At Work, custom denim and electro-rock are the order of business.
You never know whom you’re going to meet.
At a party in 2004, married couple Megan Gold and Robbie Williamson, then the owners of a year-old Los Angeles store that imported items by independent Japanese designers, complemented then-stranger Brian Kim on his jeans. Kim, a drummer and self-taught designer, had crafted the well-fitting trousers himself.
The trio formed a band, with Gold on vocals and Williamson on bass. Eventually, Kim set up a custom denim business in the store.
This year—with a fourth partner, denim designer David Hershberger—the collective revamped the Echo Park Boulevard store into Work Custom Denim, a tiny shop and studio space where, for $500, die-hard denim hounds can have a pair of custom jeans made.
“We called it Work because that’s what it is,” says Gold. “It seems like a lot of money for each pair, but it’s so much work to make a pair of custom jeans.”
The process includes three or four fittings and takes anywhere from two weeks to a month, depending on the project’s scope. The primary goal is a flawless fit—and forget about asking for Swarovski-encrusted back pockets. “These guys are denim purists,” says Gold, who handles the business side of the company with Williamson. “They don’t like washes.”
Kim sources unusual denim from “all over—from mom-and-pop stores to dead-stock warehouses,” he says.
By night, the original trio morphs into an electro-rock band, also called Work. In the store’s tiny back room, crammed to capacity with music gear, the bandmates write and record drum-machine-driven experimental rock. They recently snagged a monthly gig at hip downtown club Little Pedro’s.
And Work recently caught the eye of Brian Kaneda, denim buyer for L.A.’s iconic Ron Herman boutiques, known for lending instant pedigree to fledgling brands. “I saw their storefront, and it had all this dead-stock denim. I had to know what they were doing,” says Kaneda. “I think it’s so exciting that there’s a place where you can get custom jeans—and not just tailored. It’s practically couture.”
Related Articles
You May Also Like
Kaneda recently commissioned Work for a series of limited-edition jeans, to be carried exclusively in the Ron Herman store on Melrose Avenue. The jeans will retail at $250, and only around 20 pieces of each style will be made.
The first model, aptly called the Kaneda, will be available sometime in September. “It’s basically my idea of a great jean that we’re going to share with everyone else,” says the buyer. The next style will be crafted with a yet-to-be-named local lady in mind: “a fixture in music or fashion in Echo Park, but not a celebrity,” says Kaneda. “This is kind of the opposite of that.”