You don't need to live in a fashion capital to run a successful brand
Evan Kinori started his label ten years ago, designing and producing in San Francisco, far away from the bright lights of New York, Paris and London.
With fashion moving at breakneck speed, we’re interested in learning from the artisans who produce slowly and consciously, outside of the seasonal calendar. Read the first piece in the series: How to make a living off creating 200 pieces a year.
By Eilidh Duffy
In certain menswear circles, the name Evan Kinori is shorthand for something many brands try to sell you, but few actually achieve. Subtle and relaxed, yet quality. Immediately recognisable to those who know their stuff. This is because his designs (soft, tailored jackets and trousers, large overshirts, and uber-crafted tees in naturally dyed earth tones) don’t shout, but they are process-heavy. What looks like a simple jacket probably took six months to multiple years to perfect, a specific colouration the product of a long, sophisticated dyeing process.
His success, however, has not come through the means we might expect, such as clever marketing gimmicks or well-timed runway shows, but an emphasis on the thing itself. Kinori communicates clearly to the customer exactly what the garment is, and showing his wares to the world alongside other objects that resonate with his ethos, both at his flagship store in San Francisco and temporary exhibitions-slash-shops at art galleries like Headlands Centre for the Arts, and JDJ gallery in New York. These displays situate his work in context, surrounded by his furniture line and the work of artists and artisans he admires (and who probably admire his work, too).
For someone who’s decided to go about things their own way, Kinori has managed to build up a dedicated following the world over, assisted by his popularity on Styleforum, a popular menswear forum. For the second in a series looking at how designers manage to create sustainable business models that work (see the first edition with Oliver Church here), we hassled Kinori for about two months to speak to us about what makes his work so special – and ultimately, one of the slowest menswear brands to break through into fashion today.
Can you describe Evan Kinori the label?
This is my least favourite question… It's always funny, I think, when you're coming at it from making a product for yourself first, and then you're building everything out afterward. It's not an intellectual pursuit up front. It’s not like I've been working at X, Y, and Z for 40 years, and this is my client, this is my market... It’s the opposite. I started off just trying to figure out product making, making clothes, and then built the other stuff around it. I can talk about some of the things that I think are important. We really believe in the product, and feel like it's really special, and whatever amount of time that takes is what we try to give to it, to develop it the right way. I try to make things that I think would last in design and in construction, and it's kind of somewhere between classic and contemporary, something timeless. It shouldn't look out of place in 10, 20, 30 years. The idea is to make something that is quiet, but at the same time, it's special enough that it feels exciting to the people that are into it. It’s every day, but special and beautiful.