THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020 Y D5
As the number of abandoned storefronts
and closed retail outlets continues to mount,
the once unremarkable activity of shopping
at brick-and-mortar stores can feel like re-
ality askew — like a stroll through the Twi-
light Zone. As this glum new normal be-
comes the norm, signs of life can be almost
as jarring.
Take a pair of storefront windows on Bev-
erly Boulevard in Los Angeles. Just re-
cently they were lifeless reminders of an up-
scale furniture store, now defunct. Then in
August, they began to fill with seemingly
unconnected objects: bluejeans piled in a
chest-high mound, a lounge chair uphol-
stered in denim, a mannequin in a jumpsuit
with an eyeball for a head standing amid a
sea of paint-splattered drop cloths.
Hand-painted signage in the other win-
dow offered only that this “Appointment
Only” storefront with the cryptic displays,
and the 6,000 square feet of retail space be-
hind them, are the domain of Gallery Dept.
Despite the name, Gallery Dept. isn’t a
gallery or a department store but a hybrid
clothing label that sits somewhere in the
Venn diagram overlap between street wear
label, denim atelier, neighborhood tailor
and vintage store. Just as accurately, you
could call Gallery Dept. the personal art
project of its founder Josué Thomas, a de-
signer whose own creative urges are just as
disparate and layered.
With so many small brands in retreat this
summer, Mr. Thomas’s label has not only
weathered these spirit-crushing conditions,
but also thrived. In less than two years,
Gallery Dept. has moved from a crowded
workshop a few blocks down Beverly Boul-
evard to its new space in part because its
hoodies, logo tees, anoraks and flare-cut
jeans — each designed and hand-painted by
Mr. Thomas on upcycled or dead-stock gar-
ments — have become unlikely objets d’art
in a crowded street wear market.
THIS CORNER OFthe fashion industry is a
crowded one, and in recent years there have
been a glut of collaborations and merch
drops that have taken on a corporate ca-
dence. In contrast, Gallery Dept. is some-
thing of a bespoke operation, offering street
wear basics that are blessed with an artist’s
(in this case Mr. Thomas’s) singular touch.
Mr. Thomas began to cut jeans and
screen-print shirts as the mood struck in
2017, and since that time Gallery Dept. has
grown from an underground cult label for
collectors to one with atmospheric clout af-
ter being worn by Kendall Jenner, LeBron
James, Kendrick Lamar and two of the
three Migos (Offset and Quavo).
Those lucky enough to enter the appoint-
ment-only space, now booked with up to 20
appointments a day, are greeted inside by a
20-foot-tall span of wall that reads, “Art
That Kills” in a large crawl text, and the oc-
casional reference to Rod Serling’s seminal
sci-fi program.
Throughout the sunlit store, Mr. Thom-
as’s abstract paintings and writings fill the
spaces between clothing racks and bright
brass shelves heavy with the brand's thick
hoodies and sweatpants. Over the chug of
sewing machines, one can hear snippets of
bossa nova Muzak, a vinyl-only mix also
made by Mr. Thomas. (There are also plans
to release music by other artists, including
the New York rapper Roc Marciano, under
an Art That Kills imprint.)
Gallery Dept.’s new space was financed
on the strength of e-commerce sales from
this past spring, and not with the help of
venture capital or outside investors, Mr.
Thomas said on a recent walk-through. This
freedom gives him and the label, which now
employs 12 people, the freedom to operate
on its own esoteric terms. And there are a
few. In the store’s dressing rooms, there are
no mirrors to survey a fit. (“We’re going to
tell you if a piece works or not,” he said.) Nor
are there price tags on its garments.
“If the first thing you look at is the price,
it’s going to alter your thinking about a
piece,” he said. “I’d rather people engage
with the clothing first.”
The Gallery Dept. does not indulge pull
requests from stylists or send its pieces to
influencers, a practice Mr. Thomas explains
with a trace of punk indignation.
“Kendall doesn’t get a discount,” he said.
“We don’t seed. I don’t care who it is — we
don’t cater to different markets.”
Wearing cutoff carpenter pants and a
white T-shirt, each dusted in a fine rainbow
splatter, Mr. Thomas looked every bit like
an artist roused from his creative flow, com-
plete with paint-stained hands and individ-
ually colored fingernails. Standing in a
room with mauve carpet, Mr. Thomas
pointed out his latest ideas, pewter jewelry
in eccentric shapes, like an earring in the
shape of a zipper pull, made in collaboration
with the Chrome Hearts offshoot, Lone
Ones; and shorts cut from dead-stock mili-
tary laundry bags, all while explaining the
origins of his own style.
“I liked my parents’ clothing growing up,”
Mr. Thomas said. “As a teenager, I was able
to fit into my dad’s leather jacket. The beat-
up patina on it was perfect, and I realized
that that was personal style. It was some-
thing you couldn’t go to a store and buy.”
Mr. Thomas, who turned 36 in September,
never studied fashion or garment making,
and he can’t work a sewing machine. But
growing up as the son of immigrants from
Venezuela and Trinidad, he watched as his
parents subsisted on their raw artistic skills
to create a life in Los Angeles. And he now
uses those same talents as an artist and de-
signer: sign-painting, tie-dying, screen
printing. For a short time, his father, Stefan
Gilbert, even ran a private women’s wear
label.
Similarly, in his early 20s, Mr. Thomas
worked at Ralph Lauren. As one of the fewBlack people in creative roles in a predomi-
nantly white company, he soon realized that
the only way to survive in the fashion indus-
try would have to be with a project of his
own making.
“I was the ‘cool’ Black guy, but there was
nowhere for me to go,” he said. “Best case
would have been sourcing buttons for wom-
en’s outerwear or something.”
Gallery Dept.’s spontaneous inception
came about in 2016 when Mr. Thomas
sold a hand-sewn denim poncho off
his own back to Johnny Depp’s
stylist. At the time Mr. Thomas
was focused on making beats
and D.J.ing, but after selling
all of the pieces he had de-
signed for a small trunk
show at the Chateau Mar-
mont, he realized he had dis-
covered a new creative lane.
It had less to do with ponchos,
which were dropped from subse-
quent collections, and more to do with
old garments being remixed in the heat of
artistic paroxysm, with as little second-
guessing as possible. With the help of Jesse
Jones, a veteran tailor, Mr. Thomas began
churning out made-to-order pieces for
customers who often were unaware of
what, exactly, they had stumbled into.
“We were creating pieces while we were
selling them,” he said.
Working with heavy vintage shirts, hood-
ies, trucker hats, bomber jackets, whatever
was at hand, Mr. Thomas would frequently
screen-print the brand’s logo, adding paint
or other flourishes as the feeling struck.TODAY THAT EXTENDSto long-sleeve tees,
sweatpants and socks. At the time, he also
began blowing out the silhouette of vintage
Levi’s 501s and Carhartt work pants into a
subtle flare, accented with patches and re-
inforced stitching, resulting in a streetwise
update of the classic boot-cut jean.
Mr. Thomas christened this style of jeans
the “LA Flare.” And where denim has so his-
torically hewed to “his” and “her” catego-
ries, the LA Flare is the “they” of street
wear denim. (The label labels its items as
“unisex.”)
The jeans come with a luxury item’s price
tag, with a basic version starting at $395.
Custom tailoring and additional touches by
Mr. Thomas, can push the price upward of
$1,200. One early collaboration with
Chrome Hearts, a pair of orange-dyed flares
patched with that brand’s iconic gothic
crosses, has gone for $5,000 on Grailed.“There is nothing like Josué’s repurposed
jeans,” said George Archer, a senior buyer
at Mr Porter. “They are both a wearable
piece and a work of art. No one else is doing
what he’s doing.”
For Mr. Archer, who first noticed the
Gallery Dept. logo popping on men in Tokyo
in March, Mr. Thomas “interprets and cre-
ates” clothing as if it was an end in itself —
and not a commodity to be monetized.
(Nonetheless, Mr Porter hopes to monetize
a collection of Gallery Dept. pieces via its
e-commerce site this year.)
“You can feel the warmth of Josué’s
hands on each of the pieces,” said Motofumi
Kogi, the creative director of the Japanese
label United Arrows & Sons. An elder
statesmen of Tokyo’s street wear scene, Mr.
Kogi found the label on a trip to Los Angeles
last year. It’s not only Mr. Thomas’s artistic
touch that stands out to him but his vision
for remaking a staid garment into some-
thing that Mr. Kogi believes has not been
seen before.
“He took this staple of hip-hop culture
and refreshed it,” he said, referring to
Carhartt pants.
Getting the people who make that culture
to buy in was another matter. “The first
year we did the flare, in 2017, skinny jeans
were in,” Mr. Thomas said. “Rappers would
come into the shop and say they’d never
wear a flare. Now, everyone is wearing it.”
On Instagram, fit pics by rappers like
Rich the Kid, along with the aforementioned
Migos, Quavo and Offset, Gallery
Dept.’s flare has become a familiar
silhouette, skinny jeans break-
ing loose below the knee, usu-
ally coiled up at the ankle
around a pair of vintage Air
Jordans.
One fan of the jeans, Virgil
Abloh, sees Mr. Thomas’s
“edit” of the classic garment as
the next chapter of its history.
“Their flare cut is the most im-
portant new cut of denim in the last
decade — since the skinny jean,” Mr. Abloh
said. A self-described Levi’s “obsessive”
who owns more than 20 pairs of Gallery
Dept. jeans, he walked into Mr. Thomas’s
workshop one day after a routine stop at the
Erewhon Market across the street.
“I thought: ‘This is amazing. Here’s some
guys editing their own clothes in a shop,’ ”
he said. “It reminded me of what I was do-
ing when I started out, painting over logos,
making hand-personalized clothes.”MR. ABLOH CONSIDERSMr. Thomas’s work
to be the fashion equivalent of “ready-
made” art. He suggested that he and Mr.
Thomas come from a lineage of Black de-
signers that is still defining itself.
“He’s a perfect example of someone cre-
ating their own path from a community that
hasn’t traditionally participated in fashion,”
Mr. Abloh said. “I see Josué as making a
new canon of his own, showcasing what
Black design can do.”
Mr. Thomas didn’t argue with that. But he
was also a little preoccupied with whatever
was taking place at the tips of fingers to get
lost in the thought. The future of his brand,
after all, depends on his ability to stay in
that moment.
“People want things that aren’t con-
trived,” he said, pulling at his own shirt to
drive the point home. “This paint came from
me working. I wanted to recreate this feel-
ing. Once something is contrived, when you
can see through it, it’s ruined. There’s only
so much you want to explain.”ABOVE, RIGHT AND FAR RIGHT, MAGGIE SHANNON FOR THE NEW YORK TIMESGallery Dept. in the
Fairfax section of Los Angeles
sits somewhere between a
denim atelier, street wear
label and vintage store. Its
hoodies, flare-cut jeans and
logo T-shirts have become
unlikely objets d’art.The hottest new street wear
label in Los Angeles is more
like a personal creative project.
By NATHAN TAYLOR PEMBERTONIs It Clothing or Is It Art?
OLD
GARMENTS
REMIXED IN
THE HEAT OF
ARTISTIC
PAROXYSM.ABOVE, LEFT AND BELOW, JAMES LAW