Stahvo Hopes To Sew Up Activewear With Tailored Looks

Manufacturing

As of Monday, October 7, 2019

Gustavo Garibay had enough of brash colors and big logos in activewear. He wanted to use the words “refined” and “tailored” to describe it. When he didn’t see this option in men’s activewear on the market, Garibay, a former director of denim product development at Guess?, Inc., resolved to design it himself.

During the week of Oct. 7, he is scheduled to officially launch Stahvo, an active menswear essentials line with shorts that could be worn at the gym or the beach. Other pieces in the line include pants made out of performance fabric, T-shirts and an unlined blazer that could be worn at a meeting.

“Beach, gym, day-to-night, I don’t feel like I’m underdressed,” he said, describing his self-financed line. “It’s more refined and polished.”

The collection is currently sold at the Universal Body boutique in West Hollywood, Calif., and Hombre Tulum, Garibay’s boutique in Tulum, Mexico.

To little fanfare, Stahvo has been manufactured in Los Angeles since 2017. The first Stahvo piece that Garibay showed was the line’s shorts. Serving as the line’s first salesman, Garibay cold-called Universal Body to get a perspective on his work.

It was an untested brand, but Scott Sykes, co-founder of Universal Body, gave a green light to selling the shorts. Being located in the same retail center as the sprawling Crunch Fitness gym and a short drive from the luxe fitness studio Equinox, Universal Body’s neighborhood attracts people looking for active looks from new designers as well as new styles. The boutique seeks to appeal to the fitness and fashion crowds.

“The two crowds are definitely not exclusive,” Sykes said. “The last six years it was all about active. But its popularity has seen its height. We are all watching an emergence of a new category that is a hybrid of active lifestyle and active performance. There’s a bridge being built, and it is making its way to its own category. Basically, we are concentrating on hybrids. The hybrids give the athletic-lifestyle person something to wear. They all want to be comfortable, no matter what they are doing.”

The inspiration for Stahvo comes from frequent travel. Once a month, Garibay was flying from Los Angeles to Tulum, which is a resort city on the Caribbean coast of Mexico’s Quintana Roo state.

Garibay had little patience for waiting in airport terminals to check luggage. He also did not want to pack a lot of clothes, but he hoped that the few clothes he did pack could be used in plenty of different situations. Soon after he designed the tailored shorts, he expanded with garments that could be worn outside of a gym.

The activewear side of the line comes from its fabrics, such as four-way-stretch nylon, which offer greater mobility. The line also uses rayon and spandex, fabrics that are known for their stretchiness but also keep their shape. He added a tailored look to the garments by adding pleats on the shorts, pants and blazers. Fabrics in the blazers and pants are water repellent. The line also offers a hoodie that is made out of water-repellent materials.

While pleats may have reached their zenith of fashion popularity in the 1980s, Garibay said that pleats can lend a slimming and tailored look. Single, narrow pleats were added to the shorts and pants. Narrow cuts in the blazer, a lined hoodie and a camp-collar shirt are also features of the line. Pants have a cropped inseam, and the blazer’s pockets are placed on the side of the jacket, not at the front.

T-shirts come in several silhouettes of muscle shirt, short-sleeve shirt and long-sleeve shirt. The shirts come in white and black, while the jacket and pants are offered in black. Shorts are made in black as well as various patterns. Retail price points range from $70 for a muscle tee to $220 for a blazer.