TD 1
ad you clambered up the Chocolate Factory’s back
stairwell (or taken the lift, stamina intact) to the Native Denims studio during last month’s Open House, you would have stumbled upon a captive audience congesting the entrance. Pat, Native’s chief instigator and passionate spokesperson, was dissecting a pair of high-street jeans with acerbic gusto, encircled by breath-bated (but, occasionally, chuckling) spectators. “Everything about this garment is absolutely awful, and I’ll explain why. First of all, it’s the cheapest denim you can get your hands on. The back pockets are cut-off grain, and are already sagging, they’ve put cheap rivets in the wrong place, the knees are beginning to bag after just four wears… what else can I say that’s woeful about this thing?” Listening to Pat list off his encyclopaedic knowledge of sewing mastery – from bar tacks to gimp buttonholes – with the speed of a caffeinated auctioneer, my own set of ‘skills’ (sewing the occasional button) quickly lost steam. By the time he turned his attention to analysing a pair of made-to-measure Native jeans – whose components couldn’t be further divorced from fast fashion – attendees had no shortage of proof that this man, alongside the company he set in motion almost two years ago, lives, breathes and (probably) bleeds denim. In between these quasi-seminars – a fresh group piles into the studio every few minutes – I got to grips with Pat’s life pre-Native. “I was sewing by 11, my mother and grandmother could dress-make… those generations just had those skills.” Later, the arrival of Dave Murmane – a “serious goer” whose business head has proved invaluable to Native Denims – will add an extra flourish to this background tale. “I was in boarding school with Pat for six years. At one end of the dormitory, Pat had a Singer sewing machine, and he used to take in or let out clothes, fix patches, make flares…” Pat clocked up 12 or so years in the garment business, crossing paths with Susan Owens – Native Denims’ “master-maker” – while both worked at a denim factory not too far from their current base. Amassing experience in running production lines, sourcing materials and cutting his teeth with high-calibre tailors, Pat eventually left the industry for pastures new, but never lost sight of his dream: to set up a top-tier denim studio. “I’ve always been thinking about doing something like this,” he states. “I travel quite a lot, and one day I was coming through the airport in Frankfurt, flicking through magazines as I waited for my flight. I saw a copy of Drapers magazine, which I would’ve remembered from way back, and there was an article inside about the move from fast to slow fashion; bringing small amounts of production runs back into the UK, into what they called high-end denim, small batches, high quality, high construction finishes.” Joining forces with Stephen Kavanagh, Design Factory’s cofounder/director, Pat harnessed his frequentflier status to visit some of the world’s finest denim artisans. “A company called Blackhorse Lane Ateliers in North London makes a very nice garment, good quality linings. Stephen and I went to visit these guys and they were very open with us, we went into their factory. When I was in New York I went to see Bowery Blue, I visited 3x1, then I went to see some makers in Toronto. The best one for me is Companion Denim in Barcelona, they really make a wonderful product.” Small-scale denim producers may be sprouting across the globe – furnishing their enthused consumers with sustainable threads – but not so on Irish shores: Native Denims is the country’s sole premium denim manufacturer, while Owens adds that their studio marks “the first time in over 25 years that jeans are being made in Dublin, on any scale.” This exhaustive pre-planning didn’t just extend to jeans. The studio itself has been meticulously thought through: every aspect of its appearance, starting with the glass wall extending across the space, screams transparency. “You can stand outside and see everything through that glass,” Owens affirms. “We started with a blank canvas, and we built it this way for a reason. Nothing should be hidden.” From the streamlined, tactile rolls of fabric – some 60 to 70 types of denim comprise Native’s inventory, which I’ll detail later – to the work table replete with soon-to-be-finished patterns, it looks like they’ve collected all of our disquiet towards sweatshops and provided a potent remedy. Their assemblage of sewing machines, 33