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Most days, when he isn’t fly fishing or helping his rancher neighbours repair fences, you’ll find Tilden Yamamoto in his garage-turned-atelier in Waterloo, Montana, painstakingly cutting, sewing, ironing, and stitching a pair of his eponymous handmade jeans. After two decades spent designing and making clothes, Yamamoto founded his brand in 2019 with the help of Roy Slaper, the founder of Roy Denim and a legend among raw denim aficionados. Yamamoto spends upwards of eight hours crafting each pair out of deadstock Cone Mills White Oak denim, and sells them for $595 apiece on his website. For Yamamoto’s customers, however, a pair of Tilden jeans is worth more than the sum of its parts. Tilden is among a handful of brands that are turning the standard fashion industry paradigm on its head. In an industry that largely relies on cheap labor and volume to drive its profits, solo ateliers like Tilden, along with Toronto-based workwear specialist Henry’s, Maine’s Tony Shirtmakers, and Paris-based Oliver Church, have built a loyal following by doing the opposite. Instead of churning out tens of thousands of pieces each month in factories on the other side of the world—much of which will end up in landfills within a few years—these makers offer slowness instead of speed, exclusivity in place of ubiquity, and perhaps most importantly, a sense of connection. “There's a lie that the fashion industry likes to tell, which is that designers put their ideas into this kind of magic black box, and clothes come out the other end,” says Jonah Weiner, who regularly highlights single-maker brands in his fashion and culture newsletter, Blackbird Spyplane. “We, of course, know that there are actually humans in factories making every one of those pieces by hand, but we tend not to know much about them. And so a big part of the appeal of the one-person clothing line is that we can put a face very readily to the clothes—and not just to the person who designed them, but to the person who sat down at a sewing machine and put them together.” It’s not an accident that the rise of the single-maker label coincides with the era of “luxury fatigue,” a term coined in response to the oversaturation of luxury brands and the resulting disillusionment among customers. It also reflects a growing awareness that our consumption of clothes comes at a high cost for the people who make them as well as the planet. Where luxury once meant high quality and exclusive access to a brand’s unique creative sensibility, it now all too often means high markups and logos. In that sense, single-person brands are a throwback to the luxury labels of a pre-internet, pre-globalization world. The idea of buying your wardrobe from a single maker isn’t a revolutionary one, of course; custom tailors have been doing this work for centuries. What is new is the transfer of this approach—complete with its old-school quality and opportunities for customization—to casual clothes like chore coats, shirt jackets, and jeans. Few makers embody the new luxury ethos as well as Austin-based bootmaker Graham Ebner, whose unmistakable boots, complete with hand-stitched renderings of snakes, birds, and floral motifs, have earned him a growing following among sartorially adventurous western wear aficionados. Ebner deals directly with his clients, collaborating on custom designs and spending over 160 hours crafting each ornately stitched pair. For those who can afford the $6,000-$10,000 buy-in, he offers a level of personalization they won’t find anywhere else. “I want people to feel like they were involved in the process as much as they wanted to be and that I truly made something just for them,” says Ebner, who spent four years training under legendary bootmaker Lee Miller before striking out on his own in 2021. “Nobody needs $10,000 cowboy boots. That isn’t lost on me. So I want their time and money to feel well-spent.” The benefits of this relationship go both ways. Clients get something beautiful and unique, and makers get fairly compensated for their talents—a vanishingly rare opportunity in the era of fast fashion and corporate luxury. For Sam Zollman, the designer behind Slow Process, a Hudson Valley-based brand specializing in handmade clothes made from deadstock fabrics, working solo means having the freedom to create the very best things he can without compromise. “I have the luxury of not cutting corners,” he says. “There are certain details in Slow Process pieces that wouldn’t make sense for a larger manufacturer. I get to make custom alterations, and I ensure that every element of the piece has been considered. I think my clients appreciate those choices.” Just north of Freeport, Maine, Tony Parrotti has developed a similar reputation for dialed-in details at Tony Shirtmakers. As the brand’s founder and chief tailor, he specializes in custom-made shirts, each of which is crafted by hand at his small home studio. “My clients appreciate the fact that I meet with them, get to know them and their needs, and then I make their custom piece,” he says. “It’s an intimate process and something that can't be scaled.” In an industry built on economies of scale, this unscalable output is one of the things that makes a one-person brand so special, but it’s not without drawbacks. For one thing, working alone makes it hard to take parental leave or a vacation. And depending on how many hours it takes you to make a piece, you need a healthy roster of clients willing to pay top dollar to earn a decent living. Solving these problems can require compromise. “I miss the creative soup of working with other people, so the next step is going from a me to a we,” says Ebner, who is planning a more affordably priced ready-to-wear line. “I’ll be the first to admit I have everything to learn as I move into this next phase, but I have some good people in my corner and we’re going to make something we can be proud of.” Parrotti, meanwhile, outsources limited-runs of shirt jackets, chore coats, and button-ups to a small NYC workshop and handles the custom orders himself. He makes two to three custom shirts per week at his home workshop and is currently taking orders with an estimated delivery date in early 2027. Fortunately, his customers don’t seem to mind. In the land of the one-person brand, waiting is part of the appeal.
