materials to start his namesake label. With a cult following in Montréal, even an in-person stockist, he’s steadfast in keeping his practice artisanal. Aside from eventually hiring someone to assist him with ad hoc tasks, Gideon has stated that:
“I would never make clothes if I couldn’t make them myself. That’s the whole point.” - Gideon
I’m sure if he wanted to, Gideon could’ve scaled his label to a decent size at this point - he has the skills, the eye, the taste level, the pattern making ability, and the creative wherewithal to build a decent sized upscale menswear label. What I admire is that he’s identified what he enjoys about his practice, and isn’t willing to sacrifice his material involvement no matter the cost.
There’s a very well defined path for anyone starting a clothing label - develop a few products, get them manufactured, build a DTC customer base, start selling to some wholesale accounts to reach bigger markets and legitimize your brand, so on and so forth. I’ve seen a lot of people take this path because, in a lot of ways, it seems like the only path. Because of the inherently small scale, we rarely interact with the work of artisan clothing producers, it’s so easy to forget that is a viable option as well. I want to create more visibility so that hopefully, more people looking to start making clothing pursue can be a more careful, intentional, and sustainable practice of clothing production.
Of equal importance is the imperative for us consumers to pay attention to these artisan clothing producers. While a vast majority of the population isn’t willing to spend the money required to purchase solo-operator clothing items, a lot of you motherfuckers are! Don’t get me wrong, these individually made clothing items are far from cheap, as they should be, but they’re often not that bad when you compare them to other higher-end niche clothing products. A lot of solo operators only sell their products DTC, so you’re often saving on what would otherwise be a wholesale markup. Compare the price of a pair of Gideon’s Jeans to some Lemaire, or Auralee jeans, and they’re undercutting. A knit sweater from Studio Kelsey, a woman knitting all of her pieces herself, manages to match a lot of the niche knitwear made by bigger brands who outsource their manufacturing.
With so much discourse on responsible consumption and slow fashion these days, I think it’s good practice to get as close to the means of production as possible. A lot of us (again, myself included, I’m no saint), rely on the aesthetics and visual identifiers of “slow fashion” to guide their purchasing decisions rather than actually doing their due diligence. Buying from someone who is their own means of production ensures that they’re benefiting from all of their own labour, and often means a much more legitimate product.
Stay tuned as I’ll be doing a little spotlight on more artisanal creators across a few different clothing niches beyond denim. Thanks for reading!