No SIM THE s®@TIMES HOW TO MAKE A FORTUNE FROM WOMEN’S BOTTOMS Meet JeffRudes, the man behind.J Brand, thejeans phenomenon that has transformed the way we all Kate Moss, Angelina Jolie and Anna Wintour included - feel about our butts INTERVIEW Polly Vernon PORTRAIT Emily ShurTHE s®@TIMES —a Saturday eff Rudes (pronounced Roo-des, February 2008. Rudes was delighted because although inevitably, Jeff says, most Moss demonstrated how well these jeans people pronounce it as if it were the plural of “rude”) makes J Brand jeans, the jeans that everyone — everyone wants. Anna Wintour (who namechecks the brand in American Vogue documentary The September Issue, and who will not wear any other denim label), Net- a-Porter’s Natalie Massenet, Gwen Stefani, Drew Barrymore, January Jones, Reese Witherspoon, Katy Per “We are probably the most worn by celebrities, A-listers, fashionistas...” says Jeff Rudes, which might sound self-congratulate but is quite true. "And we rarely gift. They mostly buy at retail.” hen there’s us. We want Jeff's j the seven years since he launched it, J Br (yes, the “J” stands for Jeff) has established itself as the only fashion denim business in town. J Brand jeans are money-spinning jeans. They sell everywhere: from the Midwest of the US to Siberia. (“I have one Siberian stockist,” says Rudes. “More in Moscow. The Russians are thirsty for fashion,”) In the UK, they sell out on a routine basis at Selfridges, Matches, Harvey Nichols and Browns, on net-a-porter.com, and never mind that J Brand jeans cost in the region of £200 a pop. Why do they sell? First, because they do things to bums. Good things. Rudes knows women’ bottoms, and he knows how to contain them in denim. It’s about fabric stretch, yoke design, pocket size and pocket placement, apparently; that and a billion minuscule other tweaks. “Jeans are all about the rear,” Rudes says, “It’s all about the back.” Second, J Brand jeans set the fashion agenda One season it's a super-sleek cigarette style in a dark blue wash (Anna Wintour’s jean of choice, the 912). The next, it’s a bellbottom flare with a two-inch cuff on the hem which weights the whole so it moves perfectly. (Love Story; Kate Moss wore them every day for a week in ins too. In nd maintained their shape in between washing) Last season it was a cargo pant in an olive twill with a gold zip; £245-worth of cargo pant which captured the hard hearts of the world’s fashion editors (the women of Grazia called it the unofficial office summer uniform), which sold out over and over (270,000 units and counting to date), driving its customer base into frenzies of covetousness, and which was afforded the ultimate accolade of being referred to by its style name, the Houlihan (as in Hot Lips Houlihan of M*A*S*H). This season, Rudes tells me, it will either be the Earhart (a cropped silken flight pant named after Ame rhart) or the Bette (a high-waisted denim flare). It might even be both. Whatever, this year's financial projections suggest that J Brand will turn over $110-$120 million (£68-£75 million), a 30 per cent increase on last year's turnover of $89 million ~ which were up 30 per cent on 2009, “We've had a 30 per cent and above increase every year, from 2006,” says Rudes. Which would be good going, even if we weren't neck deep in recession. Given that we are well, it's a little gobsmacking, I meet Rudes in LA, where he, and J Brand, is based. He is 52, smoothly tanned, at the silver fox end of the hair spectrum, with perfect teeth. He's shortish and quite buff - affluent LA buff: paunch-free with gently pumped upper arms. He wears round-framed wire-rim sunglasses, and he smokes an electronic cigarette. Its end glows orange when he puffs on it, and it releases clouds of non-toxic fake smoke. He comes to pick me up in $140,000 worth of customised dark blue Maserati, which he bought “by accident” during a visit to the Fiat factory in Italy. “It’s my Sunday car,” he says. He's wearing his Sunday jeans, too, a light wash on a relaxed (J Brand, obviously) man’s jean. He likes a skinnier cut in a darker blue for work. We drive to Malibu, and en route he talks jeans, endless jeans: he talks denim looms, washes, yoke placement and mastering the fine kK aoa foo @ pbSS THE s®@TIMES —a Saturday art of authentic “whiskering’ ating the faded, vintage-look streaks that radiate out from the crotch. “I can whisker,” he says. “But it takes an artisan to whisker well.” He is passionate but circumspect, calm and unflashy in the grand ‘ i scheme of rag trade superpowers. He interrupts the | ‘I had an eye, | gocit. jeans monologue with tour guide snippets: “That's . Cher's house." he say's pointing at a beachside villa, | AC16, Lalways wanted to “We're going to Geoffrey's [pronounced “Joffrey’s"], ‘ * * which is one of the best brunch places around” | be in that Studio 54 scene, We eat shiitake omelette, drink Bloody Marys and * talk about J Brand’ past collaborations with seeing what women were assorted fashion designers. The limited-edition graffiti print the label produced with Proenza wearing at the clubs last summer's 5 x 5 collection of jeans, customised by five emerging British designer more beautiful people than Studio 54. Mark Erdem, Richard Nicoll, Meadham Kirchhoff, Benecke was the door man, and Stevie Rubell [the Christopher Kane and Peter Pilotto. Jeff tells me owner] would go outside, and they would pick the about his Little Black Jean project, which he'll most beautifull people, dressed righ produce this year in association with a selection of | Rudes noticed that the beautifully dressed of the chic hotels, LA's Chateau Marmont has already time were fond of a particular jean brand: signed up. “You'll get them on the room service “MacKeen, a French jean. It was the best jean in menu,” Rudes says. “And the label will read: ‘Little | the world. Flare leg, high-waisted, dark denim, It Black Jean from Chateau Marmont’, Doing those there was no stretch back then, so a things is very important if you're going to keep woman had to lie on the floor to zip the zippers moving it forward.” up, the bones were popping out, it took 20 It is possible that Jeff Rudes understands jeans, | minutes... but the woman looked smashii and women, and womens intense, borderline bought a pair. They were $72 b: co-dependent relationship with jeans, better than | That was like $300, $400 plus, because jeans were anyone else on the planet. $19 in those days. And they were sold in two Rudes launched himself into the denim business _ | places: Henry Lehr, which was on 64th, and Jerry when he was 17. He was born and raised in Hart, the French jean store that was on 60th. Manhattan, New York. His father was in the fabric | Jerry had this bed in the store where people laid business and asked Rudes for his input when down to do the zip. So I bought a pair. And I said, Rudes was just 15, “If there was a trend that I'd “We've got to be able to make them in America seen out, I would say, ‘This could work’ [had an __| for a better price. There is no reason why we eye, | got it...” His mother was a “fashionista, she shouldn't’ How old am I? Seventeen.” loved dressing me up. I was always Best Dressed, at | He found a pattern maker, the two of them took school, at camp, winning those awards.” the MacKeen original apart “stitch by stitch’, and He grew up loving fashion, obsessed by incoming _| worked out how to remake it. Through his father’s trends. At 16, equipped with a fake ID, he started | contacts, Rudes sourced denim; he took office going to New York nightclubs, scoping them out —_| space in his uncle’ manufacturing firm. “By 18, for the style choices of the beautiful people. He Twas in business.” became a regular at Studio 54. “I always wanted to. | Rudes called his jean the Paris 2000. It cost be in that scene, seeing what women were wearing _| $36: “Exactly half the cost of MacKeen.” He at the clubs. I was never in a nightclub that had | sold it in Henry Lehr, and a few other dk fan @ pbOS a THE s®@TIMES —a Saturday Kate Mass in y Angelina Joli in LOVE STORYS: 907 LEGGINGSTHE s®@TIMES —a Saturday upmarket New York stores, within six mont! was: “Quite a success! It was all in the fit” Rudes ran Paris 2000 from 1976 to 1983. Eventually, he got bored by changes in the jeans business. “It became all about who was cheaper and who’ [advertising] on TV. It wasn't fun any more.” He sold the company and moved to Los Angeles, where he used the profits from Paris 2000 ("$100,000 was adequate funds then”) to start producing Lycra-enhanced bodycon clothes. Rudes learnt to love California. He was married by then with two children: his son Sean was born in 1986, his daughter Sasha in 1989. “We had a chocolate labrador and an outdoors lifestyle. I still went to New York for work, for the b In the mid-Nineties, he dropped Lycra for he zht into an extremely high-end jeans line designed by Adriano Goldschmied (“the denim by Ron Herman, ler and nephew of F most influential fashion store. That, too, was @ success under his auspices. “It was shipping less than $1 million [worth of jeans] when I got involved; within a year, it shipped $5 million.” In the late Nineties, Rudes moved on again to start up a private label, which dealt with the jeans manufacturing aspect of companies such as Abercrombie & Fitch. And then, in 2003, he started thinking about his own jeans line. It’s hard to remember a time before premium denim, before our wardrobes rotated around a selection of rather expensive jeans: jeans of artful sexiness that can be dressed up for parties, or dressed formally for work, or dressed down for a casual-luxe effortless glamour impact. Yet jeans are a relatively recent addition to our fashion repertoire. We may have worn vintage Levi’s 501s in the Eighties, but we rejected them in favour of neat black wool tailoring through the Nineties (from Jigsaw or agnés b; worn to suggest Prada), And then in 1998 Earl ~ the first of the significant Californian jean companies ~ launched a sharply cut, well-fitting, indigo blue bootcut, which sold for around £110, We bought it - and began to understand the potential of premium jeans. In 2000, 7 For All Mankind launched a label that was “We did certain things that made a woman look better. Little bit tighter in the knee. Pull it in and it raises the butta little bit’ a sexier, younger, more attention-seeking alternative to Eark: all tight fit, low-rise cuts, sandblasted washes, celebrity endorsements and a $200 price tag. In 2002, True Religion upped the ante with louder logo, flashier washes and a p tag that went as high as $360. Rudes saw this, and decided he could do something... well, better In 2004, Rudes was introduced to Susie Crippen, an LA-based stylist. “Susie had a similar aesthetic to me: very clean, no logos... The second phone call Thad with her, we talked about jeans. For 45 minutes. She knew more about jeans than most people I have ever worked with” Crippen and Rudes (who had split up with Sean and Sasha's mother) began a relationship — and a jeans label. ‘They knew what they wanted J Brand to be: a fashion jean (a building block for a look, rather than the defining element of it) that had bottom- enhancing properties. “We did certain things, details, that made a woman look better” Like what? Little bit tighter in the knee, Took in the thigh a little bit. Pull it in, and it would raise the butt a little bit. Susie knew this. What I knew was the details. What size the yoke would be. Pocket angles. Pocket size. If it too small, too low, it makes Her [J Brand’s customer, always referred to as Her! look larger in the back. I noticed all that stuff” Crippen thought it would be interesting to keep the colours dark, simple, unwashed; Ron Herman, Rudes’ long-term friend and former dk fan @ pbTHE s®@TIMES —a Saturday business partner, and the first stockist of J Bi agreed. “Everyone else was doing crazy washes and pocket logos... we thought, no. Keep it dark. Black; dark blue.” Crippen and Rudes began plotting J Brand in spring 2004; by December, they had shipped their first jean — a bootcut flair with a 20in hem — to Ron Herman at Fred Segal on Melrose Avenue in LA. “We sold eight pieces, having shipped 20, in our first weekend. The sale staff saw the spark in the customer. It was a success.” Things evolved sp Following a three- month exclusive deal with Ron Herman at Fred Segal, Rudes started selling to other stores: Bergdorf Goodman, Barneys, Henry Lehr. Rudes’ addiction to newness hadn't diminished since his Studio 54 days; he scouted for it constantly. When he discovered that one of his customers ~ the French manageress of the LA Christian Louboutin store ~ was buying his bootcut jeans and getting her tailor to taper them into cigarette pants (“She told me that was what all the cool French girls were doing"), he created a cigarette pant. When he went to New York and realised that the skinny jean revolution was on its way ~ having spotted a British girl in skinnies in Manhattan's Tribeca — he rang his cutting room and told them to shave a precisely calibrated triangle off the bottom of the 300 pairs of bootcut jeans they had just finished cutting. “It went to Ron at Fred Segal two and a half weeks after | spotted the girl in Tribeca — and it sold. We shipped [New York boutique] Intermix 150 pieces, and 80 sold in the first week. When you sell 80 out of 150, you know it’s a home run.” In the summer of 2005, Angelina Jolie was photographed wearing J Brand jeans, and celebrity interest began in earnest Crippen and Rudes ended their relationship in 2006. “Really — we said this at the time — because she was like my sister, and we didn’t miss a heartbeat in still running the company together. But we said, “You know what? Maybe we should have just got together to start this company.” Crippen remained at J Brand until January 2010, when investment company Strategic bought a piece of the business. Rudes is now engaged to ‘Terre Jacobs, a cashmere designer. Between them, they have two corgis and a pug, and six grown-up children. J Brand's offices are located in the rag trade district of Los Angeles, deep downtown. It’s 165,000sq ft of warehouse, arranged over two floors. Downstairs is the jeans factory, where rows of Latino workers (predominantly Mexican, predominantly male) stitch hems, pockets, coin pockets at an intense speed. Piles of raw jeans build up dizzyingly fast. Rudes buzzes among them gleefully. He shows me his favourite machine: a back-pocket seam stitcher that whizzes automatically round a metal template, Stitching pockets is hard work; you need big man’ hands to turn the denim,” he says. “But not with this machine.’ Upstairs is the design area, a prettier spa with bare brick walls and big mahogany desks, around which 20 or so good-looking, giddy, hipster girls — and the occasional boy — flit ‘There are design team girls and merchandiser girls and PR girls and e-tail girls, and Courtney the fit model, one of the most breathlessly excited humans I've encountered. They are all wearing J Brand jeans. “They don't have to,” Rudes says. “It’s not a rule. But they choose to.” Rudes talks to these women constant He makes them rate his ideas, his whims and, crucially, the jeans, according to a five-point scale: “We have: Obsessed, Love, Good, Like, and Eh? Eh?, which is a nice way of saying, ‘No! Don't like!” A new jean arrives; Rudes summons Courtney to try it. “Give me a rating on that,” Rudes says, and the assembled J Brand girls reply in turn. Courtney says she’s Obsessed, but then Courtney always says she’s Obsessed. “When was the last time you said you Liked, Courtney?” Rudes asks. “I don't know,” Courtney says. “I just am Obsessed!” (She changes back into her officewear for the day, a pair of distressed capri jeans over which she was so Obsessed, the design team named the style Obsessed. | tell her they look lovely. “Oh!” she d kK a @ pbTHE s®@TIMES —a Saturday says, stroking them, fondly. “Ob. Sessed.”) I meet Mary Pierson, vice president of design and progenitor of the Houlihan (based on a vintage cargo pant she and Susie Crippen found in Rudes asks. “No,” say Pierson, shiftily. Rudes hunger for newness (“This company’s oxygen is New!”) has to be tactically managed; if he likes a new idea, he'll demand that it’s put into production immediately, which means Pierson has learnt to withhold pieces she doesn't think are ready. 1 wonder if Pierson and her team are under pre: te the Houlihan eff ‘Well, no,” says Rudes, “Something like the Houlihan happ company once in 20 years. I didn’t expect knew it was good, It got an Obsessed right awa and it looked smashing on. But... we didn’t know it would be 270,000 pieces later. The challenge is to beat it, and | tell them that, but we don't operate from a place of fea I think I believe him. Finally, we go to Fred Segal where we meet Ron Herman, who talks me through his J Brand selection. “It is my No | selling jeans line” Herman tells me, as he flicks through Gigis (a bootcut cropped at the ankle), Baileys (a super-wide flare), 90Is (a power stretch legging). “It has been for five years” Task Herman why he thinks Rudes is so good at jeans. Why is he tapping ~ creating, perpetuating — the great female desire to shop, better than pretty much any other label? “I think its just that he respects women,” Herman says. What is the game plan for Rudes, I ask. World domination? “When we started, friends said, ‘What's the vision?’ I ‘Well, we're going to be bigger than Diesel’ | think that’s achievable.” Rudes cites Swedish company Acne as inspiration, because it's a “great fashion company, which began with a good jeans base”, (He's somewhat damning about True Religion and 7 For All Mankind, who, he says, “are not competition. We just... share floor space.”) There’s a collaboration with an extremely significant British designer in the offing, but Rudes ure can't go public on it quite yet. And there's the ongoing mission to find a style that will beat the Houlihan sales, On a personal level, he and Terre will marry in May; and he’s clearly rich. “Um... comfortable” He spends his money on Harley Davidsons (he has three) and art; Dior tuxes and Armani suits; good wine and nice dinners. “I have fun with certain things,” he says. And why shouldn't he? Jeff Rudes is making the jeans that everyone wants, and he’ doing our bottoms a great service in the process. kK aoa foo Q D