Ft. Lonesome's Bold, Colorful Western Suits Are a New Kind of Celebrity Status Symbol
It's Yeehaw Week at Esquire, and we're exploring all the ways in which Western style and culture are coming to bear on what clothes we wear (and what music we listen to) now. We kicked off with a look at the "Yeehaw Agenda," and the deep history of the Black Western aesthetic. Then, we talked Western wear with mega-DJ Diplo. Now, we're chatting with the woman who runs the clothier that made his infamous VMA suit. Giddy up.
Perhaps you've noticed a trend in 2019, one in which ten-gallon hats and glinting gold chains have infiltrated the red carpet, your Instagram feed, and the ad campaigns of many a high end fashion house. Western silhouettes are here in a big way, and for many actors and musicians, there's one place to turn when the desire for a custom fit hits: Austin-based clothiers, Ft. Lonesome.
The shop opened its doors in 2012 and has worked with the likes of Jenny Lewis, Midland, and My Morning Jacket's Jim James—not to mention Matthew McConaughey and Richard Linklater—during its tenure. And along the way, Ft. Lonesome has become the premier purveyor for a chainstitched design, a perfect patch, or full-on custom suit.
Below, founder Kathie Sever takes us down her rhinestone-encrusted path to success.
Madison Vain: I feel like I should start by asking where your commitment to Western wear comes from.
Kathie Sever: I’m pretty sure the truest answer to that question is that I found it really fascinating. I went to art school from living on a ranch in Montana, and I found it really fascinating that Western wear was equally prominent and lauded in both worlds. [Laughs] To see alternatives embraced Western wear, from the perspective of a rockabilly-slash-rock-n-roll-slash-art-kid standpoint, and then diving straight into working on a ranch where there was just one bar in this tiny town and on Thursday nights everybody put on their pearl snaps and got dressed up and ironed their jeans…I just fell in love with the commonality.
Ft. Lonesome is a mainstay in the music community now—Jim James, Nikki Lane, the Midland guys, and so many more love your designs—but how did it begin?
It actually started off in the early 2000s as a children’s Western wear line. I’ve been selling clothing my whole life, but I was blissfully unaware what it looked like or meant to have a clothing line, and it seemed like a great idea after my daughter was born. I had this friend who was a very business-minded, driven entrepreneur who wanted to start a baby accessories line. So I was basically working for her for a little bit, but really, we were also just juggling very small children and trying to rebuild who we were going to be post-children.
Where were you working before you started this line?
I was a pastry chef, and [post-kids] I didn’t want to go back to the restaurant world.
You love the incredibly hard jobs.
Oh my god. That was the hardest. Being a pastry chef was so fucking hard. [Laughs]
Was it successful?
We actually both did relatively well. She wanted everything domestically produced—then it was harder to do that—so we were all of the sudden taking trips out to L.A. to look for production. She was looking for representation. We were going to market in New York and I was just following along with whatever she was doing. But she was making bibs and flat mats and these simple oil cloth accessories, whereas I was stitching up these baby western shirts. And when it came time to scale, I hadn’t established any sort of sustainable workflow of production. Everything started to fall apart for me. But I got a really good response for the line, so I got a lot of orders right off the bat, so I was able to fail rather resplendently in front of a lot of people. [Laughs]
Talk about baptism by fire.
I became really disenchanted with the fashion world in general. I very quickly saw that it was very hard to stay connected to the design aspect of a business. I was doing so much business and travel, and I didn’t want to be away from my kids. And I was having a really hard time figuring out how to make a sustainable-feeling line. It was incredibly difficult to source materials that were being responsibly produced. But I had also made a lot of connections and I started to be known for doing Western wear. So, along the way, I started getting more and more adults asking for custom work. And that’s what I transitioned into doing.
Your custom suits are incredibly ornate. Was it gratifying to have a bit of a bigger canvas to play with on these orders?
I was finally feeling like I was using my art school background a lot more. It felt like a nice marriage of what I studied in school and then this background that I come from, of building garments. And then throwing the Western wear thing in there was appropriate because it’s the most illustrative form of clothing that we have.
Adults are obviously in a better position to appreciate a more detailed design.
Right. Kids barf of them, they shit on them, and they grown out of them. [Laughs] So it doesn’t really make sense. Why would I not just go to the thrift store and grab stuff there [for children]?
It didn’t take too long before some famous names started seeking out your designs.
We worked with Richard Linklater, Matt McConaughey, and Ethan Hawke. And, as far as music is concerned, our very first connection or client was Nikki Lane. I love Nikki, and I think she’s the reason that Western wear is huge right now, and she doesn’t get enough credit for it. I mean, she was making Western wear look incredibly relevant and fashion forward before Gucci picked it up and all the bigger lines started playing with Western wear. She’s country, but she’s also pretty fuckin’ badass and rock-n-roll, in a very core way.
Was there one partnership or design that you felt like, maybe not literally, but all of the phones were ringing off the hook because of a design you launched?
The Jenny Lewis weed suite that we did several years ago. That was the first thing that we did where we started to see people doing Halloween costumes of the suit. It was incredible to be integrated into the artistic narrative of a Jenny Lewis era. She really adopts a look for any given tour or record. So she wore it and wore it and wore it and people started to associate it with her at that time. It can be such a powerful partnership when you’re working with someone who appreciates garments in that way.
What’s been the most recent creation you made where you just felt like, "Shit, we nailed that, I want a million photographs of that on the website?"
It would be hard to not say the suit that we did for Diplo for the VMAs. On a really nerdy, chainstitch-level, the design, the color, the amount of tiny details in there and the execution of the embroidery—as well as integrating all of the rhinestones and the hand tie-dyed fabric—I mean...yeah. We really felt like that was our best work to date. That was the third suit that we had done for Diplo, and so we felt like we really knew his shape, so to speak.
Western wear is having a huge moment this year. I think having a mega-producer like Diplo key in on the style is a pretty big indicator of how far it’s spread.
I swear that I am not trying to cultivate some sort of naïveté, but to me it’s been surprising to hear people say, "Why would he do that?" Because I have always existed in this world where Western wear was cool. [Laughs] But to be honest, it all freaks me out a little bit, because what I feel like I see, and what I feel like we all see, are these trends that you see come in and go out. And you realize that our attention spans are getting shorter and shorter and we’re perpetually looking for stimulation and something new, and so, to be totally frank, I am a little nervous about how Western wear is popular right now. I keep having moments where I’ll come into work and I’ll say, "Is this it, you guys? Has the look now jumped the shark?"
I think it’s just getting started.
I hope so. Because working with celebrities is so fun, but it’s so much more fun to work with more of what I would consider the trickle-down effect of Jenny Lewis wearing a custom-embroidered suit. You know, women who are getting married who want to build something really fun, or men who are getting married who want to wear something more Gram Parsons-inspired. It’s been amazing to have such a broad array of people interested in getting these suits made right now.
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