We need more spicy clothes!
Eckhaus Latta on freaking these fabrics, staying true to beautiful idiosyncratic visions, Rei Kawakubo grails, thriving as a small label in a biz full of big snakes & more
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— Jonah & Erin
Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta — we love when cool friends make cool things together! They formed their namesake line in 2012 and swiftly established it as the epitome of “art-schooled-out-yet-rockable downtown sauce.” A decade-plus later, Eckhaus Latta continues to do sh*t no one else is doing… snub-toeing boots with audacious yet swaggy severity… shibori-dyeing and silver-foiling (!) sick USA-made denim… treating knitwear to beautiful, idiosyncratic, Auntwave-via-RISD deconstructions… and more materials wizardry.
Also? As SpyFriend Kim Gordon knew when she shouted them out on “BYE BYE,” they are blessed with very tight last names.
Mike and Zoe met as students at RISD. Before starting their line, Zoe created knits for Opening Ceremony and Mike designed accessories for Marc Jacobs. Together they’ve opened NYC and L.A. stores, launched a sunglasses collection and a kids’ line, and staged runway shows where people like Susan Cianciolo, Natasha Stagg, and Dev Hynes model and perform.
None of which would matter, of course, if the clothes weren’t so sick. If you have doubts as to whether you could pull off an Eckhaus Latta piece: Try one on and see if it doesn’t enswaggen you, boost yr d*mn confidence, and reconfigure what you thought was your comfort zone in one fell swoop.
Jonah and I (Erin) have been fans of Eckhaus Latta for years. I actually wore one of their sweaters for our New York Times profile shoot. So I was stoked to tap in with Mike and Zoe the other day to talk about their obsession with Michael Kors, why “gender neutral” is complicated, and how they’ve managed to stay true to their vision — and remain successful — as a small line in an industry full of 🐍giant snakes🐍!!
Blackbird Spyplane: The first thing about your clothes that always catches our eyes is the materials. You have these incredible mixed-material knits, denim in all these crazy washes, and at the FW24 show a few weeks back there was a quilted suit (below top right) that looked oily… almost lacquered. Do you design from the materials out?
Zoe Latta: “Yeah, the majority of the time the design is material-led. Even if we haven’t found the material — sometimes we’ll only have a texture first, or the idea of a texture, and then the silhouette comes.”
Blackbird Spyplane: That vertical-quilted set reminded me of old Eastern European military jacket liners, but also this quilted suit Agnes Martin used to wear at her studio…
Mike Eckhaus: “Yeah, for those we looked at old military liners and reassessed them, changing proportions and volumes. We found a swatch of quilted material that was really different, with the vertical quilting and these nylon qualities to it that we were excited about. It’s the convergence of those two elements.”
Blackbird Spyplane: At your size, are you able to develop materials yourselves, or is it about hunting and sourcing?
Mike Eckhaus: “Oh yeah, we develop all of our knitwear, all of our washes. There’s some times we’ll do woven jacquards that we develop. We don’t develop our woven textiles, for the most part.”
Zoe Latta: “But we still modify a lot of them in-house, whether it’s garment-dyeing or something else.”
Blackbird Spyplane: We just wrote about how the price of garments has been SOMERSAULTING lately. Why are clothes so expensive right now?
Mike Eckhaus: “The costs of everything have gone up. Materials, shipping — you have to factor these margins in. Then there’s this other cost of clothing in the luxury space, where now a lot of stores make you wait in line to get in, and have a salesperson walk around with you. It’s about airs of exclusivity and creating barriers to access. As someone who enjoys shopping — not necessarily purchasing, sometimes just looking — it’s gotten very frustrating. I think it’s all about trying to create further ideas of luxury.”
Zoe Latta: “They’re scarcity tactics. But across the board, as Mike said, inflation has affected every molecule of every product. And if it hasn’t, then some kind of fishy, sad kind of cost-cutting is happening — whether that’s underpaying for labor or bad materials or undercutting somewhere else.”
Blackbird Spyplane: It seems harder than ever to be an independent fashion line — especially one that rides the kind of line between artistic and commercial impulses that Eckhaus Latta does. You’ve been around for 12 years now. How do you survive? Is there a more-commercial aspect of the business that helps sustain the more-artistic side?
Mike Eckhaus: “Our denim and jersey programs are our bread and butter, and knitwear builds on that. Those pieces allow us to take, I don’t know if ‘risks’ is the right word, but to move in a more intuitive way. But yeah, it’s hard to be a small fashion brand. We need to work within reality, and not be too fantastical.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You’ve done some big collabs, like with UGG, and smaller ones, like designing costumes for a ballet and also for goats in a short film called Goats of Paradise. What drives those side projects?
Zoe Latta: “Those are usually like an artist friend we adore. It’s not about revenue for us. Things like the UGGs are, and we’re cooking up some right now that we’re really excited about.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You started using deadstock materials 10+ years ago, and started doing “gender-neutral” clothing when you launched. What are you doing right now that people will catch onto 10 years from now?
Mike Eckhaus: “I have no idea, because everything you mentioned, we were doing out of necessity. ‘Gender neutral’ has become a sensitive thing for us, though. There are things we make that definitely fit that description, but —”
Zoe Latta: “We’re definitely not here to say that all of our clothes are fit off of a gender-neutral form. I think that’s an impossible act — or, like, from a patterning perspective, it would just mean oversized baby clothes. For us it’s more about cross-dressing fluidity, experimentation regardless of gender.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Real quick — if you Google “Eckhaus Latta” there’s this weird, tiny icon for your website. I smashed the enhance and realized it’s a picture of Michael Kors. You made a dress with Kors’s face on it (below bottom right) back in 2013 or so. What’s the deal with Eckhaus Latta & Kors??
Zoe Latta: “You went deep. No reporter has ever asked us about our deep Michael Kors affinity.”
Blackbird Spyplane: It cracked me up, and it gets to the heart of what I love your line: There’s a sense of humor, a playful art-kid thing.
Zoe Latta: “We had these obsessions with Michael Kors and Steve Jobs early on. We were starting our business, and it felt very ironic for us to use Kors as our ‘star.’ We also thermal-printed one of his logos backwards, then printed our logo over it. He’s the opposite side of the coin from us but, at the same time, we’re in the same town. And you’ll have someone like Paloma Elsesser who’s a Michael Kors girl and an Eckhaus Latta girl.”
Mike Eckhaus: “It’s cheeky, but there’s no ill will. Using Eckhaus Latta and Michael Kors in the same sentence feels silly, because yes, both of us produce clothing, but what goes into those structures is so different. And yet we’re still in the same industry.”
Blackbird Spyplane: All right, finally, we asked you to share unique cherished possessions. Speaking of Steve Jobs, let’s start with this sweatshirt (above top left) from your third season. You made this not long after Jobs died and produced maybe 35 of them, using secondhand sweatshirts covered in cheap iron-on portraits of Jobs that crack and fade with wear. Jonah mentioned that this reminds him of Felix Gonzales-Torres’s candy-pile sculpture — a piece about mourning that itself deteriorates over time.
Zoe Latta: “A friend just dropped this off at my studio. I wore mine to sh*t. The iron-on effect, 14 years later, looks really rad in terms of how it’s deteriorating, and how you can’t even see Steve anymore. Seeing this piece again made me feel really nostalgic — I miss making things in this weird naive way.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You also sent a sweater by Marc Jacobs for Charivari (above bottom left) that I believe is from the same year as one in the Met’s permanent collection. Is it from his 1984 student work??
Zoe Latta: “It’s not mine, I should say. It was lent to me, and it won’t be received back. Yeah, this is the same as the one at the Met, but I don’t know if he was still a student then or if he was just working for Charivari. Charivari was this boutique on the Upper West Side — they had a network of boutiques in the ‘80s and ‘90s that were really fun, and they brought Yohji and Comme to the U.S. This is a hand-knit sweater Marc made when he was a retail employee there, and he convinced the owner, Barbara, to do a line with him.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Incredible. On the Met page for this sweater they mention Rei Kawakubo and her influence on Jacobs. You also sent over a late ‘70s Kawakubo-branded sweater you told me was “purchased from Tina Turner’s estate by an ex in Zurich??” Insane provenance.
Zoe Latta: “Supposedly, right when they started Comme des Garçons, they couldn’t sell it in Canada because there was another copyright for that name. So they made a new brand called Rei Kawakubo and that’s what this is — just so they could distribute in Canada.”
Blackbird Spyplane: Mike, you worked for Marc Jacobs. I’m guessing he and Rei are two designers you look up to. Who else?
Mike Eckhaus: “Helmut Lang is really important to me, and Nicholas Ghesquière in his early tenure at Balenciaga. And Margiela.”
Blackbird Spyplane: You sent over an FW03 Helmut Lang bomber (above bottom right) that you got as a 10th grade birthday gift. That’s some advanced s**t for 10th grade.
Mike Eckhaus: “I pubesced quickly!”
Blackbird Spyplane: You also sent a sweater from Ghesquière-era Balenciaga (above top left) that Zoe found on eBay and gave you to cover the security deposit on your first studio together; and a leather jacket (above bottom left) that you “bought at Savers in college then cut up and changed.” I wanted to ask you about this SS03 Prada dress you mentioned your mom wore to your brother’s Bar Mitzvah, too…
Mike Eckhaus: “My mother died when I was in high school, and I don’t have much of her stuff — this is one of the few things that I have, so it’s important to me in that respect. She also got this right when I became aware of fashion, through like Style.com, and I was like, ‘You SHOULD get this dress.’ Being that kind of gay child. So, it’s funny, all the objects I sent are more or less from around that time, when I was first becoming aware of fashion. When I look back, a lot of collections from that time have a lot of significance to me, in the same way that anybody probably feels about their point of entry into an infatuation.
“There’s this fascination with the unknown that sticks with you.”
Eckhaus Latta’s site is here and they’re on IG here.
Our interviews with Nathan Fielder, John C. Reilly, Emily Bode, André 3000, Danielle Haim, Sandy Liang, Eric Wareheim, Mac DeMarco, Jerry Seinfeld, Matty Matheson, Michael Stipe, Phoebe Bridgers, 100 gecs, Seth Rogen, Tyler, The Creator, Maya Hawke, King Krule, Kim Gordon, Steven Yeun and more are here.
Beautiful stuff. As a certified bigg(er) boy, I'd love to see more cuts designed to look good on larger male bodies as well as female
I'd like to own it all! Thank you for drawing attention to this brand.