Phipps (Q8892)
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Phipps is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Phipps |
Phipps is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
One of the cornerstones of Phipps is character work. Less so in the theater kid tradition of “yes, and?”-ing one’s way through life, and more so in the Cindy Sherman-esque school of studying and embodying an individual. Designer Spencer Phipps builds his product not around nebulous inspirations, but around people,characters, that exist in the collective imagination of the roads less traveled in America—as in, not New York or Los Angeles. Except that these people and their stories are not made up, but very much real.“Fringe characters” is how Phipps described them on a recent phone call. “It’s all very American Midwest-oriented,” he explained. “We have people living off grid, bikers, the weird old man; basically everyone I’m charmed by,” the designer said. Not unlike Cindy Sherman, this season Phipps cast himself in his lookbook, in addition to shooting it and styling it himself. He’s made cameos in past collections, but this is the first time it’s all him. “It feels a little insane,” he conceded.While Phipps did cite Sherman’s self-portraiture as a reference, the impetus behind making himself the face of the collection is pragmatic, not some kind of esoteric art reference. The designer, who is a finalist for the 2024 CFDA/VogueFashion Fund, recently launched a YouTube channel after finding success with a series of self-shot Instagram Reels in which he styled himself in a variety of Phipps looks. “I looked at our most viral content form the last six months, some of which we’ve racked up half a million views on, and said ‘why not just do that?’”Phipps admits that this approach will not always be suitable or feel relevant, but it’s astute to bank on his own image now given the positive returns he’s seen on social media. Unlike most of his CVFF counterparts, he’s not staging a runway show during New York Fashion Week; online, at least for now, is where his business is.Phipps’s clothes are appealing in their practicality and familiarity. Standouts this season include a pair of shearling chaps and their more commercial counterpart, patchworked in a combination of leather and white canvas or denim. There’s a handful of great cozy knits and fleeces, some in vintage-y impressionistic landscapes and others in abstracted plaids, and a run of handsome rugged workwear. The sleeper hit is likely to be the studded chinos—like your favorite Dickies only dressier.It helps that Phipps has a sense of humor.
Here and there, the designer is holding a Phipps branded ax, a chainsaw, animal crackers, and even a Phipps branded newspaper (which is how he chose to present his work for consideration for the Fund). “The photos are hilarious, but there’s a character and storytelling aspect to it that we approach in a more cinematic way,” he said. “There’s a certain believability I like that involves holding an object or something that pushes the look into the character space.”The added layer of appeal is that much of fashion at the moment involves cosplay: Think of the many URL-driven trends that come and go, like “office siren” or “trad-wife.” These involve a certain degree of costume. Gone—for now—are the days of designing for abstract personas like “the woman with a career!” or “the cool guy downtown.” Those people are cosplaying too—dressing up for the job or life that they want. It's just that for Phipps, the life he’s modeling is less about climbing the corporate ladder than it is about hiking the Appalachian trail.
3 September 2024
Phipps is a popular name in America. “A funny thing we’ve discovered, which is something new to me being back in the US, is that Phipps is a very common name here,” said Spencer Phipps on a call from Los Angeles, where he relocated from Paris. “There’s a strip club, there’s a mall, there’s a grocery store, [and] a radiology center,” named Phipps, according to the designer’s research. There’s even three separate North American lakes with the designer’s last name.Luckily for Phipps, the man, and for Phipps, the brand, there doesn’t seem to be another fashion label by the same name. The designer leveraged this discovery in his spring 2024 collection, morphing his logo into race car patches that looked less Formula 1 than NASCAR—“the down market version” he joked.This visual interpretation of his name served as a solid base for the new collection. “It’s all very character based, and just weird American people,” he said of his starting point, explaining he was after the “countercultural ruggedness” found in workwear, late ’90s L.L. Bean and Abercrombie, Carhartt, and souvenir shop clothes. The Phipps twist was the sense of humor he brought to his plaids, denim, and camos. “Especially with rugged American wear, it’s all very serious, but I’ve encountered people that are quite funny and strange with their presentation,” he said.There was also a slight nod of kink—gay kink. “He knows what Tom of Finland is,” said Phipps of his customer. That came across most clearly in the handsome strangeness—and sexiness—of a pair of vintage leather chaps hybridized with jeans. Where does Phipps find old chaps? “I have my weird places to get them,” he explained. “No one really wants old chaps, they just sit there.”Phipps has switched his business to a see-now, buy-now structure. “This model is more in line with this digital-first intimacy that you get from online stuff,” he said. As of late last year, the designer started putting himself front and center in his collection imagery, posting videos on Instagram dressing up in the classic “GRWM” (get ready with me) style. The positive feedback was instantaneous, he explained. There’s value in speakingtoyour customer versusatthem, seems to be the takeaway.That Phipps himself is a guy with a great beard and interesting style who works out—and whose muscles are on display in the videos—certainly helps.
(“Intimacy” is right!) His comments are almost equal parts “thirsty” and shopping inquiries, but pretty much all of them are about the product—be that how good he looks in a pair or jeans or how someone wants to buy them in order to pull them off in the same way. This is 2024 DTC marketing done right: meet your customer where they’re at, mid-scroll.
21 March 2024
Now that he’s decamped from Paris and relocated to the Hollywood Hills in his home state of California, it’s safe to say that Spencer Phipps has entered his LA era. “I’m so happy to be back. It’s been pure joy this last year,” he said at his show last night. “I wanted to focus on the core essence of what Phipps represents and I think I can do it better in the US. It makes more sense for the brand from a marketing strategy, a business strategy, and also my own personal life.”To present the fall 2023 Phipps collection—his first on American soil—he chose a quintessential Hollywood location, Big Sky Movie Ranch. If you’ve never heard of this sprawling landscape set deep in Ventura County, you’ve certainly seen it on TV and in the movies; it was used as a set for everything fromLittle House on the PrairietoTwin Peaksto, most recently,Babylon.If Phipps’s design story were a script, this would be that pivotal scene where the protagonist takes control of the narrative. Over the year that he’s been back, he’s refined the brand identity, drawing on inspiration from its rugged workwear roots; formally introduced denim and underwear, and built out his womenswear. There’s even talk of moving all production from Portugal to LA. He counts these as the progressive steps that align with a commitment to US-based manufacturing and sustainable practices.As magic hour descended, it was difficult to discern where the guests ended and the models began. Phipps’s work is grounded in reality; he extracts elements of American subcultures—western, grunge, punk—and reimagines them through a contemporary lens modeled on a diverse cast of characters including real cowboys, bikers, and one multi-hyphenate jiu jitsu black belt-magician-guitarist.Phipps ties the brand divisions together through cohesive design and layered styling. For fall, the influence of Avedon’s American West series came across in blanket capes and chap jeans crafted from upcycled leather scraps and vintage denim, whereas grommets and d-rings spoke to the influence of the ’50s teens in Karlheinz Weinberger’s photography. Standout pieces from the new womenswear included long, straight, slouchy jeans and a deadstock pullover anorak paired with a camouflage midi skirt. On the men’s side, there were “butch florals” in the form of camouflage patterns and subtle hieroglyphs representative of the four archetypes of masculinity—the king, warrior, magician, and lover.
The noise around sustainability within the fashion industry is only getting louder and more confusing. It’s appreciated that Phipps keeps it simple, remixing the past to plan for and protect the future. “Using up leftovers, recycling, upcycling and incorporating vintage is a labor of love for me,” he said. The chore jackets and anoraks on the runway are part of an ongoing deadstock project with Woolrich.Showing Phipps in Paris gave the brand a point of difference. Back home in LA, the field is crowded with other brands riffing on the Southern California lifestyle. So how does he plan to differentiate Phipps? “We’ve always been doing our own thing and will continue to do so,” he said. “Our voice stood out in the Paris landscape and I believe the same will happen here, but with a bigger community.”
24 July 2023
After 18 years away mostly roaming between the precipes he loves to climb and menswear gigs in New York, Antwerp, and Paris, Spencer Phipps is moving home to California. Once he’s finished shuttering his office in the French capital, the designer will return after half a life to reconnect with the state whose many-splendored multitudinousness has long inflected his work. This preface collection to his new LA-based phase suggested that the old adage exhorting the eye to travel still bears fruit. Phipps’s specific wearable cocktail—blending technical wear and backwoodsy Americana, formal wear with upcycling, and consistent irony with a multi-faceted approach to self-identity—looked particularly at home on the street-cast models shot at Venice Beach and across other LA locales.A stretchy miniskirt stitched from a rainbow of conjoined waistbands from upcycled sports shorts epitomized the range of this Phipps spectrum, and the manner in which his purpose and playfulness subverts the “very white bread, granola-boring” arena of technical wear. A designer-accessorized Woolrich overshirt in buffalo check—an ironically now-Italian in origin garment that’s a touchstone across American subcultures—was styled against a sarong. Moto gear rode in tandem with tuxedos to create a clash of uniform in order to deny uniformity. Phipps revived his Smokey Bear motif in ‘Only You’ printed t-shirts and pajama shirts and shorts printed with vintage ad campaigns.Phipps said he decides which elements to mix through instinct: “what I find that fits the message and what creates an interesting look: what clashes in a nice way.” He added: “these identities that I’m talking about and this kind of language I’ve developed, it’s very specifically American. And all these elements come from the base of American reference points.” Phipps is developing a style of dressing that defies the onlooker’s imperative to categorize in order to reflect more sincerely the multiple facets of gender, sexuality, and lifestyle that are the building blocks of individuality.Vive la difference.
16 May 2022
What menswear seems to offer this season is a turning point in the discourse of masculine identity. Almost all designers are embracing a progressive, daring, sometimes openly defiant stance, both visually and conceptually, on the increasingly blurred representation of gender—an open source, non-normative space where fashion is taking the mantle as a cultural force. Ingenuity and provocative vitality seem to reign supreme. It’s definitely a good time to be a menswear designer.Spencer Phipps wants to be part of the conversation. He kicked off his exploration of masculine codes of representation and the tribalism of manhood’s rites of passage by reading a book—which in these times of AI, XR, VR and brain-frying CG imagery is a commendable starting point. King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert L. Moore and Douglas Gillette investigates the archetypes of masculinity inhabiting each one of us: “I’d say it’s more about human nature than about gender studies, more about attitude,” said Phipps over Zoom from his studio in Paris, looking like a bearded Baba, cool with a benevolent Cali disposition. “So we started working on ways to represent masculinity for today, looking at its various tribes and groupings—punk street groups, military groups, sports teams—and what the visual codes are that they use in the way they dress.”The original Phipps spirit (both the label’s and probably the man’s) is about an outdoorsy survival mode with a DIY, punkish mentality, “mixing things that are less functional and kind of weird and countercultural into the world of outdoor culture,” he said. Here, archetypal tropes were merged or flipped into “new modes of communication,” as he put it—taking a Dennis Rodman jersey tee and drowning it in glitter, doing fancy leopard-printed construction workers’ gear or going tough on a classic rain jacket with piercing studs. The collection’s DIY Punk Patagonia spirit (a brilliant description whose coinage was credited by the designer to my Vogue Runway colleague Luke Leitch) was heightened by an extensive upcycling practice that Phipps and his ream religiously devoted themselves to. An edited offer of one-off artisanal pieces called Lab was entirely made using found objects and leather scraps; or cutting deadstock from a performance sportswear factory into patchworked biker jackets; or turning vintage-sourced buckles or old bike tires into belts.
“Things still functional but with a bit of psychedelic fun—Phipps isn’t that square,” said the designer. You bet.You can also bet that he had quite a blast working on cinematic turf. Expanding on the same “heavily serious topics and harkening issues and discussing them in a lighthearted way,” he said, the collection’s video (more of a mini-movie really) was a grand and trippy affair shot with cutting edge XR augmented technology by French studio MADO XR, an extended reality and virtual production startup. Four XR-generated surreal environments represented masculinity throughout the ages of humanity—a prehistoric military bunker; a forest with a rave in full swing intended as a rite of passage; a gladiator arena where fears are confronted and, finally, the galaxy, showing a hopeful yet still mysterious future. Populated by a multitude of characters, some of them a parody of male stereotypes, the project lacked neither ambition nor ingenuity. “It was a big production, yet it was actually made with a DIY spirit,” said Phipps. “But technology does a really good job of making things look much fancier than they are.
26 June 2021
Seen everything half-decent on Netflix, Disney+, Hulu and Amazon Prime combined? Then enjoy a few minutes of relief by taking in the excellent second Spencer Phipps digital presentation. Shot on the Skaftafellsjökull glacier in Iceland and starring the super-fit pogonophile designer, the video is basically a trailer for a movie he hasn’t made yet that co-stars the collection. Paging the Netflix commissioning team: that movie looks way better than the abysmalOutside The Wire. Lack of a good voiceover artist apart, the trailer/show is excellent, irreverent—and serious too.As well as climbing and fashion design, Phipps’s kinks include environmental responsibility. Again, this fun-loving collection addressed heavy issues humorously and attractively. Entitled “Endurance” after Sir Ernest Shackleton’s stricken ship on the doomed Imperial Trans-Antarctic Expedition, the collection channeled archetypes of masculine (and sometimes maddening) exploration and reflected the consequences of the confidence that the planet is ours to conquer and exploit.“It means feminizing, twisting, exaggerating, shifting,” said Phipps of a collection that opened with “Save the Fucking Whales” recycled cashmere knits whose sales will benefit an NGO named Oceanic Global that is working to do just that. Italian milled wool with technical treatments was used in purposefully provocative bodysuits that mimicked the thermal underwear Shackleton and his ilk lived in but which could as well be used to explore a dancefloor. Technical wear was rendered in recycled sea plastic Econyl and colored in ombre waves. Stiff collared teddy coats, rugby shirts and Shetland and cable knits were old school pieces styled on new school explorers, wearable environments rendered healthily fresh by their inhabitants. Phipps is punk Patagonia, good on every level, and perfect attire for the podium, whether you are standing on it to proselytize for positivity or just looking to party.
23 January 2021
Spencer Phipps’s home turf is Americana by way of Paris. Two-and-a-half years in, the designer’s not only gotten comfortable enough with his adopted city and language, he’s decided to go auteur filmmaker for spring.This flick isn’t a feature (yet); it’s more like a trailer for a faux Hollywood production entitled “Spirit of Freedom”—and it’s gunning for glory. Brando/Dean types, grab your hat. Iconographic touch points include a cactus camouflage, a Joshua Tree, mesa knits, and a pastiche of potentially lethal desert critters—coyote, rattlesnake, scorpion, etc., worked in collaboration with illustrator Gordon Flores. The brand also continues to build out the tailoring it introduced a year ago, this season with single-breasted suiting and a first foray into neckties. On the upper end of the price scale are “Zoom pajamas,” in inky organic silk hand-embroidered with flora plucked from the Mojave desert.Back in his comfort zone—the one Phipps calls “the building blocks of American style”—there are plenty of pieces to keep his customers happy. Those include T-shirts emblazoned “E Pluribus Phipps” with a stylized eagle, borrowings from Elvis featuring the same totem (“because, why not?”) and a “This Land Is Your Land” flag T-shirt.Giving old things new life is a Phipps signature, so revisited vintage finds like a black fringed jacket, a Harley Davidson shirt, and letter jackets all mixed with sweats, tailored shorts, and even jeans with a chaps treatment. “What’s happening [in the world] now has solidified what we do in a really nice way,” the designer offered on the topic of upcycling. Still to come is a bigger push into women’s sometime next year.
13 July 2020
Since he launched his brand a couple of years ago, Spencer Phipps has been devoted to sustainability. But with this season’s “Treehugger: Tales of the Forest” collection, he caught everyone by surprise with a collaboration that has to be (unfortunately) the timeliest and most poignant one out there: Smokey Bear. Even the authorities at the U.S. Forest Service were perplexed at first, the designer said. But once the deal was signed, Phipps had decades of archives to riff on: Smokey turned 75 last year.It was a pretty savvy move—a jolt of nostalgia, at least for the Americans in attendance, with a message that matters. But despite the authentic Paul Bunyan swagger—one of the models was, in fact, a lumberjack—the designer noted that this collection was “a big step up in terms of luxury.”Placing a concern for nature within the luxury space is a serious challenge. To get there, Phipps said he tried to focus on suiting in a very smart way, sourcing cloth in northern England and paying close attention to details such as linings and buttons. He also used Steiff materials for sweatshirts and embellishment, for example on the lapel of a suit jacket. “It’s biodegradable, very artisanal, and it has a luxury appeal,” he offered. “It’s not faux fur made from plastics. It’s a more traditional way of working.”His commitment to slow fashion also prompted him to introduce what he’s calling his “gold label”—essentially a range of curated vintage pieces, embellished and elevated to “treasure items” with a stylized gold star or forest ranger patches. That studied mashup included market-found jeans and flannels, heirloom pieces, and even a pair of jeans Phipps’s mom made back in the ’70s. “I’m just focusing on the lifestyle of sustainability. I’m not making you a new plaid shirt because there are so many out there already, and they’re beautiful,” the designer said.On the runway, it looked pretty much like a walk in the woods (a couple of forest prints toward the end were standouts). It worked. Phipps may be less about capital-Ffashion than it is about capital-P philosophy. But that is something everyone, everywhere should be getting on board with.
14 January 2020