Monday 16 March 2009

RABII DENIM: BESPOKE JEANS


Just read an article in The Times about a shop in Glasgow called Che Camille, which works with Scottish designers on the premises in Glasgow to create a mix of bespoke fashion & made-to-measure pieces. One of the designers there is Robert Watson, who has launched a bespoke denim line, Rabii Denim. There's an interview with him in Dazed Digital from January. His route into design was through homemade clothes in childhood and then a tailoring course & tailoring job. He clearly treats denim as a tailor's fabric rather than as a base cloth to be washed and treated, which I imagine will give the jeans quite a different look to even handmade Japanese dry denims. They have some basic fits which can be adapted/made-to-measure, or I think they will also work with a favourite jean, which sounds exciting.
From the article: “My mother made my clothes because we were poor. Kids used to make fun of me at school because I wore the clothes made by my mother and, after I told her, she encouraged me to draw the garments I wanted.” The pieces (jeans & jackets) use raw denim and are made to the traditional standards and know-how of tailors: high quality, thick and untreated fabrics, assembly and finishing by hand. Though most of Robert’s designs look rather minimal, they simultaneously have a few spot-on reinventions in the proportions, cut and fabric. “A few months ago I made a pair of jeans for myself to go to a music festival,” he recounts, “I wanted to make something different, so I started doing reverse panels and reverse details on the pockets. A lot of people I met asked me where I got them and six months later they all came knocking at my door asking for exactly the same pair of jeans.”

Bespoke denims require just one fitting and the starting price is around £200, though they can easily reach £300 if there are a lot of details such as coloured stitching. “I always urge customers to go for the most basic models and warn them that the more elaborate the denims are, the worse they often look.”.

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