Five Fits With: Fashion Designer Reese Cooper
Reese Cooper is 25 years old, and his namesake brand is floating into its seventh year. He’s collaborated with brands like Levi’s and Merrell, and he’s showcased his wares at the prestigious Paris Fashion Week and a national park in California. He’s done capsule collections and installations all over the world. He’s friends with a plethora of artists in music, fashion and the like, and they all wear his clothing. He’s also been nominated for the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund and for the Council of Fashion Designers of America’s Emerging Designer award. Surely I’m missing some accolades and achievements, but this is just to give you a sense of all he’s done already.
Maybe all of that sounds a bit intimidating, but Reese is as humble and approachable as they come. His clothing is just plain cool; wearable, but interesting, and rooted in real principles and interests instead of buzzwords and trendy Pantone hues. Reese took a couple of hours from his busy schedule to sit down with me and discuss how his brand came to fruition, the jeans-and-a-tee paradox of the cerebral fashion designer, gorp as a trend versus a lifestyle, making clothes that sell versus risky but interesting items, living in major cities as a necessity, an inspiring documentary on volcanologists, and plenty of other topics.
Let's get into your upbringing and schooling and how these things influenced you. How did you decide to start your namesake brand?
I think there was a lot of stuff that I wanted to learn in school that I didn't and that definitely led me down this career path. I knew I wanted to make stuff. I didn't know it would be clothes, but in the regular education system you're not really taught that you can just go make stuff regardless of what it is. I always had a fascination with how things are made through spending a lot of time with my grandfather when I was younger. He made everything that they need at the house.
I spent a lot of time around clothes through internships, like steaming clothes at showrooms, and thought, “Why the fuck is this so expensive?” I went down the rabbit hole of being like, “Oh cool, there's such a thing as a $70 zipper.” All of those things combined led me to making clothing. Starting it under my own name was just to make sure I didn't put out bullshit just for the sake of putting stuff out.
Sometimes you look at a runway show review and you'll see these really interesting looks, and on the last slide, when the designer takes a bow, they're in jeans and a tee or something much simpler than what they presented. How much separation is there for you in your own personal style and how you seek to present Reese Cooper as a brand?
I definitely am guilty of that. I really like the design side of everything and I'm super obsessed with how the hem on the bottom of a pant is—the thickness of that hem, and whether an eighth of an inch makes a difference in how it hits a shoe. I obsess over that shit. But I do just wear jeans and a tee a lot. I think that's just because I spend so much time looking at clothes on other people; I spend less time caring about how I look. Because I don't really care if I look good as long as the thing I'm presenting looks good. That, in my opinion, should be more important. I do wear my clothes often. I didn't really wear a lot of nice stuff before. And so now that my own stuff plays in that caliber of manufacturing and quality, I typically get scared to wear some of it because I don't want to get it dirty.
Some of the best and most cerebral designers end up wearing a tee and jeans, and you probably hit on it there a little bit. I think part of it is that they spend so much time...maybe agonizing is the wrong word, but they spend so much time thinking about what things should look like, proportions, fit. You're thinking about the cuff on a pant...
I have to assume it's like a very talented drama TV writer; when they get home at the end of the day they probably just want to put on some bullshit reality show that they can zone out to and not have to pay attention. Plus it just makes your life simple. I know jeans look good on me. I’ll wear them instead of having to spend 30 minutes in the morning.
How much of the brand correlates to you as a person?
Most of it. It started out as just making things for myself or things that I wanted to wear. And then, as years have gone by, I stopped designing specifically for myself and branched out. Sometimes I design with specific friends in mind, or artists, or collaborators. Once more and more people start wearing something that you make, you start looking more at people and what they wear and try to serve a much larger audience than the guy who, at the end of the day, we just established, wears jeans and a T-shirt. I've never made anything I don't like just to tick a box which I think is important.
It's no secret fashion and the outdoors are intersecting as gorping becomes a trend for the masses, but it feels like the outdoors was a tenet of your brand before all the hype. Why has this been the case for you?
I think a lot of it is subconscious. I spent a lot of time outside growing up. I've pretty much lived in major cities my whole life, just by necessity, not because I want to. My grandparents lived in middle of nowhere in the woods and I spent a lot of time there. I love the idea of being able to have my office in the middle of nowhere, but it's really hard if you need to go to the post office or grab something quickly. It's just not easy for what I do right now. I just spend a lot of time outside. We go on hikes up by where my girlfriend Juliet’s family lives in the canyons up in the valley and that shit is so much more beautiful to me than anything in the city of L.A. I try to be over there as much as possible.
How do you operate outside of the realm of what's trendy?
The whole trend cycle is a cycle, so as long as you're making the stuff that's true to you, at some point every couple of years it's going to be on trend and you're going to catch that wave—every time it comes back around, because it always does. Then you'll have a whole track record of being like, “This is the shit I've made the whole time.”
Like you, I mostly taught myself how to do what I do and sometimes I have a tough time articulating how I get from point A to point B. Do you have a specific process in designing a new collection or is the journey from point A to B tough to pinpoint?
It's super hard to pinpoint what exactly inspires the early thoughts. But once there's some fuel in the tank and because I'm a self-owned business, I have to go about things quite strategically. As much as I would love to just sit and draw crazy things all day and then just make super conceptual stuff, we have rent to pay. Anytime I've done a bomber jacket, it works. The stores like it. My customers like it. I think, “Cool, we need a bomber jacket this season because statistically that's what my data is showing me.” Then I think, “What is the theme and concept of this season? How do I apply that layer of thinking onto the framework I know I need to hit just to stay afloat.”
What's currently inspiring you?
I just saw a really good movie called Fire of Love, which is a documentary on this couple of volcanologists. They studied and researched volcanoes in the seventies through early nineties. I believe they're French. Although they studied volcanoes, and did all these research films, and got their grants from scientific institutions to produce these incredible films on volcanoes, and though they're responsible for quite a lot of major discoveries on how volcanoes work, this documentary focused on them as people. Super inspiring, and it's also compiled entirely with their own archive footage. Seeing a story put together through footage captured in that way, I noticed that once there is some sort of standard or framework, you can make anything out of it. This beautiful thing came out of something that was not intended for that footage to be used for. There's that train of thought. And then the other train of thought for me was that for the same cost that we do these fashion shows, you could actually sponsor a younger research team on something that you care about and produce an incredible body of work that actually does something and still incorporates clothes. Because these people, when they're out there, have to wear something. It was just one of those things that every so often sends my brain in a hundred different directions. A bunch of friends have put out good music lately and we're starting to travel again. All of these things are hitting at once.
Which music?
I like all my friends’ stuff and I'm biased because I like them as people. But I really like Kenny Beats' new album. It's incredible music, but I think I listen to it with a very different ear than a Pitchfork critic because I really like spending time with him. It's just that type of shit that makes me happy, seeing people I know and like spending time with make beautiful stuff.
When you're not working on the brand how do you spend your downtime?
Traveling for fashion week to go to 15 things a day technically is our downtime. It goes back to the fact that we never have downtime. I say “we” because Juliet's with me. It's never for more than two days at a time. Not working both days on a weekend is rare. When we get to do that, we just want something super easy so we'll spend time at her family's place. I'll spend time with my mom. A lot of it is either, “Let's see a movie,” or, “Let's go outside,” or, “Let's go swimming,” or, “Let's go to the beach,” or, “Let's go on a hike.” Things that are just so far removed from having to think about producing stuff. Because as much as I'm a designer, I'm also technically a manufacturer.
Do you have a favorite place to travel to?
Paris when it's fashion week is always my favorite thing. New York when it's not fashion week.
What sort of advice would you offer someone young who thinks they want to design clothes but doesn't have an idea where to begin?
There's a difference between wanting to design clothes and wanting to start a business that makes clothes. Designing clothes you can do for other people and if a pair of jeans comes out wrong, you're not out a few thousand dollars, you can just try again. That's really cool. Start with internships and actual design jobs and only take on this level of responsibility when you feel like you're actually ready to. Because it's not an easy thing. In theory, it's super easy in a democratic type of approach where you can just start making T-shirts and start making clothes. Technically, anyone can start making clothes. But being able to sustain all the things that I've learned in the past seven years doing this… I mean I had no idea that we had to have this wildly niche, specific type of lawyer on retainer. And if you don't have that, you're fucked. It’s all of these different things. Unless you're really ready to spend 90 percent of your day doing nothing related to actually designing clothes, I would work for other brands before starting your own. Because when you run your own brand, 90% of your time is indeed nothing related to actual creativity.
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