ROBERT GELLER DENIM


A denim line can be a venal move, a profit-focused ploy at padding the bottom line with little thought for design or details. But for Robert Geller, who launches his new denim collection this Spring, jeans are a core part of his eponymous label’s DNA, and they have been for years. “In 2009, I won the CFDA/GQ Best New Menswear Designer award, and as part of winning it, I was able to do a collaboration with Levi’s,” he explains. “I flew out to San Francisco a few times and really spent time with them going through the archives and learning a lot about denim and washes and all of that, and that really opened my eyes to the possibilities of denim.”

The rough, increasingly fashion-friendly fabric has played an ongoing role in Geller’s collections since, but the designer says he had been looking for a way to bring the price point down, a quandary he solved when he found a trio of Japanese brothers working in Los Angeles who could deliver the quality he wanted at an appropriate cost (the jeans retail for just under three hundred dollars). With manufacturing resolved, Geller focused on streamlining the designs. “We had these different cuts that we kept changing from season to season, and it was confusing even to us,” he laughs.

The team ended up with three cuts, all of them on the slim side, each available in four washes: black, off white, and blue with two different fades. A jacket and shirt will complete the collection. Geller expects artist collaborations and other special projects in the future, but says he plans to keep the main core intact. “We want the base to stay the same,” he explains. “I want somebody in five years to be able to say, ‘I love my off-white RG01’s, I want to buy two more pairs.’ I think that consistency is really important in a denim collection.”

Robert Geller Denim is available now at Assembly New York and Fred Segal Man, Los Angeles.

Jonathan Shia is the editor of The Last Magazine.

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