On a cloudy Sunday morning, Benjamin Talley Smith, a 45-year-old man with apple cheeks and a penchant for a Canadian tuxedo, was shopping for jeans at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Los Angeles.
He was wearing jeans – a pair of worn-out Levi’s and an equally worn-out Levi’s denim jacket – and was rooting through piles of jeans. He wasn’t looking for collector’s jeans, the classics that can fetch thousands, but rather interesting jeans: jeans with an unusual fade or a weird DIY patchwork or a striking splash of paint.
“Every pair of jeans is different,” he said with the air of an oenophile assessing a new bouquet. He held up a pair of jeans with some large white spots on the thighs. “Too sour for me,” he said, putting them back.
He grabbed another pair and pointed to a series of faded lines at each ankle. “See that honeycomb wear pattern?” he said. ‘That was because a cowboy had tucked his jeans into his boots. Maybe I’ll try to replicate that.”
Then he saw an old pair of jeans from the Japanese brand Evisu. “Look,” he said. He smiled. “I made that.”
Discovering his own work is not an unusual occurrence for Mr. Smith. If there is a man behind the denim curtain in fashion – a wizard of jeans – it is him, a name passed from brand to brand, from designer to designer, like a secret password.
Scott Morrison, one of the founders of premium denim in the United States, hired Mr. Smith from Earnest Sewn and then introduced him to Catherine Holstein of Khaite, who recommended him to Hali Borenstein of Reformation. Mr. Smith has also collaborated with Tommy Hilfiger, Alexander Wang, Rag & Bone, Juicy Couture, Helmut Lang, Marc by Marc Jacobs, Vince, Everlane, Aritzia, Jordache and Walmart, for whom he sustainable Free Assembly denim, which starts at $27. Its sweet spot is between the jeans giants – Levi’s, Lee, Wrangler – and the global luxury groups. When Ms. Holstein met Mr. Smith, he was introduced to her, she said, as “arguably the best denim man in the United States.”
He gave advice on her best-selling Danielle jeans – the high-waisted, straight-leg style made famous by Kendall Jenner, which helped end the jegging boom and launched a quazillion TikTok videos – as well as Reformation’s Val jeans, a favorite of Miley Cyrus. In addition to Khaite and Reformation, Mr. Smith currently works with Ulla Johnson, La Ligne and Spanx (the Spanx is a reinvented denim line set to launch in 2025).
Recently, he went to a school talk for his son, and “one of the parents was wearing a full head-to-toe Ulla look, which I also had,” he said. “An amazing denim jacket with puff sleeves and a matching skirt with large logo buttons.”
“That’s always what I like best,” he says. “I think of the jeans like my children. Every time I see them I always think, ‘Oh, that’s one of mine.’
Considering that the global jeans market is expected to rise $121.50 billion by 2030 and that there is hardly any brand, high or low, that does not dream of jeans, Mr. Smith is one of the most influential people in fashion you’ve never heard of.
Or never heard of it until now.
The language of jeans
Why does a fashion designer need a denim specialist? “It’s a completely different language,” Ms. Holstein said. And denim is one of the most sustainable clothing categories. Once customers discover a style they like, they keep coming back. That’s why, when Ms. Holstein decided to start her business, Mr. Smith was the third person she signed up. He likes to call himself the denim whisperer. And she knew she needed someone who spoke jeans.
In jeans, “whiskers” does not refer to cats’ sensory antennae, but rather to the thin, faded lines created by sitting and radiating at the crotch. “Ghost patches” are not supernatural; they are light or dark spots on jeans where the spots have fallen off. ‘Chevrons’ have nothing to do with heraldry, but refer to the small folds along the seams of the inner thigh that form when the indigo rubs off. And ‘the magic triangle’, a term that is the jeans equivalent of the golden mean, refers to the optimal placement of the back pockets between the yoke and the center seams.
Do it right, and it will “make your butt look really good,” Mr. Smith said.
“For me, jeans are all about making your butt look really good,” he continued. “If you place the bags even a quarter inch too far down on the outside edge, they frown a little. And then you have a frowning butt. But if you just push them up a little, you’ll have a happy butt. His job is an endless search for the platonic happy ass.
For Ms. Johnson, who has been working with Mr. Smith since late 2020, designing with denim is a very different practice than designing with wool, cotton or silk.
“The level of scientific research on how many hours of washing you need is very different from questions about draping,” she said. But it does matter, she said, because while only 5 percent of her collection is denim, its sales have doubled since last year.
Then there is the “downsizing,” says Ms. Borenstein, the Reformation director. Shrinkage occurs during washing and affects the fit. Regular pants can take a day to make and two or three fittings to perfect. For jeans, however, it takes “at least a week,” she said. “The measuring points are much more complicated. They should hug your legs in many different ways.
Ms. Borenstein said denim currently makes up about 10 percent of Reformation’s total revenue. (Reformation is introducing 25 to 30 denim pieces per month.) Denim is also Reformation’s fastest-growing category. The Val jeans, in a light blue wash named after the Colorado River, are the best-selling style this year, the first time since Reformation’s founding in 2009 that something other than a dress has taken that spot.
Mr. Smith said it takes an average of two years after initial concept to understand whether a product line works in the workplace. (Unlike some denim specialists, he helps build lines from design through factory production, washes, etc.)
“Denim is very expensive to make,” he said. When approached by a brand, “I always have an honest conversation that it’s going to cost $30,000 to get the first collection off the ground,” he said (at least if it’s made in Los Angeles). “Then you have to maintain it.” Still, he said, he turns down brands “fairly often.”
Denim is eternal
In Los Angeles, the heart of the American jeans world and where Mr. Smith lives, he has a loft-like office that is a kind of cross between a jeans stamp and a jeans laboratory.
On the wall behind his desk hang 51 different pairs of jeans, arranged from dark to light, so that every time he turns his head he sees a pair of jeans. He has racks of jeans and shelves full of plastic bins full of jeans, organized by wash and brand – ‘well over a thousand jeans’ in total. He created the first pair of jeans he ever made, in 2000, when he was still in college, and the most complicated pair of jeans he ever made, for Evisu, which was inspired by an old pair of Levi’s and involved so many different old Levi’s were involved. patches, each of which had to be made by hand, with one pair taking two weeks to make and costing $800.
“It wasn’t practical,” Mr Smith said.
Mr. Smith didn’t expect to be a denim man. He grew up in a small town in Vermont, the youngest of five children. His father was a photographer and bookstore owner who owned a printing press; his mother was a schoolteacher and music teacher. He was “born in a bed my father built,” he said, and generally wore Carhartt.
He didn’t really think about jeans until he got to Massachusetts College of Art and Design, when he discovered Diesel, and he certainly didn’t plan on making jeans his career – he planned to go into film and interned with Ken Burns, the documentary maker – until he decided he wanted to work with his hands and switched to fashion.
A brief stint with a Boston designer took him to Paris, and after graduation he got a job at Tommy Hilfiger. He was supposed to work on outerwear, but it was 2003 and premium denim was starting to become a thing. Hilfiger needed someone in jeans. Then the director responsible for denim became ill.
“Basically they said, ‘You have to do it all,’” Mr. Smith said. “I was 25.” Thus began his odyssey in jeans.
Although Mr. Smith briefly dabbled in his own line, called Talley, with custom jeans that took about four weeks to produce, he decided he preferred consulting and moving from brand to brand. “It keeps me nimble when I can make a $27 pair of jeans and then a $500 pair of jeans,” he said, referring to the divide between Walmart and Khaite.
Mr. Smith divides his time between the Los Angeles office; his favorite nearby factory, Caitac Garment Processing Inc., which specializes in washing and laser and hand sanding (he also works with factories in Pakistan and Turkey); and an apartment in Brooklyn’s Greenpoint neighborhood that he kept because he goes to New York about once a month to visit clients.
In Los Angeles, he lives in Studio City, in a ranch-style bungalow built in 1937, with his wife Danielle Robinson, co-head of talent at Issa Rae’s ColorCreative management company, and their 5-year-old son. (Khaite’s Danielle jeans are named in honor of his wife.) At home, he has 22 pairs of jeans that he actually wears. His wife also has a lot of jeans.
“She has hundreds of pairs, but every day she says, ‘Oh, I like that one in your closet,’” he said. “And then she gets mad at me because I say, ‘Oh, you have those weird jeans from five years ago. I need to borrow it for something,’ and she doesn’t think it will come back.”
Recently he tried to replicate one of his old Levi’s for Khaite. He had worn them to a meeting with Mrs. Holstein to review samples for the new season, and she was particularly impressed with the natural placement of the cracks.
“It takes a lot of passion, curiosity and tenacity to truly be a student of denim,” Ms. Holstein said. “I’ve never met anyone who has it like Ben.”
For him, each pair of jeans produces the next pair, which produces the next, and so on. “The laundry is like a living, breathing thing,” he said. “It doesn’t always come out the way you want, or it leads you down crazy new paths.” It’s jean evolution in real time.
“I’m never bored,” Mr. Smith said. When he’s in a crowd of strangers, he thinks to himself, I bet I have a pair of jeans in your closet.
