Don't trust people who call themselves passionate
6 encounters with Real Ones, and what makes great clothes tick
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Last week in Paris, in addition to throwing a great party with Neighbour and Lady White Co., Erin and I were lucky to spend time visiting with people who are extremely gifted at making clothes, and who have devoted their lives to honoring and developing that gift.
Something not one of these people did? Call themselves “passionate.”
We got to talking about this one night with the gifted clothesmaker and Spyfriend Keith Henry of Henry’s. Keith is a longtime vintage head who taught himself how to make patterns and cut & sew clothes; he’s been doing exactly that full-time for the last 6 years — and I have never once heard him call himself passionate. The three of us were at dinner, cataloguing various flavors of behavior we’d encountered in the context of Paris Men’s Week, and we zeroed in on I’m passionate as a kind of Huckster Shibboleth, prevalent in the lexicon of people who, as Keith put it, “move funny.”
Calling yourself passionate is what someone says when they haven’t found something they actually feel passionate about. It’s what someone does when they’re writing 7 paragraphs of IG-caption hogwash about a “new chapter” in the “rollercoaster” that is their “journey.” It’s what someone says when they’re fundraising, when they’re dissociating in a job interview — when their mouths are moving, but their brains and their hearts are somewhere else.
Because when you’re actually passionate, it registers self-evidently in the work you do, and in the way you talk about that work.
In that spirit, today I want to write about 6 illuminating encounters we had with several top-notch clothesmakers last week that capture their talent, ingenuity and, instead of passion, let’s just say, General State of Being a Real One.
These encounters — with Man-tle; Gnuhr; the highly buzzed-about & mysterious duo Unkruid, whom we met and learned some more about; Tender Co., Evan Kinori; and Camiel Fortgens — center on clothes that, yes, look cool and are fire to wear.
But what really interests me about them is the way they capture design thinking at its most elegant, and the kinds of material processes that help illustrate why a Mach 3+ slapper actually slaps.
Let’s get to it —
Encounter #1: TENDER CO.
William Kroll founded his legendary independent label, Tender, in the late 2010s in his native UK, specializing in tweaked takes on workwear. Last year, he uprooted the entire operation and moved to Pennsylvania, where he’s been keeping extremely busy. At his showroom in the Marais, William showed me and Saager from Neighbour his new Working line, whose sporty-workweary hybrid creations he designed over text message (!) with the Scottish designer Robert Newman of Middle Distance. William also showed us the first Tender collection he produced entirely in the U.S. (minus a small handful of denims and knits).
Unlike Tender’s previous UK factory, the one that William contracts with in Pennsylvania is a family operation (one family literally does all the cutting and sewing) that only owns single-needle sewing machines. These make for a more labor-intensive, and therefore cost-intensive, manufacturing process. So to cut down on time and money, William designed several new garments that could be constructed with a minimum of sewing:
