Someone Else | Freenote Cloth: The Creative Process

Matt Brodrick

The design kind of happens one of two ways: I'll come up with a silhouette in my mind or I'll see something, I'll find an old vintage piece, where like, "Hey, I can do this another way"—or sometimes I find a fabric and I'm like, "Where does this fabric take me?"

It's kind of split down the middle. For example, like the corduroy that I used last season. OK, a corduroy suit my mom used to dress me in it, it used to piss me off all the time. Well now I'm like, "I kind of actually want one," so now I'm like, "Well what can I plug this into that I haven't really seen?" So we did a denim jacket out of it. We're going to do a vest out of it. So in that case the fabric kind of dictated where it went.

In other cases, like the chef jacket, kind of like, "How can I modify this thing? How can I make it my own, yet still keep some of the aspects that people will recognize?" That piece was designed more on the silhouette.

Matt Brodrick

Someone Else

Matt Brodrick

On the board here basically I'll go to three, four fabric suppliers. I'll go through their collection. I go through and pick the pieces that strike me at first. I'll lay them out on the table in front of me. I'm kind of a hoarder of sorts, so I'll start off with as much as possible, and then I'll keep whittling it down until I find the things where I'm like, "Thats the one." When it gets up to the board, that usually means it's going to stick and I need to figure out where I'm going to place it.

But a lot of times when I'm picking these out, I'll have an idea of a piece or, "Hey, this is going to look great on a western (shirt), or this will look great on one of our utility shirts, or a single-pocket classic shirt." I love to mix some fabrics in that you wouldn't necessarily see, like if something that looks like a dressed-up shirt I'll put in a fabric that's kind of dressed down just to give another little spin on it.

I'm lucky that the fabric suppliers I work with out of Japan and the U.S. make some of the nicest fabrics that you can find. So it's really up to me to let the fabric speak for itself and not overdo it with too many details, and just make sure I plug it into the right place to give it the most justice.

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Matt Brodrick

Absolutely. The inspiration for what I call the Bad Moon collection last fall was really based off of watching "Peaky Blinders," seeing those suits, seeing how they were dressed and then doing my own research on it. I went to a wedding, I like to wear my clothing, and I'm at the wedding and I'm not wearing my stuff and I'm like, "Damnit, I should make a suit." People need them. How can you take the aesthetics that we have here and apply that to a suit?

That's kind of where the idea for that collection came from, but where I start with is a rough board of images, whether a silhouette on it, maybe an old picture, maybe a couple colors, maybe pulling it from a plant, anything, and then that kind of pours out into, "Ok that's the main idea," and then it refines into, "Here's the color story out of that. Here's the palette I'm going to pull. Here's a look that I want to build."

For example, the "Peaky Blinders" or the Bad Moon collection was all based around that one look. So yeah, each season you gotta bring some interest and obviously you stick with the stuff that you have so people can come back and buy it, so that you're not like showcasing something different and new every time you gotta build.

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Matt Brodrick

Or your sound or whatever. People make sport analogies. I make it to bands. Here's your debut record or freshman record, and you've had your whole life to figure it out to release that one, and that's everything—boom. The next thing is the follow-up album. "How do I back up all that I just did, which took me how many years, or my whole life, to come out with? How do I back that up with something just as interesting, or an evolution?"—and how many bands go backwards on that? Then you got your bands like Radiohead. They've just constantly tweaked it, did something different, went way outside of what they were doing before, but it still had that same essence. I'm not fuckin' Radiohead, but I like to use that analogy. You're always building off what you did before and trying to improve it.

Someone Else

Matt Brodrick

Every time that I think im being ultra-creative and came up with something new, a year later I'll go back and look in a book, or I'll go look through my vintage collection, and I'm like, "Fuck that's where that came from." As original as I like to be, nobody's fuckin' original. You're always building off of something else that you've seen. For us, that's this pant right here. It's built off of a bunch of Eastern Bloc military styles, so i kind of morphed those things in and took some pocket shapes. Usually what I'll do is take a pocket shape and be like, "How do I make this more of a challenge?" The more curves you add into it, the more shape that you do, it's a lot harder to sew.

I try to add as much curve into it, and that's the same thing as the western that I'm wearing here. Usually this is called the sawtooth pocket. I'm like, "Ok, let's add some nice curve to it." The original western was trademarked, until that ran out 20 years later, but it's my version of it.

Someone Else

Matt Brodrick

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Freenote Cloth: The Creative Process

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