DU 005: The Brooklyn Denim Revival (2014 - today)

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By Eric Steffen
Founder / Maker
FITTED Underground

In America, and Brooklyn in particular, we used to make things.

In the 1920s, the Domino Sugar refinery in Williamsburg was the largest in the world, producing half the country's sugar. The waterfront hummed with factories — glass, rope, iron, textiles, paint. Knitwear manufacturers crowded into loft buildings in Greenpoint and Bushwick. Garment workers, most of them immigrants who brought centuries of craft tradition from Eastern Europe and the Mediterranean, bent over cutting tables and sewing machines in buildings that still stand on streets you walk today. At the turn of the twentieth century Brooklyn wasn't just a borough — it was a manufacturing civilization.

Then the factories left. First slowly, then all at once. The logic of cheap offshore labor began rewriting the map of American industry through the second half of the twentieth century. By the 1980s, the manufacturing floor of the borough had been largely emptied, the buildings converted to residential lofts or left to decay. What Brooklyn made, and how it made it, was forgotten.

What happened next took decades to understand.

The Artists Arrive — and Then the Makers

The story of Brooklyn's revival is usually told as a real estate story — artists move in, rents rise, developers follow, artists move out. And that's true as far as it goes. The painter migration from Manhattan to the Lower East Side, then to Williamsburg, then Bushwick, then Ridgewood, is a well-documented cycle of creative colonization and displacement. Each neighborhood is discovered, made bohemian, made cool, made expensive, and abandoned to the next wave.

In New York City, creativity migrated east as the city began to gentrify in the 1990s, from the Lower East Side, to Williamsburg and on to Bushwick and Queens.

But underneath that story is a different one. The artists who came to Brooklyn weren't just looking for cheap rent. They were looking for space. The borough had warehouses and lofts and industrial buildings that Manhattan no longer had — room for studios, workshops, kilns, presses, looms. Room to work. And gradually, alongside the painters and musicians, another kind of maker arrived: people who wanted to build objects with their hands. Furniture. Leather goods. Beer. Food. Clothing. Things that took time and skill and required you to actually know what you were doing.

This is the maker movement, and Brooklyn became its American capital, not by accident but by infrastructure — the physical legacy of a manufacturing past that had left its buildings behind even as it departed.

Beyond the Hipster

There's a version of this story that ends in parody. The bearded artisan in the flannel shirt, charging fourteen dollars for a jar of small-batch pickle relish. The Brooklyn brand as costume, as aesthetic, as a product of trust fund money cosplaying as working class. That critique has real teeth. The early 2000s version of Brooklyn cool was, in some ways, a performance — dressing up as workers in a neighborhood where actual workers had been priced out.

But beneath the performance was something genuine, and it's worth separating the two. The countercultural impulse behind the maker movement — the instinct that there is something broken about a world where everything is made somewhere else, by someone you'll never meet, in conditions you'd rather not know about — that instinct is not cosplay. It's a legitimate moral response to a legitimate problem. The hipster aesthetic faded. The underlying values didn't.

What's left, a decade and a half later, is something more serious: a genuine craft revival in Brooklyn — and across American cities — driven by people who aren't playing at making things. They're actually making them.

The maker movement is bigger than denim, and it was already taking root in Brooklyn long before I founded FITTED Underground in 2014. A few of the companies that have helped establish the borough as a maker capital:

• Mark Jupiter — Fourth-generation New Yorker Mark Jupiter builds custom furniture by hand from reclaimed materials, including vintage Singer sewing machines. Located at 191 Plymouth Street in DUMBO, his philosophy: "While many brands have felt as though they have outgrown Brooklyn, we are committed to growing within it."
• Uhuru Design — Founded in Red Hook in 2004, Uhuru builds sustainable furniture from reclaimed materials including wood from the Coney Island Boardwalk and bourbon barrels from Kentucky distilleries. Their work is in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian.
• Kings County Distillery — New York City's oldest whiskey distillery, making handmade bourbon and rye from New York State organic corn since 2010, inside a 123-year-old building at the Brooklyn Navy Yard.
• Brooklyn Brewery — Founded in 1988, Brooklyn Brewery was making the case for local, craft, and worth-the-price long before anyone called it a movement.
• Knickerbocker Mfg. Co. — In 2013, founder Andrew Livingston bought a closing 60-year-old factory on the Brooklyn-Queens border — sewing machines included — and built a menswear brand around it.

The American Revival: A Timeline

While Brooklyn was building its maker identity, something parallel was happening in workshops across the country. A small wave of American denim brands launched between 2008 and 2013, each one a bet that a certain kind of American consumer was ready to pay more for something made with genuine care.

In Los Angeles in 2008, Rogue Territory began as a custom denim workshop inside American Rag's World Denim Bar — offering fully bespoke jeans to a select clientele before pivoting to ready-to-wear the following year. That same year in San Francisco, lifelong friends Tony Patella and Pete Searson founded Tellason around a simple premise: return to the birthplace of the blue jean and make the best possible version of it, using American selvedge from Cone Mills and cutting and sewing everything in California. Also in 2008, 3sixteen — founded in New York by Andrew Chen and Johan Lam — made its denim pivot, launching the SL-100x jean in partnership with Kuroki Mills in Japan, blending Japanese fabric with American production.

In 2010, Steven Dang — a full-time graveyard shift mechanic for the LA Metro — started Railcar Fine Goods in a spare bedroom, then a garage, then a workshop in Arcadia, California, where he worked double shifts between repairing trains and building jeans. Every garment cut and sewn in-house, by hand, on vintage machinery — a philosophy he described not as producing garments but as building them. In 2013, brothers Matt and Andrew Brodrick founded Freenote Cloth in San Juan Capistrano — workwear-inspired, California-made, uncompromisingly built.

What these brands share is more important than what distinguishes them. None of them started with money. All of them started with conviction. All of them bet that the story of how something is made matters — that a consumer exists who wants to know where their jeans came from, who made them, and why it cost what it cost. They were right. By 2012 the raw denim revival had found its audience, nurtured by early internet forums, the subreddit r/rawdenim, and a community of enthusiasts who passed fade photos and wash reports between themselves with the intensity of collectors.

None of them started with money. All of them started with conviction — and a bet that a consumer existed who wanted to know where their jeans came from and why it mattered.

108 Bayard Street

It probably makes sense for me to pause here and tell you my own story.

Before I was a jeansmaker, I was a banker. And before I was a banker, I was a Peace Corps volunteer in South Africa. For almost three years (I extended my service) I lived in a rural village just south of the Zimbabwean border in a region known as Venda. In the Western world, the individual is the primary unit of meaning. In Africa, the community is. The family. The tribe. In the Zulu and Xhosa philosophical traditions, this is called Ubuntu: a worldview that says, roughly, "I am because we are." Not as a slogan but as a lived reality. The way decisions got made. The way trust was built. The way I needed to get permission from every stakeholder before moving forward with a project. The whole was greater than the sum of its parts.

I came home and went to graduate school and entered finance, because I genuinely enjoyed the skill set, but also because that's what you did. I had loans to pay off. And for 3.5 years I was reasonably good at a job that had nothing to do with Ubuntu or community or making. I enjoyed the work, but not the demands of an intensely capitalistic lifestyle. Ultimately, I was miserable in a clean, well-compensated way that's easy to rationalize — until it isn't.

The idea for FITTED Underground arrived the way that the best ideas often do: quietly, irrationally, insistently. With a soul that wanted to live whether I was ready for it or not. I've written about the moment of saying yes elsewhere on this site. What I'll say here is what that yes required: I had to teach myself to sew. And make patterns. And design. Not to mention market, build teams, and sell. But first — to sew. I spent years working alone, learning a craft from scratch with no shortcuts available. I made mistakes. I made bad jeans. I made better jeans. I became, over a decade, a maker — not because I had talent or training or capital, but because I refused to stop.

I became a maker not because I had talent or training or capital, but because I refused to stop.

Part of what I do now is teach. The next generation of makers needs people willing to pass on what they've learned — the pattern making, the fitting, the fabric knowledge, the thousand small decisions that go into a garment made with intention. That knowledge lives in people, not in manuals. It gets transmitted the way all craft knowledge gets transmitted: slowly, in person, through relationship. That's Ubuntu too, even if nobody calls it that in Williamsburg.

At 108 Bayard Street we make jeans. But what we're really doing — what this whole enterprise is really about — is making an argument that craft matters; that values matter. That the relationship between maker and wearer is worth caring about. That the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Why Brooklyn. Why Now.

Brooklyn is the right place for this revival because Brooklyn has never fully made peace with the idea that making things is over. The artist migration that transformed the borough over the past three decades was, at its core, a migration of people who believed that creating something — painting it, writing it, building it, growing it, sewing it — is a more honest way to spend a life than maximizing for efficiency and profit.

That's a value system, not cosplay. Not an aesthetic. And it's a value system that runs deeper than the boutique honey or the artisanal candle. It runs into questions about who we want to be as a people, as a society and culture. What kind of economy we choose to have determines, to a large extent, who we get to be, at least externally.

Brooklyn is a place with genuine diversity — of people and of thought — where ideas get tested against each other, where people are encouraged to push boundaries and challenge assumptions, where art and commerce and community exist in productive friction. As a friend put it: Manhattan is where you go once you've established an idea. Brooklyn is where you go once you discover it.

We're somewhere in between, but our heart and values are decidedly rooted in Brooklyn.

The Bigger Picture: From Me to We

Here's what I believe: we as a country and an economy have tilted too far toward laissez faire capitalism.

The dominant logic of late-twentieth-century American capitalism — maximize shareholder value, externalize every cost you can, grow as fast as the market will allow — produced extraordinary wealth and extraordinary hollowness simultaneously. The manufacturing jobs left. The craft knowledge left. Garments got cheaper and more disposable. The people who made them became invisible. And the people who bought them lost the story — the connection between the object in their hands and the human being who made it.

The craft revival is a correction. Not a rejection of markets or profit — but a rebalancing. A shift from "how do we maximize return?" to "how do we create something worth making?" From shareholder value to stakeholder value. From me to we. From the quarterly report to the generational investment. From the garment designed to last a season to the garment designed to last a decade.

The craft revival is not a rejection of markets or profit. It's a rebalancing — from shareholder value to stakeholder value, from me to we, from the garment designed to last a season to the garment designed to last a decade.

This is what slow fashion means at its best — not a luxury market segment or a marketing term, but a set of values about what clothing should be and what the act of making it should mean. Values that say: the person who made your clothes deserves to earn a living wage and work in conditions you'd be comfortable knowing about. That a garment worth repairing is worth more than one worth replacing. That understanding where something comes from and how it was made changes your relationship with it — makes it more yours, more meaningful, more worth keeping.

In Macbeth, Shakespeare wrote of "vaulting ambition that o'erleaps itself" — ambition so overreaching that it undermines its own purpose. That's what happened to American capitalism — and doomed American manufacturing. It o'erleaped itself. It chased scale and speed and margin until it had none of the things that made it worth doing. Japan didn't make that mistake. We can still learn that lesson, too.

Every pair of jeans we make at FITTED Underground is a small argument for that rebalancing. A vote, cast in denim, for the idea that craft matters. That beauty matters. That the things we put on our bodies every day are worth caring about — and worth making well.

Every pair of jeans we make at FITTED Underground is a small argument for that rebalancing. A vote, cast in denim, for the idea that craft matters.

What Comes Next

That's the history. Five articles, six thousand years, one garment. Now the real education begins.

The 100 level covers what raw denim actually is — the fabric, the construction, the terminology, every part of a jean explained from the waistband down. The 200 level covers buying — how to find your fit, how much to spend, why a pair of well-made jeans costs what it costs. The 300 level covers care and wear — how to wash, how fading works, how to get great fades, how to repair what you love rather than replace it. The 400 level goes inside the craft. The 500 level asks the bigger questions about culture and slow fashion and what it means to build an economy around things worth making.

All of it points toward the same place: a more conscious relationship between the person who makes something and the person who wears it. Denim University exists because we believe that education changes behavior — that a customer who understands what raw denim is, why Japanese selvedge costs what it costs, what the fade on a well-worn pair represents in terms of time and life lived, makes different choices. Better choices. For themselves, for the people who make their clothes, and for a planet that can't absorb the cost of disposable fashion indefinitely.

That's the course. That's the point. Now let's go to class.

← Previous: DU 004 — How Japan Saved Raw Denim  |  Next: DU 101 — What is Raw Denim? →

Further Reading

• Getting to Yes — FITTED Underground
• Mission, Purpose & Values — FITTED Underground
• How to Buy Your First Pair of Raw Denim Jeans — DU 201
• How It Works — FITTED Underground

Eric Steffen is the founder of FITTED Underground, a custom jeans and raw denim workshop at 108 Bayard Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. He has been making jeans by hand since 2014. Denim University is his attempt to share everything he's learned — about the history, the craft, and the culture behind the world's most enduring garment.