As a musician, fashion is your opportunity to make a first impression.
It is your statement.
I'm originally from not too far from here in Columbia, Maryland.
I moved to L.A. and ended up writing my debut album,
Cautology, that came out last year on Warner Brothers.
Got to meet a bunch of my heroes.
You mentioned the word, you know, heroes.
Gave you an opportunity to meet heroes.
Our mission here is all about outfitting heroes.
You know, it begins with the military.
That's where I think it originates for us.
You have heroes that inspired you,
and now you're inspiring other people.
So that really resonated to me.
What was it about the military that was close to you?
My family business is outfit.
We would go down to the factory and my grandfather would tell me,
like, this is how we're helping the war effort.
And this was during the Cold War, the height of the Cold War.
This is the 80s.
It was all about outfitting, you know, the soldiers or the airmen
or whoever it was with the best possible product.
Alpha is a brand I think what interested me so much was its authenticity.
This utilitarian design has always been adopted
when you think about military fashion, right?
Whether you're a designer or whether music people gravitate toward it,
just because if it's built for the military,
it's probably good enough for the street, right?
Alpha Industries was the first contractor to produce this field jacket.
The soldier had a glove that he wore,
and this kind of secured the glove.
And then you have this wing in the back here to give them movement.
And what we try to do is continue through that into the garments that we have today.
These are flight jackets.
People call them the bomber, but we call them.
And what the government specified was the MA1.
This is an original garment that Alpha Industries made
and had a contract for, and I believe this one was from 1967.
Different variations of the MA1, but kind of the same purpose.
So if you look at what you'll notice is they're short.
They're short-waisted jackets.
They're a little bit longer in the front and shorter in the back,
so he's not sitting on it in the cockpit.
And then we have these shearing in the sleeve
that you really don't see in a lot of outerwear.
And you have to remember what this was for were pilots.
So we made a functional garment for the pilot to use in the cockpit.
We actually refer to this as the MA1 pocket.
We have some pen caps that are in here.
And a lot of times they ask us if they're bullets,
and of course they're not bullets.
And the technology that they had in the 60s, they were given coordinates.
So the pilots were literally taking their grease pen
and writing the coordinates on the glass of the cockpit.
So if they put it directly in this pocket,
it would all bleed through and they'd get a big stain here.
And this pocket was to fit a pack of cigarettes.
So this is where the size came from.
My first collaboration was with these guys in Korea
going there and taking in more of the culture,
transformed the way that I viewed other people's art.
Do you find yourself collaborating with other partners
and other parts of the world to create something unique?
We've been doing collaborations for a long time,
but over the past, let's say five years, it's really picked up a lot.
What's really great about being a heritage brand
is a lot of these brands are coming to us.
Our phone has been ringing off the hook for years now
of brands that want to do something in the military outerwear thing
and so they want to get the original brand involved.
We've made jackets with StuCy,
at least three or four jackets over the years
and they're great guys to work with too.
And then public school, you know, these guys are very pioneering
this whole new look that I really like and our designers really like.
It's clear that Alpha is having that same impact
on these other brands and vice versa.
She's gonna lead to something that's even more creative.
I'm so thankful that I got to really dive into the depth
and the history of the brand because it's fascinating
to learn about all of these nuances
that's just a piece of a bygone era.
It really turns an item of fashion into an art and history museum.
