Tristan Detwiler is ready to have a higher profile.
The founder and designer of the buzzy, sustainable menswear brand Stan got his start creating one-offs from antique textiles that soon found fans among surfers and celebrities.
Himself a surfer and model, Detwiler had a piece on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Lexicon of Fashion in 2021, took home the All Gender award from the Fashion Group International in 2022, and opened a bespoke atelier in Los Angeles earlier this year, where he customizes old quilts and other textiles into tailored pieces for customers.
Now Detwiler has teamed with SByrd Services, an L.A.-based source of deadstock fabric, to develop a larger production run for the spring 2025 season. Detwiler will return to New York Men’s Day on Friday to show the commercial collection. It will consist of around 55 styles, including relaxed linen coastal-inspired board shorts, linen drawstring trousers and Aloha shirts as well as unconstructed blazers and outerwear. There will also be some 15 one-of-a-kind pieces in the collection.
Detwiler, who last showed at NYMD in 2022, said he has long been urged by customers to create a larger number of pieces. But because his fabric of choice was repurposed antique quilts that he found in places as far-flung as Turkey and France, it was an impossible task.
“I was ready to grow commercially but I wasn’t able to until I found a sustainable source for material,” he said. “But now that I’ve found a well-coordinated production partner, I can scale.”
He said antique textiles “will always be my ethos and I’ll continue to source them when I travel, but I’m stepping forward from that. This new collection allows for a more-holistic body of work: not just one-offs but material that I can seek out for my Southern California-inspired clothing.”
He described the aesthetic of the collection as “relaxed surfer beachwear with more sophisticated off-beach pieces that the character I call Stan would wear. That includes everything from board shorts to a double-breasted, peak lapel linen suit.”
Prices remain relatively high, with shorts retailing for around $450 and tailored coats for $2,500.
He said his intent is to move beyond direct-to-consumer selling to add wholesale customers with retailers such as Bergdorf Goodman and Maxfields on his wish list. “My goal is to create partnerships with these retailers to express my vision.”
Detwiler said that although deadstock fabric by its sheer definition is also only available in limited quantities, SByrd has “unlimited resources to scale production. It’s a necessary step for me beyond my single atelier,” he said.
Detwiler joins other artisans such as Bode and Greg Lauren by creating new pieces from antique or deadstock fabrics. As he describes on his website: “I am a craftsman by trade. My medium: dirt stained remnants of tattered, worn textiles ingrained with stories of hand-woven fibers. I live in the perpetual search for such things. Stories relayed from the past; translated through centuries. The goal of Stan is to reconceptualize stores into clothing and allow long-lost memories to live on.”
