What Does America's Finest Sportswear Brand Know About Denim?

Lady White Co., the greatest sportswear brand in America, has mastered a million different permutations of cotton. Specially woven cotton jersey for its famous T-shirts, ultra-soft cotton-silk outerwear, shirting woven from Japanese cotton, and bullet-stoppingly heavy cotton fleece hoodies are de rigueur.

But denim is new. And appropriate.

Part of Lady White's ongoing collaboration with the venerable Japanese maker Phigvel, this is the Los Angeles clothing label's "first exploration into denim," as Taylor Caruso, Lady White Co.'s Sales Director, puts it. Key details include custom 12oz selvedge denim in one-wash and faded finishes (Caruso cites the "rare artisanal washing process derived from stone- and hand-sanding), jeans that rework staple Phigvel silhouettes, and a pretty damn good hooded jacket that reconsiders a Lady White classic as something extra-sturdy.

But everyone does denim. Why is it suddenly a big deal that Lady White would, too?

It's all about the intent.

You don't spend 11 years perfecting one item at a time — first T-shirts, then another style of T-shirt, hoodies, then shirts... — to suddenly dip into new product categories willy-nilly. Good things are deliberate, which is as true of clothing as it is of any artistic endeavor. And Lady White is an essentialist clothing label of the finest sort: everything that matters, and nothing that doesn't.

So, it's fitting that it'd only do denim the right way, with a nearly 25-year-old company that specializes in only the best of everything. Phigvel's leather goods are peerless and its apparel stylings epitomize Brancusian workwear, both because they're pared back to perfection and because they look like what the sculptor actually wore.

So, consider Lady White's debut denim offering as the best of what it is: two pairs of basically perfect jeans and jackets so incredibly considered that the act of wearing them becomes effortless. As all good clothes ought to be.

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