![]() ![]() They’re typically built around the vision of a single founder they’ve embraced e-commerce and mostly skip wholesale if they do open stores, they’re retail operations that feel personal and considered. They provide thoughtful, legible clothing to men who’ve outgrown either hyped-up streetwear or limited basics. But Babenzien’s brand isn’t alone: his company belongs to a mature cohort of independent menswear brands, a group-John Elliott and Aimé Leon Dore, Todd Snyder and 18 East-I’ll call post-streetwear. If you are a youngish man who has spent the last few years growing interested-or obsessed beyond reason-with clothes, Noah is probably part of the reason why. If he couldn’t make it work, who else would try? If Babenzien couldn’t figure this out, something more than hoodies and T-shirts would be lost. Of course, such enlightened ambitions only raise the stakes when it comes to survival. Babenzien sees his company as a kind of lighthouse in the choppy, unethical waters of fashion-one that, by its very existence, models a conscious way forward. And it wasn't just the coronavirus: in June, when protests against police brutality and racial injustice sparked up, he was forced to ask whether his brand was doing enough in that fight, too. This was central to the founding ethos of the brand: a career in streetwear had taught Babenzien that cool without kindness was ultimately hollow. Noah gives one percent of its annual sales to grassroots environmental groups, and releases one-off goods to support various causes throughout the year. And you could only expect loyal customers to buy clothing they didn’t need for only so long, right?īut it was clear to Babenzien that getting through the crisis whole wasn’t enough. The government’s Paycheck Protection Program, meant to dispense loans to small businesses, was proving horrendously tricky to navigate. ![]() And small, independent brands-without deep-pocketed investors-were particularly vulnerable. ![]() Macy’s had furloughed most of its 125,000 employees Neiman Marcus and J.Crew would both file for bankruptcy in the weeks to come. Babenzien took to the company’s email list to encourage customers to appreciate the dire reality of the moment, calling on them to support the independent businesses that, like his, rely on regular cashflow to stay solvent.īecause, not quite a month after New York City went quiet, the clothing business was on the ropes. When we first spoke, all but a dozen of the 50-odd Noah staff had been furloughed. “You kind of go back to your roots,” he told me in the first of a number of phone conversations during the month of April. With those all shuttered, Babenzien had his assorted factories and suppliers send the fabric swatches, dye tests, embroideries, and garment samples-all of the fashion-business stuff that goes into making the brand’s rugby shirts and swim trunks and hoodies-straight to his door. The scene reminded him of the brand’s earliest days, five years ago-before the Noah boutiques in New York and Tokyo, before the department store outposts in London and L.A., before the brand staffed a warehouse in Brooklyn and populated an office in Soho. In March, when the coronavirus began forcing huge chunks of the country to work from home, Babenzien-the founder and designer of the streetwear-gone-prep label Noah-took his work home, too. The clothes piled up in one corner of Brendon Babenzien’s dining room, folded behind the section of the dinner table that had become his workplace-a little retail operation in his apartment. ![]()
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