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Jeans, well-made and well-imagined
By Andrew Seguin
 If, just before walking out Chapin’s front door, you glanced at the current art case and asked yourself, “What does a weathered snowshoe have to do with jeans?” you’d literally be on your way to an answer. Your path to that knowledge would take you outside the school building, south through the city, then west across it, to where the old High Line railroad track ends in the Meatpacking District. There, you could walk into a store on Washington Street and ask for an answer from a Chapin alumna, Eleanor Lembo Ylvisaker ’95.
The jeans displayed in the art case were made by Earnest Sewn, a company she co-founded. Also the company’s public relations director, Ms. Ylvisaker will explain to you that “everything our company does ties back to its concept,” and the concept, in this case, is paying homage to America’s history of craftsmanship. To Earnest Sewn, the snowshoe symbolizes a time when America was committed to high-quality, handmade products, and their jeans are one of those products.
The Meatpacking District store above which Ms. Ylvisaker works is named An Earnest Cut and Sew, and it’s where the jeans are sold, but it is also a vehicle for disseminating the company’s aesthetic, part of which is a belief in the Japanese notion of wabi-sabi, or finding perfection in the imperfect. No two pair of jeans is alike, and each pair incorporates some inconsistency in its design.
“The store was originally opened as a marketing tool,” Ms. Ylvisaker said. It’s filled with antique furniture and fixtures, unfinished brick and wood, old-fashioned signs and carries products — such as hand-cobbled shoes and items from Italy’s oldest apothecary, Santa Maria Novella — that relate to the company’s vision. It’s a vision that means each pair of jeans is hand-stamped by the three people involved in their manufacture, and that some of those people, who sand the jeans, undergo charcoal drawing tests in order to practice the strokes necessary to achieve the Earnest Sewn look.
Earnest Sewn’s attention to detail and craft is one of the things that distinguishes it from other jeans companies. Another is the atmosphere the company has created around the jeans themselves, so that when you enter An Earnest Cut and Sew or visit its showroom, replete with a row of wooden movie theater seats, you feel that you are entering another century.
Ms. Ylvisaker has been instrumental in creating that atmosphere and bringing it to the public. But she doesn’t use paid advertising. “It’s all in-house PR,” she said. “I overhear the designers talking and think, ‘That would make a great story for the company.’” Then, through events at An Earnest Cut and Sew or articles in fashion magazines, or even a display such as the one in Chapin’s art case, Ms. Ylvisaker gets Earnest Sewn’s message out.
It’s a skill she’s had to develop over time. “I was always interested in fashion, even at Chapin,” Ms. Ylvisaker said. “But I studied early-childhood education and taught for two years. Then I decided I wanted to do something creative.” Her career change led her to work at Harper’s Bazaar, Cosmopolitan and Lucky, then to freelance fashion work, where she ended up meeting the future president and designer of Earnest Sewn, Scott Morrison. The two of them, along with Lori Jacobs, launched Earnest Sewn in 2004.
The company has met with great success and was recently asked to offer its custom-tailored jeans — wherein the customer gets to choose everything, from the denim to the pockets — at Barney’s. Ms. Ylvisaker is working on opening another store in Los Angeles. “We expand where we can,” she said. Though Los Angeles doesn’t typically receive much snowfall, its residents may be seeing an old snowshoe in a shop window very soon.
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