Jason Denham and Liam Maher, took a moment from their busy days to sit with Revolver and discuss their "Truth in the Details" motto, ethos and passion for Denham the Jeanmaker brand.

Denham is a relatively new brand from 2009 yet with nearly 20 years experience in the denim world - How are you balancing your past work and moving things forward? 

The design team shares a common interest in certain aspects of apparel design. The main ones are probably:

Utility: -Looking at how garments are built from a functional point-of-view consistent with the workwear roots of denim.
Modernity: -Each of the designers have a certain individual pride, of course but moreover we feel a genuine responsibility to our shared tradition. We feel obliged to "push things forward", picking up where our distant and more recent forbearers left-off. One of the outcomes, we hope, is "modernity" but the process can also involve something more like "invention". We're active in the workwear segment partly because the idea of simple yankee-ingenuity appeals to us. Building clothes out of tent-fabric, shooting metal rivets into fabric garments... all that early all those early blue-jean legends.
Modesty: - It sounds a little crazy to talk about modesty. But we share a taste level that gravitates toward designs that have distinction and richness on one hand without calling too too much attention to themselves on the other. The person should wear the clothing, not the other way around. So the process often involves envisioning fairly outrageous new constructions and then dialing them back until they hit that balance of newness and wearability. I call it "dialing it back to cool". Jason describe the importance of balance and knowing when to lift your pencil off the drawing paper.
History: -Maybe this should be first on the list, but we also hope for each garment to carry a little bit of a fossil-history of the workwear tradition. We're very turned-on by the backstories related to archetypal designs within the workwear cannon and we want to keep them alive in our own work.

iIf you wrap together the ideas above you're left with our key design concepts. Worship Tradition, Destroy Convention. The Truth is in the Details.




How did you build your team? Are the other core designers Liam and Barbara compliments, contrasts to your style? How do you define your relationship with them and the rest of your team?

Liam: Jason should obviously answer this one from his perspective as well. But from my end.... -I have the sincere privilege of having Head of Design on my business cards. That title is a tiny bit ceremonial since Jason is the driving creative force behind the brand. Jason keeps a very wide field-of-vision on matters related to design as well brand-building, distribution, sourcing, communication, etc. All of which he does in a very down-to-earth style usually making very difficult responsibilities seem all but effortless. Aside, or even "above", all of that Jason also remains a JEANMAKER combining long experience, journeyman artisan sensibilities and a vital contemporary design attitude and bringing all this to bare within the men's and women's denim collections. I have the luxury of worrying mostly about the collection and I lead the development of seasonal design concepts and some of the more design-focused aspects of the basic brand concept. Barbera leads the process of converting and adapting this direction to work within the women's collection and together Barbera and I design the non-denim parts of the collection. That obviously involves tops; outerwear, layering, shirting, jersey, flat knits, etc.



We love Denham because its one of the few brands that clear has a retail space to guage feedback, customer response immediatly? What responses have you been amazed by, confused by, intrigued by? 

Indeed. We've all worked at places where management dreamed of having retail "right next door". For my part, when I directed creative services for Burton Snowboards in the 90s we did have a full flagship shop within the head office compound. That was cool, but it wasn't at all the same because it wasn't in a genuine shopping district. Here at Denham we really do see the end consumer happening upon our concept every day. I think overall we're pretty gratified. We're trying to design for people like ourselves (sorry for the cliche) but we also expect that out work will appeal to a very broad age range who share a particular taste and an eye for detail. We also feel strongly that our concept works exactly as well in the women's collection as it does in men's and we see this conviction reinforced everyday. So, no real surprises. One thing maybe we didn't expect is how many people we'd meet who are doing their own interesting projects via the store. We regularly get people coming in the store who end up telling us about their own passions. Just last week we had a guy who sells only top quality vintage Ray Bans. He's got 1,500 pairs and can talk you through every millimeter of every component on every frame. A couple weeks before we had a guy who designs amazing jewelry from stainless steel in Japan. Stuff like that happens all the time and it makes it a very cool place to come to work. If you build it, they will come, -the kindred spirits.



Does fabric come first or design? 

Sometimes fabric comes first. But I think it's more a case of us carrying around a pretty deep living archive of garment-types in our heads all the time anyway. So if we see a fabric that excites us, it's usually because we're very rapidly associating it with a garment-type we like. One of my own idiosyncrasies is a high level of focus on functional detailing (I sometimes call it "utility tailoring"). For me an idea for a new way functional detail can influence an entire garment design.... sometimes more than one. Fabric and "materiality" is always critical regardless of what comes first since we're fabric freaks. It's like a painter talking about the importance of paint, I guess. Beyond that we also focus pretty heavily on findings, finishing and hardware.



Denham is immediately a global brand rooted in with fabrication in Europe and Asia, raw materials sourcing around the world, and end use globally as well - how do you take this into account as you design your line? 

We actually want our concept to unite a wide variety of materials and production techniques, and we hope to engage customers across an equally wide landscape. The result, of course, is that we move elements and finished goods around the map quite a bit. A single product might feature Re-cut/recycled military textiles from the Netherlands, findings forged in Germany and facing-fabrics from Japan. We also regularly use British fabrics and Italian laundries. We do this in relatively small batches and we try to use boats instead of planes, but it's far from a "local goods for local markets" type of enterprise.

The simple fact is that we work quite hard to combine the best array of resources in order to realize our particular designs. Our overriding focus is on the product itself. I don't know if part of your question is geared toward getting a sense of our attitudes toward the environment and the responsibilities the come with global sourcing. But we think less about protecting the environment through sourcing practices than we do about working on garments which will hold their relevance and value beyond normal fashion cycles and keep our consciences relatively clean insofar as we're not knowingly producing clothing ultimately bound for the dumpsite.

When managing our small collections and producing our fairly small quantities and we try to orchestrate our resources to deliver a garment which is special and will remain in a customer's wardrobe for some time to come. While we don't make political claims, we feel the best thing we can do for the environment is to bring products into people lives which they won't want to throw away in a hurry. We don't have any earth-shattering new insight into the problem but we suspect that the increasing speed of product-rotation in the fast-fashion market and the normalizing of the idea of "disposable" fashion have been bad for both the consumer and the environment. We'll start by simply trying to keep our work out of the waste-stream.