What happens when you have to dress four English rockers for a tour and you can’t find anything for them to wear that’s cool enough for the stage but durable enough for some good old-fashioned thrashing and moshing? If you’re former Reformation head designer and stylist Brianna Lance and The Vaccines guitarist Freddie Cowan, you start your own menswear brand. Their line, Basic Rights, founded in partnership with Savile Row tailor David Chambers, debuts today with a presentation at Jimi Hendrix’s Electric Lady Studios and an online e-commerce launch.
“The idea is to offer simple pieces that you can build a wardrobe out of, and then if you want to add in some crazy vintage jacket that you found or a super-colorful piece, you can,” says Lance. The debut range features crewneck tees, snap-front denim shirts, dark-wash jeans and jackets, proper trousers, and several takes on sweats in neutral tones from navy to gray.
What separates Basic Rights from other lines of so-called essentials is, well, pretty much everything. First, there are the fabrics, which are all sourced in Japan with durability and function in mind. Trousers are made in workwear twill to withstand wiling out, tees are in thin French terry to accommodate sweating—“Not a very glamorous answer!” Lance says—and denim pieces are free of logo details. “We were thinking about the kinds of things that last guys the longest,” Lance says, calling to mind the sustainability practices of her former employer. “It’s trying to be non-disposable fashion.”
Then there are the cuts, inspired by the wardrobes of some of history’s most stylish men. “The most iconic, classic version of everything is kind of what we were looking at, so when we did a trouser, we looked at tons of pictures of Steve McQueen, Paul Newman, Ian Curtis from Joy Division—of all these super-iconic male figures—and focused on what kind of trousers they were wearing,” Lance explains. “The same went for the jeans, jackets, and T-shirts. We were just trying to find the most classic version of something that still had an element of coolness to it.” This is were Chambers’s tailoring expertise came in. “He was amazing because I could literally send him a picture of Paul Newman’s jeans on a motorcycle and he would know exactly what I wanted the shape to be, which is incredible. It’s such a lucky thing to find someone like that.”
And finally, and probably most important to Basic Rights’s customers, are the prices, which range from $50 to $500. “That’s what’s really lucky about the world of fashion changing and being able to do direct-to-consumer. The reason we used this model is so that we would be capable of giving the customer a higher quality at a more affordable price,” says Lance. Can’t argue with that.
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