NEW YORK — Aaron Levine has taken the idea of networking to new heights.
The veteran designer, whose 20-year career includes creative posts at Abercrombie & Fitch, Club Monaco, Hickey Freeman and Joseph Abboud, is finally taking the plunge and creating his own eponymous collection. And he’s leaned into his friends and former colleagues — even his mother — to make his dream a reality.
“I always wanted to do something on my own,” he said during a preview with WWD at the Brooklyn studio of Storytellers & Creatives Mfg. Co., one of his partners in the venture. “I’m calling in all the favors.”
To say the Aaron Levine line of elevated basics is being bootstrapped is an understatement. “It’s coming out of my savings account,” he said. “But I believe you’ve got to put your money where your mouth is. I believe in these people and this community and we’re doing it.”
You May Also Like
“These people” include Arturo Castaneda, founder of Storytellers & Creatives and a patternmaker, who has worked for everyone from Emily Bode and Willy Chavarria to Madewell, Who Decides War and Coach. He cut his teeth at Ralph Lauren, where he worked for a decade as head concept designer before starting his own business in 2015. His Brooklyn studio is full of bespoke patterns and bolts of fabrics as well as a small team of 12 artisan-tailors.
“We work with 45 brands, but we’re only partners with one of them because of his humanity,” Castaneda said of Levine. He said he was especially impressed that Levine made no secret of being fired from A&F and didn’t try to sugarcoat it. “Our company is built on a lot of failure,” he said, adding that Levine’s honesty to him was a sign of his “beautiful imperfection.”
After six-plus years at A&F, where he started as vice president of men’s design and was elevated to senior vice president of men’s and women’s design, Levine was let go in 2021. Since then he has been doing freelance design work for different brands, including Drakes, whose collection launched last week, while setting the stage for his next chapter.
“I met Arturo at an event about one-and-a-half years ago when we were both doing work for Madewell,” Levine said. “He may be unassuming, but he’s an assassin. Storytellers & Creatives is really the holy grail of hand-tailored garments.”
Levine is also partnering with Josh York, a Detroit-based entrepreneur who operates a cut-and-sew factory in that city and manufactures for Shinola, Foot Locker, American Trench and other brands.
“He made some product for me,” Levine said, “but that wasn’t the full vision.”
He knew the Aaron Levine line needed wovens as well so he FaceTimed Castaneda and asked if he would help. “I didn’t know if he’d even take my call,” Levine said, “but within 10 days his team had hand-built patterns for me.”
He said “everything we build, they create, often from a back-of-a-napkin sketch.”
The skill of the team at Storytellers & Creatives — including Jessica Zuluaga, a Colombian native who is the director of the team — prompted Levine to further expand the offering within his launch collection and add tailored clothing as well.
The initial collection will consist of around 60 pieces that are essentially menswear but can also be worn by women. “My history is in men’s but I oversaw women’s as well at Abercrombie,” he said. “We don’t take anything too literally.”
Among the key pieces will be “our version of workwear,” he said, pointing to a selection of pants that range from elastic-waist pull-on styles and weather-resistant zip-off models to more dressy, single-pleat military versions. There are T-shirts, flannels and fleeces made from cotton that was “grown in South Carolina, knit in New Carolina and made in Detroit.” Sweaters are made in Italy and the wovens and tailored pieces by the Storytellers team in Brooklyn.
Prices range from $70 for the T-shirts, $175 for the fleece pieces and $395 for trousers, to $245 to $295 for the wovens, $395 for sweaters and $595 to $695 for outerwear. He has created a logo of a nautilus that will be used as branding along with a lower-case script version of his name that will adorn the collection. He solicited his mother, who does calligraphy, to create all the labels.
Levine described his collection as “elegant, chic and grown up” and believes it’s appropriate for a range of ages. He’s expecting the trousers, flannels, cut-and-sewn pieces and a service jacket to be the most popular. But that’s really up to his customers. “We’re trying to learn as much about our customers as we can. I’m super excited to see which styles will resonate with them.”
In advance of the launch, Levine has been teasing the collection on his Instagram page, where he has 117,000 followers. One of those is U.K. photographer Ben Weller, who reached out and offered to “build the imagery” for the collection in his hometown in Cornwall in England.
So once the samples were completed, Levine said he “packed four suitcases and took the 30-hour journey” to Cornwall, where Weller found local surfers, doctors, artists and filmmakers to be featured in the images. “We shot on everyone from a 10-year-old kid to a 65-year-old man,” Levine said. “It just feels genuine and true.”
To promote the collection, Levine turned to another friend, Clare Drummond, now of PR Consulting, with whom he had worked at Abercrombie, who has taken on that task.
The collection will be offered online on the new Aaron Levine website that was created by more friends — Nolan White and art director Peter Hughes — beginning Friday. Shipping of the line will be from York’s factory in Detroit. If the collection becomes as successful as he hopes, Levine said he is “working with several vendors regarding scaling opportunities” if he needs larger production facilities.
Levine still lives in a Columbus, Ohio, suburb, where he moved his family while working at A&F, because he doesn’t want to upend the lives of his two teenage daughters. He flies to New York frequently to meet with Castaneda or to Detroit to visit York’s factory.
Because Castaneda and York have become his partners, the only big investment he’s making is in buying fabric. “We’re making a very small number of each style,” he said.
He’s working with “a lady from L.A.,” who prefers to remain anonymous, on fabric sourcing and procurement.
Because the team is so scattered, they spend a lot of time on video screens and phone calls. But while challenging, they’ve made it work.
“We’re bootstrapping this because of our combined love of this game,” he said. “There’s no money from outside.”
But while the money might be tight, the dedication to making the Aaron Levine line a success is deep.
Levine summed it up this way: “We’re making real clothes that are meant to be worn. We’re not kids, we’re battle tested, and we’re not rushing through it.”
