The Howe Collection

Noticing a void in men’s highend denim, Jade Howe launched the Howe Collection in the Fall of 2001, describing the line as “Cowboy punk meets English country gentleman rock star.”

“It’s a lot, but if you get it right, it’s perfect,” he said.

The collection of pants, woven and knit shirts, T-shirts and jackets utilizes better fabrics in trim fits; denim comes in low-rise boot cuts and straight legs with novelty washes and discharged printing.

“It’s raw and deconstructed, yet it’s tailored, with imported fabric from Italy and France that make it nice,” he said. “It’s something that’s been missing from the West Coast for a long time.”

According to Howe, there’s a huge demand for men’s high-end denim, but the West Coast has not been paying enough attention to it. “Even the better denim brands don’t offer a full collection. If there were five more, that wouldn’t be enough,” Howe said.

Howe attributes his background in the boardsports arena for giving him a different perspective on the state of men’s fashion. He began working for Quiksilver in the late 1980s, then went on to create his own studio, attracting clients Volcom and Hurley, among others. Howe said that by the end of the 1990s, the oversized clothing trend went into overkill.

“It seemed like when the country supersized its fries, it supersized its clothes,” Howe said. “You couldn’t find clothes to fit unless you went to the Italian brands, and that was intimidating for some guys, because you could only find that stuff at the flamboyant stores. The flamboyant aren’t the only guys interested in style,” he said.

Howe said that the few men’s boutiques that carry more stylish casual fashions carried them in fits that were too narrow for more-conservative men.

“The guy we focus on is the 20- to 30-year-old male, who has maybe an action sports background and is into music. We try not to make our cuts so narrow and slim that guys can’t wear it.”

Howe said he made the decision to launch his line after seeing “a lot of guys coming into my studio wearing women’s boot-cut jeans.”

He translated that fit, affordability and availability “so that American guys can understand it. We’re trying to make it [the collection] accessible for your everyday male, so I try to get a guy out of the door with a pair of jeans and a T-shirt for about a hundred bucks,” said Howe.

Retail price points for the Howe Collection are $72–$125 for jeans, $68–$140 for wovens and knits, $90–$150 for jackets and $22–$44 for T-shirts.

The Howe Collection was featured in Gen Art’s annual Fresh Faces of Fashion show on Nov. 3 at the Mayan Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.

For more information, call (714) 536-1877. —Darryl James