Ryan Willms: The Gastown Culmination | Hypebeast

As generations begin to hit levels of fashion maturity much earlier than the past meaning many people are often dressing beyond their years, do you see a negative aspect to this?

I don’t really see this having a negative effect on people. I still haven’t seen any 12 year olds wearing Aldens and seersucker sport coats when they should be playing football and being a kid. Fashion is really about being comfortable with yourself and being able to subtly express how you feel through your choice of attire. If a 20 year old wants to wear a suit and tie, that’s great – if a 40 year old wants to wear a graphic tee and sneakers that could be great too. If they wear those items well and with style may be another question for debate.

We’ve seen a number of custom runs of items created exclusively for INVENTORY and your online retail presence. Is the change in approach from being an avid consumer to doing product design a relatively easy one?

I suppose we really launched our online shop due to the opportunity to work on couple of collaborative projects – so it’s something we feel is important to our brand and allows us to create items that we really like. Being a consumer, you can be very impatient and buy things now, or find out information now. But being on the production and design side, there is always something going wrong; a fabric can’t be found, a stitching detail missed – so you have to have a lot of patience going into the projects, which I didn’t really expect in the beginning. I thought it would be easier than it is, but I guess the goal is to make it look easy in the end, and I feel our collaborations exist for a reason and usually get a lot of wear and use by ourselves. I am excited for some of our fall projects with Baracuta and Joya to coming back from the sampling process.

With a focus on mostly timeless and non-trend based fashion, do you find that while there’s always going to be growth and renewed interest among readers, inevitably you may run out of things to highlight and focus? Product that aren’t inherently different and fresh season to season.

At first glance I think that could appear to be an issue, but when it comes down to it, the brands we are really highlighting and now retailing; Margaret Howell, Engineered Garments, Yuketen, The Real McCoy’s etc – they are all ‘fashion’ brands and continue to develop and produce something new each season. While they aren’t taking on new head designers like a Dior or YSL, they stick within their groundwork but still push themselves. It’s mixing those brands with more traditional companies like Duluth Pack and Wm. J. Mills & Co. that offers an interesting variety. So while some of the products and brands we do feature will be the exact same in 100 years, the majority of them are still trying new things each season. As well, in our second issue we were able to sit down with White Mountaineering and Beams; there is a huge market in Japan and a lot more brands that we love like Visvim, Wtaps and Neighborhood that we are till anxious to meet with and learn more about.