San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
How a Levi’s designer recreated a 1980s British music scene in S.F. during COVID.
Levi’s recreates 1980s scene despite pandemic challenges
One truth about the fashion industry that Paul O’Neill has learned over his decades in the business is that it stops for nothing or no one. In his role as head designer for Levi’s Vintage Clothing, O’Neill needs to come up with a new collection every six months — no matter what.
“There’s no, ‘It’ll come out when it’s ready.’ It has to be done in six months. So we always have to be tuned in to it,” the 44yearold O’Neill says from his home in El Cerrito. “I’ve always got like three or four collections in my head floating around.”
During these early 2021 months, Levi’s Vintage has been debuting O’Neill’s latest collection, Loose Fix. It’s an ode to the “Madchester” music scene that manifested in Manchester, England, during the late ’80s and early ’90s, when bands like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays (who inspired the collection’s name) were developing the indie dance sound, which melded college rock riffs with dance beats of the burgeoning rave culture. Like practically every music scene, Manchester’s was marked by an identifiable fashion sense, one that blended the rugged, vintage look of thrift store clothing with the windbreakers and hoodies made necessary by the city’s gloomy weather.
Taking the tribute further, O’Neill also designed a series of hoodies and longsleeved white shirts featuring artwork from the
albums of the Happy Mondays — playful, brightcolored logos and paintings from Central Station Design that represented the Mondays’ sound perfectly.
It’s the second collection O’Neill’s designed since the pandemic began — his first was No Fun, based on the postpunk scene of 1980s Louisville, Ky. — and, naturally, the coronavirus pandemic has made his job more difficult. While he had already designed the Loose Fix collection before COVID19 struck, it became almost impossible for the production of the “lookbook” — the main marketing materials for the collection — to meet the quality of past books. A process that usually meant traveling to some exotic locale and taking photos of models in O’Neill’s clothes was flipped on its head due to travel restrictions.
So for O’Neill’s Manchester collection he had to find a way to bring the northern England city to San Francisco. It seemed like such a massive undertaking that O’Neill was ready to drop the lookbook all together and just take some generic photos of models wearing his new clothes. It would have been disappointing but at least he’d have something. Then a friend of his emailed him the Instagram account of a Mancunian (a native of Manchester) who took up a new hobby during the pandemic — making miniatures of his home city.
In a moment of clarity, O’Neill realized the potential of using a miniature Manchester for the lookbook. He was exhilarated.
“We’re kind of pushed into this situation because of what’s going on, but it was actually more exciting than the normal approach,” O’Neill says, after spending months on making the lookbook.
O’Neill didn’t pursue a career in fashion to play around with dioramas and video effects, but the lookbook needed to happen. This collection also happens to be O’Neill’s most personal one yet. He has been a fan of the music from Manchester since he was a kid, from the Smiths to the Buzzcocks and beyond. But it’s also where his fashion career began more than 20 years ago, and where he cemented his love of vintage clothing.
Born in 1976 in Dublin, Ireland, O’Neill says he wasn’t into fashion growing up, and he’s still not. He’s into style.
“I don’t care what the latest trend is, or what celebrities are wearing or anything like that, but I’ve always been into people who have good style,” O’Neill says. “That could be just an old man on a bus or it could be someone wearing a Gucci suit, it doesn’t really matter.”
O’Neill started finding his own style as a teenage fan of thrash metal — or “trash metal,” as he calls it, because of his Irish accent.
He dressed the part of an ’80s metalhead, wearing his hair long and a denim jacket with a back patch from one of his favorite bands. As he grew older, his musical tastes softened. The psychedelic dance songs of the Happy Mondays and the Stone Roses led him to ’60s bands like the Doors and the Velvet Underground, and with that a fascination with the clothing of that time. Shopping trips looking for old records expanded to hunts for suede flares and bellbottoms.
The decision to become a fashion designer came in his 20s, after he spent a few years as an abstract painter. Some of his friends worked in the industry, and they gave him a new perspective on the work, demonstrating to him that making clothes didn’t have to be focused on what was trending.
“It wasn’t all about fashion. You could approach it from an artistic point of view or from a historical point of view,” O’Neill says.
So he headed to design school in Manchester, moving there in ’97 and spending the next six years there, first earning a bachelor’s degree in fashion and apparel design before working as a pattern maker at a local shop. These were good times for O’Neill. While the legendary night club the Hacienda had closed and the original Madchester bands like the Happy Mondays and Stone Roses had all broken up, he could still go to the local pub and see his favorite musicians hanging out, getting drunk.
But O’Neill was still focused on the ’60s, eschewing raves for DJs playing Northern Soul records during the town’s traditional allnight dance parties, where some locals dressed as they did back during soul’s heyday. And his obsession also drove his designs, especially his final collection for school.
“It was kind of a Mod experiment. Slimfitting pants, suit jackets with a center front zip, bold patterns and high buttonover collars,” O’Neill says, adding that much of his inspiration for his final collection at school came from a shirt Bob Dylan wore for the album “Blonde on Blonde.”
By the late ’90s, Levi’s was also looking back. Vintage Levi’s jeans with the “Big E” red label were in high demand, especially in Japan. This inspired Levi’s to start reproducing some of its vintage products, which proved to be so popular the company began producing small collections in Japan, Europe and the U.S. By 2009, Levi’s was crafting a global collection, Levi’s Vintage Clothing, based out of Amsterdam.
O’Neill joined the team in Amsterdam the year it began, and he proved to be an asset right away. His research skills helped them find concepts to provide historical context that they could build a collection’s story around. Each collection wasn’t just a few reproduced pieces from long ago; they were reproductions of moments in time, like the early days of boxing in America or the construction of Mount Rushmore.
“Every season, Paul brings to life these incredible narratives — each one grounded in Levi’s archival history, but made relevant and modern through Paul’s unique process of design synthesis,” Paul Dillinger, Levi’s vice president of Global Design Innovation, wrote in an email. “Where the material record ends, he fills in the gaps with his sophisticated style: beautiful colors, refined patterns, relevant fits and graphics that reflect his sharp wit.”
At first, Levi’s didn’t give the vintage line enough of a marketing budget for the team to produce the lookbook, so O’Neill and the rest of his team threw down their own money and begged friends to help make their own. The pamphlet they put together for the Summer 2011 collection about the construction of Mount Rushmore wasn’t the fanciest, but it got the point across, demonstrating the historical context that inspired the collection by having the models act like workers in a quarry. The company loved the project and agreed to fund future lookbooks.
After producing 10 collections, Levi’s closed the Amsterdam offices and brought O’Neill to San Francisco to be the head designer for Levi’s Vintage. O’Neill used his position to create collections based
on even more specialized cultural events, such as the launch of Sputnik in 1957 and Dylan’s pilgrimage to Greenwich Village in early 1961. O’Neill also began investing more into the lookbook and promotional materials, scheduling photo shoots in faroff places like Jamaica and releasing vinyl records from fake bands he created to push the clothing.
Over time, the collections started selling out, snatched up by foreign buyers and Levi’s obsessives.
“For ‘denim heads’ like me, the Levi Strauss & Co. Archive is sacred ground and Paul’s exacting reproductions of vintage Levi’s products provide a rare glimpse into the history of the denim industry’s material record,” Dillinger wrote. “Paul’s ‘501 Timeline’ product series is an extraordinary tool for anyone who wants to study the evolution of denim design and production.”
After the pandemic hit and foreign countries stopped travel, O’Neill realized that his next lookbook, for Loose Fix, wouldn’t happen as he planned. But then a friend sent him a link to the Instagram account of Ric Facchin, who started building miniatures of Manchester landmarks.
“A couple of days later, I’m sitting on the couch, looking at my phone, and then I just see a pic of Ric painting a model,” O’Neill says. “I was like, ‘Jeepers, he’s actually recreating these buildings.’ They’re not buildings. They’re like little scale models of buildings. And then alarm bells are going crazy in my head.”
O’Neill reached out to Facchin but was ignored. “At first I was convinced it was a windup or a timewaster,” Facchin says. “However, I then went and found his name on LinkedIn and obviously I got back to him pronto with my cap in hand.”
Facchin had sold all his models before O’Neill reached out, but the Mancunian model maker was happy to produce more. Under O’Neill’s direction, Facchin recreated scenes from Manchester’s past, including the Factory Records building and King Bee Records. A photographer there then took photos based on O’Neill’s instructions and relayed the image to O’Neill.
“He was really focused on building the underground Manchester, the local Manchester, that not everyone knew about,” O’Neill says about Facchin’s work. “And he was super detailed. I’d phone him and he’d be like, ‘Oh, I’m just on my way over to check the plumbing on that building.’ He’d want to make sure that he had the pipes right.”
While O’Neill solved one problem with Facchin’s Manchester models, it created another issue: perspective. He couldn’t just take photos of models and add them to pictures of Facchin’s creations; he had to consider angles of light, the height of the photographer and many other math problems.
“I put a lot of work into all of the shoots, but this one, I was up every night on a Zoom with the retoucher. And we were constantly working on everything ... trying to get the right vision through for it,” O’Neill says.
In the end the Loose Fix lookbook turned out even better than O’Neill hoped, with Facchin’s help, of course.
But O’Neill hasn’t had time to really enjoy his work or even breathe for that matter as he’s already planning for his next collection, which comes out in a few months. (He wouldn’t let us reveal it.)
“You know, we’re meant to be doing a shoot in March,” O’Neill says. “That’s kind of unlikely as well, but we have more tricks up our sleeves.”