DU 504: The Philosophy Behind FITTED Underground
Summary
Denim University consists of more than 40 articles about denim. This one is about why FITTED Underground actually exists. The answer has little to do with jeans — it has everything to do with what kind of world we all want to live in. Before making jeans, Eric Steffen worked in investment banking, where 100-hour weeks were not unheard of and the organizing logic was the accumulation of wealth for a narrow class of people at the expense of everyone below them. FITTED Underground is a proof of concept for a different way — wholistic capitalism in practice, at maximum difficulty, with every month in business as a data point. It was never just about the clothes. The clothes are just the beginning.
Q&A
Why did Eric Steffen leave investment banking?
The work was genuinely stimulating and the pay was good — he's honest about both. But the incentive structure was wrong. The board had hired managers to maximize shareholder value, and managers were rewarding performance as a productive asset. The human being inside the asset was not the primary consideration. Sixty-hour weeks were normal; hundred-hour weeks were not unheard of. The costs — in health, time, human dignity — were not appearing on any balance sheet. They were being externalized onto the people doing the work. The intuition said: if you follow these incentives to their logical conclusion, they produce a world most people would not choose to live in.
Why did he choose jeans specifically?
Two reasons — philosophical and personal. Philosophically: denim is the most democratic garment ever made, and slow fashion — buying fewer, better things and keeping them longer — is the most direct counter-argument to everything the fast fashion system represents. The material and the philosophy are perfectly matched. A garment that gets better with age is the living argument against disposability. Personally: he loved the craft itself, and believed — still believes — that you cannot build something good unless you love the work. The philosophical argument alone is not enough. The work has to mean something beyond the argument it makes.
What does FITTED Underground represent as a proof of concept?
If a slow fashion brand making jeans by hand in Brooklyn — one of the most expensive cities in the world, in one of the most labor-intensive product categories there is — can build a sustainable business, then the argument for wholistic capitalism becomes very difficult to dismiss. Because if the model works here, at the hardest possible difficulty setting, then it certainly works for software companies, financial services firms, technology businesses, and consumer goods companies with less brutal cost structures. Every month FITTED Underground stays in business is a data point. Every pair of jeans sold is evidence. The difficulty of the model in fashion is not an argument against wholistic capitalism — it is the strongest possible argument for it.
What is wholistic capitalism and how does it differ from socialism?
Wholistic capitalism is the idea that a business exists to create value for all the stakeholders it touches — workers, customers, suppliers, communities, and owners — rather than optimizing exclusively for shareholders. It is not an argument for equal distribution of value across all contributors. The creation of value is not uniform and the rewards don't need to be either. The argument is that the current system has become perverse in a specific and correctable way: the people at the top are accruing too much of the value relative to what they actually create, and the costs are being borne by everyone else. Wholistic capitalism is a correction at the level of purpose — embedded at the founding, expressed in every subsequent decision.
What does "every purchase is a vote" mean in this context?
It means consumers hold more power than the system wants them to believe. Choosing, consistently and deliberately, to support brands whose values you know — whose workers you can imagine, whose purpose aligns with their product — is participation in a different economic system than the mainstream market is offering. That choice, multiplied across enough consumers, is how systems begin to change. Not through legislation, not through protest, but through the quiet, persistent accumulation of purchasing decisions made by people who understand what they're choosing.
Test Your Knowledge
Click each answer to reveal whether it's correct.
1. What does Eric Steffen identify as the fundamental problem with the incentive structure in investment banking?
A. The work was intellectually unstimulating and poorly compensated
❌ Incorrect. The article explicitly acknowledges that the intellectual environment was genuinely stimulating and the pay was good. The problem was not the quality or compensation of the work — it was the incentive structure and what it was optimizing for.
B. The incentives optimized for returns to people at the top by extracting as much as possible from people below — externalizing the costs onto the people doing the work, invisible on any balance sheet
✓ Correct. Managers were rewarded for making shareholders money, which meant everyone below the managers needed to perform as a productive asset. The costs — in health, time, human dignity — were not appearing on any balance sheet. They were being externalized. The problem was not hard work itself. It was an incentive structure producing the hard work while optimizing for the wrong thing: returns to the people at the top at the expense of the people doing the actual work.
C. The hours were too long and prevented a satisfying personal life
❌ Incorrect. The brutal hours were a symptom, not the diagnosis. The fundamental problem was the incentive structure that produced the hours — optimizing for shareholder returns by extracting maximum performance from the people below.
D. Finance is inherently unethical because it creates no tangible goods
❌ Incorrect. The article does not argue that finance is inherently unethical or that tangible goods production is morally superior. The argument is about incentive structures — which can be wrong in any industry, including jeans manufacturing.
2. Why is "working within the system to change it from inside" described as insufficient?
A. Large companies are too bureaucratic to implement meaningful change
❌ Incorrect. The argument is not about bureaucracy. It's about incentives — the system's incentives are stronger than individual intention and operate continuously, tending to absorb and reshape the person trying to change things from within.
B. Working within the system tends to produce absorption — the system's incentives are stronger than individual intention and operate continuously, tending to make you become the thing you're trying to change
✓ Correct. The three options faced were: urge others to change (produces words), work within the system to change it (tends to produce absorption — you become the thing you're trying to change, because the system's incentives are stronger than your individual intention), or start from an entirely new vantage point. Building something, rather than arguing for something, lets the proof of concept exist in the world rather than in a white paper.
C. Individual employees lack the authority to change corporate policy
❌ Incorrect. The problem isn't about authority. It's about what happens to individual intention under sustained exposure to a system's incentives — the tendency for the system to reshape the person rather than the other way around.
D. Systemic change requires political action, not business action
❌ Incorrect. The article's argument is precisely that business action — building a proof of concept — can be more effective than political argument or working from within an existing institution.
3. Why is the difficulty of the business model in fashion described as the "strongest possible argument" for wholistic capitalism?
A. Fashion has the highest profit margins of any consumer goods category, making it the ideal test case
❌ Incorrect. The opposite is true. Hand-manufacturing clothing in Brooklyn is described as a brutally difficult economic model — high labor costs, significant cost base, unable to compete on price alone. The argument is that if it works here, it works anywhere easier.
B. If the model works at the hardest possible difficulty setting — hand-manufacturing in one of the world's most expensive cities — then it certainly works for industries with less brutal cost structures
✓ Correct. Making clothes by hand in Brooklyn is maximum difficulty: high labor costs, expensive city, labor-intensive product. By conventional capitalist metrics, the article admits it makes limited sense. But if a brand running that model can build a sustainable business, the argument for wholistic capitalism becomes very difficult to dismiss — because if it works here, it works for software companies with 80% gross margins, for financial services firms, for technology businesses. Every month in business is a data point.
C. Fashion has the largest consumer base, making consumer behavior change most impactful there
❌ Incorrect. The argument is about economic difficulty, not market size. The point is that the cost structure of hand-manufacturing in Brooklyn is among the most challenging possible — making sustainability there a particularly strong proof of concept.
D. Fashion is the most visible industry, so success there creates the most publicity for wholistic capitalism
❌ Incorrect. The argument is about economic difficulty, not visibility. The strength of the proof of concept comes from succeeding under hard conditions — not from the attention that success might generate.
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By Eric Steffen
Founder / Maker
FITTED Underground
It's time to show my hand.
I've written about the history of indigo, the science of fading, the economics of raw denim, the philosophy of repair. I've argued for slow fashion and against fast fashion, for craftsmanship and against disposability, for the kind of clothing that gets better with age and against the kind designed to be thrown away. And underneath all of it, I've implied a deeper argument without quite making it directly.
This article makes it directly.
The Surface: True But Incomplete
I love denim. That part is real and I don't want to undercut it. There is something genuinely special about a garment that becomes more beautiful with wear — that records the specific texture of a specific life in indigo and friction and time. Rugged meets refined. The most democratic garment ever made, worn by miners and presidents and every generation of rebel in between. I mean all of that.
Love of denim is only part of why FITTED Underground exists. The deeper reason is to introduce an economic model that works for all, not just some.
And the craft itself — the patternmaking, the sourcing, the machines, the fitting, the specific satisfaction of handing someone a pair of jeans that fits them the way nothing they've ever owned has fit them — I love that too. I have been doing this for over a decade and I still find it interesting. That is not nothing.
But love of denim is not why FITTED Underground exists. It is the vehicle. The reason is something else, something I've been working toward saying clearly since I started, and something I think this curriculum has finally given me the language to say.
Investment Banking: In the Belly of the Beast
Before I made jeans, I worked in investment banking for a big bank. Let me be honest about my experience: I liked a lot of it.
The intellectual environment was genuinely stimulating — the problems were hard, the people were sharp, and there was a rigor to the work that I respect to this day. And I'll be frank — after being a teacher, Peace Corps Volunteer, and a graduate student, it was nice to get paid well.
But there was also something wrong with it. Sixty-hour weeks were normal. Eighty-hour weeks happened regularly. A hundred-hour week was not unheard of. That kind of schedule is brutal in ways that are difficult to describe — not just in terms of time, but in terms of what it does to your sense of yourself, your relationships, your capacity for anything outside of work.
I started following the breadcrumbs. Why were we being asked to work this hard? The answer, when I traced it back far enough, was straightforward: the board had hired managers to maximize shareholder value, and managers were being rewarded for making shareholders money. That meant everyone below the managers needed to perform as a productive asset. The human being inside the asset was not the primary consideration.
I want to be clear here. I have nothing against productivity. Hard work is not the problem. The problem is the incentive structure that was producing the hard work — and what that incentive structure was optimizing for. It was optimizing for returns to the people at the top of the organization, and it was doing so by extracting as much as possible from the people below them. The costs of that extraction — in health, in time, in human dignity — were not appearing on any balance sheet. They were being externalized. Borne by the people doing the work.
I didn't have the language for it at the time. But I had the intuition, and the intuition said: these incentives are wrong. Not wrong as in illegal. Wrong as in — if you follow them to their logical conclusion, they produce a world that most people would not choose to live in.
A Better Way: Wholistic Capitalism
The question that followed me out of banking was: what would it look like if the economic incentives were aligned with the whole institution — not just the shareholders?
I want to be precise about what I mean by this, because it's easy to misread. I'm not arguing for socialism. I'm not calling for the redistribution of wealth equally across all contributors to an organization. The creation of value is not uniform and the rewards for it don't need to be either. What I am arguing is that the current system has become perverse in a specific and correctable way: the people at the top are accruing too much of the value relative to what they actually create, and the costs of that accumulation are being borne by everyone else — workers, communities, the environment, future generations.
Wholistic capitalism — a term I've been developing through this curriculum and examine in more depth in DU 503 — is the correction. A business model in which stakeholder value is weighed alongside shareholder value as a founding principle rather than an afterthought. Not as charity. Not as PR. As the actual logic of the enterprise, embedded at the founding, expressed in every subsequent decision.
It has to start somewhere. And so I thought: let it start with me.
Not arguing for a different system — building one.
When the incentives are aligned this way, the decisions change. Who you hire and how you pay them. Where you source your materials and from whom. How you price your product and why. A wholistically capitalist company makes different decisions at every step because its purpose is different at the founding — and purpose expresses itself faithfully all the way down to the finished product.
I'll be honest about one more thing: capitalism is not a panacea. Economic systems don't change until people's hearts change first. You can build the most beautifully aligned company in the world and watch it fail because the market doesn't value what it's doing. I know this. The risk is real.
But it has to start somewhere. And so I thought: let it start with me.
Why Start a Jeans Company?
When I left banking, I faced a choice that I think a lot of people face when they become disillusioned with a system: do you urge others to change it, do you try to work within it to change it from the inside, or do you do something else entirely?
I tried the first option in various ways. I thought about the second. And eventually I realized that neither was going to produce what I actually wanted to produce — a working example of a different way of doing things. Urging others to change produces words. Working within the system to change it tends to produce absorption: you become the thing you're trying to change, because the system's incentives are stronger than your individual intention and they operate on you continuously.
The third option was to start from an entirely new vantage point. To build something rather than argue for something. To let the proof of concept exist in the world rather than in a white paper or a speech or a conversation at a dinner party.
I chose jeans for reasons that were partly philosophical and partly personal. Philosophically: denim is the most democratic garment ever made, and slow fashion — the practice of buying fewer, better things and keeping them longer — is the most direct counter-argument to everything the fast fashion system represents. A garment that gets better with age is the living argument against disposability. Every pair of jeans that gets repaired rather than replaced is a vote against the system that made a Walmart coat seem like a reasonable alternative to craft.
Personally: I loved the craft. I still do. And I believed — still believe — that you cannot build something good unless you love the work itself. The philosophical argument is not enough on its own. You need the work to mean something beyond the argument it makes.
So I bought a sewing machine and started learning. I made terrible jeans for a long time. I got better. I opened a workshop. I built a curriculum. And somewhere in that process FITTED Underground became something that I think is genuinely interesting — not just as a jeans brand, but as a laboratory for a different way of thinking about what a business is for.
Proof of Concept
Let me be completely honest about the economics here.
Making clothes in the United States is difficult. My labor costs are high relative to what a factory in a developing nation pays. My cost base is significant, and I can't compete on price alone with offshore production. By the conventional metrics of capitalism — margin, scale, return on investment — what I am doing makes limited sense. In fact, I thought it was a kind of a dumb business model when I started it. And yet — I've devoted my life to it.
In a sense, that difficulty is precisely the point.
If a slow fashion brand making jeans by hand in Brooklyn — one of the most expensive cities in the world, in one of the most labor-intensive product categories there is — can build a sustainable business, then the argument for wholistic capitalism becomes very difficult to dismiss. Because if the model works here, at the hardest possible difficulty setting, then it certainly works for software companies with 80% gross margins. It works for financial services firms. It works for technology businesses, for consumer goods companies, for any enterprise with a cost structure less brutal than hand-manufacturing in New York City.
The difficulty of the model in fashion is not an argument against wholistic capitalism. It is the strongest possible argument for it. We are running the experiment at maximum difficulty. Every month we stay in business is a data point. Every pair of jeans we sell is evidence. Every client who comes back — that is the proof of concept accumulating, slowly, in the real world.
What This Has to Do With You
If you've read this far — through the history of indigo and the science of fading and the economics of a raw denim jean and the philosophy of repair — you already understand more about conscious consumption than most people ever will. You know what goes into a garment. You know what the price of a great pair of jeans actually reflects. You know why a Walmart chore coat fails the slow fashion test regardless of how good it looks.
That knowledge is not neutral. It changes what's available to you as a consumer. And what's available to you is a choice that most people don't know they have: to participate, with your dollars and your attention, in a different economic system than the one the mainstream market is offering you.
You don't have to buy from FITTED Underground. But I'd encourage you to buy from someone whose values you know — whose workers you can imagine, whose purpose aligns with their product, whose inside matches their outside. That consideration, multiplied across enough consumers, is how systems begin to change. Not through legislation, not through protest — but through the quiet, persistent accumulation of purchasing decisions made by people who understand what they're choosing.
Every purchase is a vote. Cast yours deliberately.
What I'm Really Up To
FITTED Underground is a jeans brand. It is also a laboratory. It is also, if I'm being fully honest, a love letter to the idea that business can be done differently — that the purpose of an enterprise can be something more than the accumulation of returns to the people at the top, that workers can be treated as human beings rather than productive assets, that the things we make can carry the values of the people who made them all the way to the person who wears them.
Slow fashion is a solution to many of the problems in the fashion industry today. Wholistic capitalism is a solution to many of the problems in our broader economic system — income disparity, the distribution of wealth relative to the creation of value, the externalization of costs onto the people least able to bear them.
FITTED Underground is a proof of concept for both. One that probably shouldn't work. One that does.
That's what I'm really up to. That's what sitting in this workshop in Williamsburg, making jeans by hand, is actually about. It was never just about the clothes.
The clothes are just the beginning.
What Comes Next
The 500 level has been building toward a single argument: that the values behind slow fashion and wholistic capitalism are not niche concerns but early signals of a larger shift in how we think about business, consumption, and what we owe each other. The next article celebrates the American brands doing this work — in denim, workwear, footwear, and beyond. That's DU 505: American Slow Fashion Brands Worth Knowing.
← Previous: DU 503 — Can Walmart Be Heritage? | Next: DU 505 — American Slow Fashion Brands Worth Knowing →
Core Curriculum
Complete the core curriculum by reading these essential classes.
- DU 101 — What is Raw Denim?
- DU 102 — What is Selvedge Denim?
- DU 104 — Denim Weight Explained
- DU 201 — How to Buy Your First Pair of Raw Denim Jeans
- DU 204 — How Much to Spend on Raw Denim
- 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.
