FEELING IT
Stylists see more clothes in their careers than most people will in a lifetime, making them perfectly poised to create the stuff of fashion myth. Enter, Stevie Dance. By Alice Birrell.
Stylists are perfectly poised to create the stuff of fashion myth. Enter, Stevie Dance.
Aselfish act is the unlikely starting point for a denim label named Feel – with all the positive vibes the name connotes – but Stevie Dance confesses this was in fact the impelling force behind her first design project. “I really just wanted to make the perfect jeans for myself,” she says over the phone from Los Angeles, where Feel is made. “I was working all the time and I wanted to pack as few things as possible in my suitcase, and [for] each thing to be able to work really, really hard. I wanted to not have to check a bag in.”
Empathetic readers unite, because while the Australianborn stylist’s proposition is as straightforward as the end product (one denim style, two washes, comparable cuts for men and women), the quest for good denim is parsed so much it’s become a legendary pain point. Dance, then, admits she may be chasing a somewhat utopian concept. “Obviously, a universal fit is a ridiculous proposition,” she owns, speaking to the brand’s launching pillar: one single style. “But at the same time, everyone can wear a white T-shirt and feel sexy and smart, nonchalant and sophisticated in it. I was working on that premise with jeans.”
But as those who sew the crispest shirts, cut the sharpest tailoring and sole the best shoes know well, simplicity can be prodigiously complicated. “I didn’t want [the jeans] to be too low; I wanted them to sit on the natural waist. I didn’t want them to be skinny; I didn’t want them to be bootleg: I just wanted them dead straight,” says the bicoastal Dance (she splits her time between New York and LA), spooling off the design parameters that governed the four-year development process.
Such a list could only be put together by a stylist. Dance says she’s been privy to “every sort of denim in the world”, a statement that, given her career, could be close to true. After graduating from her studies in cinematography and journalism at the University of Sydney, Dance built up experience assisting at Vogue China and the The New York Times T Magazine before returning to Australia, taking a
magazine editorship then relocating to the US. Denim was always present in her work and in her own wardrobe. Now as fashion director of Pop magazine and consultant to Virgil Abloh at Off-White, who has created his own cult jeans, it’s part of the furniture.
“What comes to mind are portraits of Donald Judd at work in Marfa, Lee Radziwill, Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy, Joan Didion on the beach in Malibu,” she describes of the references that she’s mentally amassed over years prepping for shoots. “Bob Dylan, Jeff Bridges, Charlotte Gainsbourg, images of Richard Prince’s cowboys, Kate Moss in the 90s in a rigid jean and Manolos.”
The visual expression of all this comes through strongly in the jeans’ satisfyingly textural wash, the element Dance says she spent the most time on, along with the rise. The original ‘Genuine’ jean has five pockets and a button fly, rendered in a grainy blue that will play to the offhand nonchalance of creatives who seek out denim as a blank canvas. A hint of grey in the indigo allows it to easily match back with vintage denim but with only a soupçon of nostalgia – Dance doesn’t want her jeans pegged to a decade. “I wanted them to be contemporary and neutral and you can’t quite put your finger on it,” she says, mentioning the 90s, but also not the 90s.
The second colour is black – not a raw pigment-soaked hue but a lived-in kohl black, the denim equivalent of smudged, night-out eyeliner. Both renditions are achieved using an ozone wash, which utilises ozone gas and little water to fade the jeans. Dance’s label is more than notionally sustainable, using organic softeners rather than harsh acids, with labelling and packaging kept to a minimum.
Offcuts too are upcycled into denim insulation, through the program Blue Jeans Go Green.
“It should be the biggest conversation today,” says
Dance of sustainability. “Being a stylist and watching this endless rotation of trends was something that I really didn’t want to play into.” So she produces in small batches, saying customers are happy to wait for what they want. “We don’t have an aggressive growth plan where we’ve been making sure that we’re never out of stock of any size.”
Dance’s focus on universality also speaks to another tenet fashion is increasingly fixated on.
Rather than issuing diktats, she listens to her customers, who range from an 80-year-old woman in
Santa Barbara to Parisian men. She encourages clients to send in photos of themselves to determine their best fit, as well as answering an online quiz. The label offers moulding tips post-purchase (wearing them in a warm shower then doing squats is one), and strives to account for personal taste and a plethora of sizes. “Irrespective of whether I think a pair of jeans suits all, other people might think: ‘I can get them on but I don’t like them,’” Dance says. To that end she’s also personally willing to share her nous. “If you ever want Stevie to give her two cents, I’m down to look at photos!”
Since launching last year, Feel has added a hemp-cotton blend T-shirt and, most recently, white denim. After that will come cut-offs in “a sophisticated length” (Dance can’t stand shorts that are too short). She sees Feel as providing an essential “tool in your tool box for getting dressed and just getting on with things … It’s the most pure version of what you actually need it to be.” Sounds as close to perfect as you can get.
“Everyone can wear a white T-shirt and feel sexy, smart and sophisticated in it. I was working on that premise with jeans”