In the midst of working on the fourth record for their dreamy strum-pop duo Foxymorons, David Dewese and Jerry James, like so many musicians, found themselves whiling away downtime chatting about music and art. But rather than evaporating like so much pop-culture ephemera, their conversational tangents begat an unexpected career shift—a foray into fashion. Two years later, their debut men's line is being sold in coastal boutiques, and it seems it's only a matter of time before it's—get this—big in Japan.
"It was the fall of 2007, and we had this huge pile of songs," Dewese recalls. "We couldn't agree on lyrics.... Somehow we wound up at a bar talking, and somehow clothing stuff kept coming up."
Turns out, several states apart—James still resides in the duo's home state of Texas—they'd both cultivated an interest in style as well as a nostalgic affinity for the comfort and clean lines of childhood bedtime attire. "What if we made clothes?" they asked. Dewese went ahead and purchased a domain name while the two talked favored icons such as The Beatles and the Kennedys.
The subsequent clothing label is American Viceroy (domain: americanviceroy.com), just a semantic skip over from the Foxymorons' own record label, Country Viceroy. What became their debut Fall 2009 collection had its genesis in a simple idea: pajama-inspired clothing you could wear outside. They don't call them pajamas—contemporary men's mag Valet called them "more Wes Anderson than Hugh Hefner"—but rather a uniform for creative living.
"It goes back to being kids and wearing your pajamas all day around the house and having fun and doing cool stuff," Dewese explains. "It's taking that creative spirit, which doesn't have to be locked into the bedroom. You can take it out into the world."
That unleashed creative spirit quickly trumped their conviction to finish that fourth record. But it stalled when the duo realized they knew exactly nothing about clothing design—so they got crafty, seeking out pattern books, reading message boards, consulting Rachel Lowe (owner of local boutique Two Elle) for advice and hunting down pattern makers. They used their band fund for capital, and found a Dallas garment production infrastructure with more affordable rates than Nashville.
"Usually, you don't do a photo shoot before you show the stuff to people," says Dewese, who knew about fashion websites from his work as a graphic designer, "but we just sent a website link around to make it look like a real clothing company."
They approached four stores, and two of them—Steven Alan Annex in New York and American Rag in Los Angeles—signed on. Fashion buyers responded to the silhouette and the aesthetics—and the offbeat model. Sean Williams, known better as the frontman of The Nobility, a local '60s quirk-pop outfit equally inspired by The Beatles, was a natural choice.
"He was the guy we were thinking about when we were drawing stuff," Dewese says. "He has a look we like. He has the body type and silhouette that goes well with the clothes we wanted to make, and the clothes we like to look at in old magazines. He can mix rock 'n' roll with preppiness, and also sort of a quirky element as well."
American Viceroy has just finished their Spring 2010 line, which expands their sleepy morning aesthetic into a more well-rounded and practical daytime concept. The pants and long sleeves have been abbreviated, and minor fixes abound, such as pants pockets that can now accommodate an iPhone. They describe their spring colors as "reminiscent of the late 1950s Hyannis Port summers of our imagination."
Though it's a throwback to an era the men are too young to have experienced in a region they never lived, they certainly nail the essence of a New Englander's pastel-and-checks-tinted life of leisure. That classic appeal has recently drawn the attention of GQ and a handful of other men's fashion sites, not to mention interest in Japan—a trend scout contacted the two recently looking to help place the line in Japanese stores.
"The Japanese have been interested because we carry a shirt size that's extra small," Dewese says. Theirs is a slimmer silhouette that the smaller-framed man of leisure isn't likely to encounter in his typical run to Target or other department stores, where medium is typically the smallest size you'll encounter—and even that tends to run roomy. Even though Dewese is a devotee of that narrow aesthetic, he's not sure he can even wear the very clothes he designs—another move that goes against the grain of a typical musician's thinking: He's going for a smaller, not larger, audience.
"We're designing what we'd like to see," he says. "It's not what I see when I walk around the mall or around Wal-Mart. We're narrowing our audience. We like The Beatles and that whole look. That '60s Kennedy/Camelot kind of stuff."
Only in this case, it's fit for an indie rocker.
Email tmoore@nashvillescene.com.
