Fashion is exhausting. Between outrageously priced designer clothes, the unstoppable dominance of fast fashion and the decline of quality across every price point, the business has become so convoluted that even its most enthusiastic proponents are tiring of it, with most of the industry entering a creative and financial slump this year.
Many fashion skeptics are finding refuge in the clothes of Evan Kinori, the 35-year-old based in San Francisco who has a cult following for his considerately designed men’s trousers, shirts and jackets. You may find his work awe-inspiring or pretentious (or both). He mails his orders with handwritten notes, and his latest project is a display of his clothing and furniture designs in an airy Tribeca gallery titled “Exhibition One: Apple, Elm & Cotton.” His garments, which he releases in drop-style batches and are individually numbered, change minutely from season to season, which has led to a school of Kinori acolytes who dissect his output with Swiftie-level fanaticism, many on a dedicated Discord channel.
His clothes, most of which cost between $400 to $700, have the ease of 1990s Armani menswear and the intelligent lines of Yohji Yamamoto. And the precision with which he makes them, from sourcing his fabrics to manufacturing the clothes and selling them, is almost maniacal. Most are made domestically.
“How do you get people to hold on to stuff longer? You make it special as f—,” he said in an interview last week. “If something of mine goes on Grailed” — the menswear designer resale site — “I’ve failed, because that means someone didn’t feel personally connected to it enough that they wanted to keep it.”
