Shockoe Atelier

The Lupesco family arrived in the clothing business the way a lot of American clothing families did, by leaving somewhere else. Pierre Lupesco got out of Romania as a young man, made his way into European tailoring, and by the family’s account learned the trade under Otto Hertz at the Belgian cloth house Scabal. In nineteen seventy-four he landed in New York with two suitcases and no English, started cold-calling men’s specialty shops, and inside three weeks had placed his collection with some of the best stores in the country. Nearly forty years later his son Anthony opened a jeans workshop in Richmond, Virginia, and built it out of exactly what the father had carried over: single-needle work, seams pressed and folded by hand, the construction of a tailored coat applied to a pair of five-pocket pants.

The Tailor’s Son

Anthony Lupesco grew up inside the trade without meaning to. Pierre spent most of his career in tailored apparel manufacturing in Italy, and when Anthony was young the family moved to a small town outside Milan. He was one of the only foreign kids there, the one who spoke Italian with an accent, and denim became the thing that told him where he was from. It was American, it was ordinary, and it was his. “I realized that I wanted to work in the environment I saw growing up,” he has said of the decision, years later, to build something of his own.

The route there ran through retail. Anthony’s parents were winding down their sweater and scarf design business in Washington, and he moved to Richmond and opened a high-end men’s store there in two thousand seven. Watching a documentary about collectors who dig hundred-year-old Levi’s out of mine shafts and desert cabins, he got fixed on a simple question: what would it take to make a garment that could still be standing in a century? The answer he arrived at was not to study vintage jeans, which is what nearly everyone in the raw denim revival was doing. It was to ignore them and build a jean the way his father built a suit.

We didn’t know how to make jeans when we started. We relied on my family’s experience with fine tailored goods.

That is not false modesty. Pierre had never made a pair of jeans either. What he had was fifty years of knowing how a garment holds its shape on a body, which is a different body of knowledge than knowing what a nineteen-fifties Levi’s arcuate looks like. “I really wanted to make jeans in a way that nobody else was doing,” Anthony told a Richmond magazine, “by applying old world tailoring techniques to something that’s really pretty automated.” In practice that means a lot of single-needle sewing, seams pressed and folded by hand, a reinforced double waistband, and construction time measured in hours per pair rather than minutes.

Thirteen South Fifteenth Street

Shockoe Denim opened in October of two thousand twelve at 13 South Fifteenth Street, in Shockoe Bottom, and the format was unusual from the first day: the workshop and the store were the same room. A customer walked in past the sewing machines to reach the rack. There was no factory somewhere else, no wholesale mystery, no story about partners. If you wanted to know who made the jeans, they were sitting right there.

The cloth in those early years was American. Shockoe built its jeans on selvedge from Cone Mills at White Oak in Greensboro, North Carolina, a day’s drive south, which at the time was the only industrial selvedge denim woven in the United States. The best expression of the young company’s instincts came at its second anniversary. Hunting through an abandoned factory in Petersburg, Virginia, the crew turned up a roll of Cone denim dated nineteen seventy-one, cloth that had been sitting in the building since it was used to make Landlubber bell-bottoms. On the ninth of October, two thousand fourteen, they cut fifty pairs from it and called them the Petersburg Deadstock I. They sold for a hundred and twenty-five dollars at the anniversary party and a hundred and fifty in the shop afterward, and that was the whole run. As Anthony’s partner Matt Rho put it at the time, if you wanted a pair, you had to get to Richmond.

From Denim to Atelier

One jean turned into a wardrobe, and then the name stopped fitting. In the autumn of two thousand fifteen the company dropped Denim for Atelier, and the collection that came with the change included dress shirts, vests, jackets, blazers and overcoats. The doors that opened for those pieces were Pierre’s. Italian mills and small Italian factories do not take new accounts from unknown American labels, but they will take a call from a man who has been working with them since the nineteen seventies. The rename, Anthony said, was about context more than product. “I think it frames the jeans in the proper context into how we would like to see them worn.”

Growth was steady rather than dramatic. Online sales became the biggest channel, running about sixty percent of the business by two thousand seventeen, with wholesale accounts across the country and into Europe and Asia, including Need Supply Co. across town in Carytown. In January of two thousand seventeen the company took over the suite next door and roughly doubled its footprint, mostly to add machinery and pull more of the work in-house. Anthony’s explanation of why it was time is the most Shockoe sentence in the record: he and Matt Rho had reached the point where the two of them were doing their work on a ping-pong table on the retail floor.

The line thickened around the jeans rather than away from them. Today there are four fits, the Slim, the Standard, the roomier high-rise Ivy, and the most generous cut of all, the Heritage, offered across a shelf of cloths: the house Kojima slub, a black selvedge, a grey selvedge, a khaki, a tinted-weft Italian. Every pair is hand-numbered and signed, carries a vegetable-tanned leather patch from a small family producer in North Carolina, and comes with free repairs for the life of the garment, which for a company that expects a jean to last decades is a real liability and the point at the same time.

Fifty Thousand Masks

Three things nearly knocked the company off course, and the third one turned out to be the making of it.

The first was ambition. The expanded collection reached for alpaca, cashmere and Italian wool, and priced itself past the people who had been buying the jeans. Anthony has been candid that the brand had to walk that back and rebalance, keeping the pieces that worked and letting go of the ones that only worked on paper. The second was the loss of the cloth. When Cone shut White Oak at the end of two thousand seventeen, the American selvedge that Shockoe had built its reputation on simply stopped existing, and the company went looking abroad for weaving of the same caliber.

The third was the pandemic. On the twenty-seventh of March, two thousand twenty, Shockoe stopped making clothes and started making covers for N95 masks. The denim line went dark entirely. The Richmond and Henrico health director Danny Avula and Mayor Levar Stoney connected Anthony with the Medical College of Virginia, and the shop that normally ran four to eight people on production scaled up to fifteen, and at its peak about thirty. By the time it wound down in July, the crew had turned out roughly fifty thousand masks for health care workers. It was the hardest stretch the company had been through and the one that changed how its owner saw it.

This has given us the confidence that we can be real manufacturers, not just boutique retailers.

He said something else that year that explains the last decade of decisions: the mask work helped him rediscover why he started the company in the first place, and that it was more about manufacturing than about fashion. Shockoe applied the lessons directly. In February of two thousand twenty-two, after nearly ten years, the company left its namesake neighborhood for three thousand square feet at 1623 West Broad Street, laid out from scratch around a faster production flow modeled on what the mask line had taught it. Nine people made the move. The format did not change: walk in off Broad Street, and the sewing floor is right there behind the clothes.

Made in Richmond

Everything Shockoe calls its own is cut and sewn at 1623 West Broad Street. That is the whole basis of the company and it is not hedged anywhere: patterns, cutting, sewing, pressing and finishing all happen in the room the customer stands in. The tees and sweatshirts are the exception, and the brand says so plainly, they come from a factory in Los Angeles.

The cloth is bought where the weaving is best, and since White Oak closed that has mostly meant Japan and Italy. The house fabric is a fourteen-and-a-half-ounce slub selvedge from Collect Mills in Kojima, Japan, which gives the flagship jeans their name. A seventeen-ounce big slub and a twelve-ounce grey selvedge come from Kuroki, also in Japan. The black and tinted-weft selvedges are woven by Candiani in Italy, and a black stretch selvedge used for the denim jacket comes from Kaihara in Japan. One American cloth is still in the line, and it is one this publication has been to see: the seven-ounce denim in the western shirt is woven at Mount Vernon Mills in Georgia. Leather patches come from a small-batch family producer in North Carolina. Where the cotton is grown, at any of these mills, the company does not publish.

The Bottom and the Broad Street Shop

Shockoe Bottom is the oldest commercial ground in Richmond, the low land along the river where the tobacco warehouses stood and where the goods of the city changed hands. It was also the site of the antebellum South’s second-largest slave market, a history the neighborhood has spent the last decade reckoning with publicly. The brand takes its name from that ground and marks its buttons and its labels with a tobacco leaf, and it has now moved a mile and a half west of it.

The heritage the company actually claims, though, is the one on its own hangtag. Shockoe prints the line “Made By Immigrants In The U.S.A.” and means it literally. The crew has been described as a collection of French, Korean, Mexican, Guatemalan, Scottish, German and English hands, brought together by circumstance in a cinderblock building in Virginia, run by the son of a Romanian who fled and rebuilt. “When we say that our products are made by immigrants in the U.S.A.,” Anthony has said, “it is also our way of saying made by Americans, as it is our belief that we are all immigrants here.”

That is the useful thing about Shockoe in a beat full of Americana. Most of the revival reaches backward, toward a mill town or a gold rush or a nineteen-forties pattern. This one reaches sideways, into European tailoring, and lands somewhere that could not be from anywhere else. As Matt Rho once put it, the denim is different because the company is not Americana and not heritage. It is a tailoring house that happens to make jeans, in Virginia, with the door open.

The Bottom Line