Michael Phillips Moskowitz and Casey Berman describe their San Francisco-based ready-to-wear fashion label Gytha Mander as a classic tailor shop for a modern audience.
“If you can imagine a bunch of hipsters hijacking a London Savile Row tailor shop, you can understand the vibe of Gytha Mander,” says Berman, the label’s co-founder and business-end guru.
Founded in 2004, Gytha Mander has already earned accolades in SF Weekly’s Best of the Bay 2006 and was featured in Esquire Europe as “label of the month.” The men’s designer label recently presented their line at San Francisco GEN ART, a showcase for emerging talent in the fashion world.
Steeped in highbrow intellectualism and heavily inspired by its founders’ Jewish heritage, Gytha Mander began as a self-funded venture between Bay Area natives Moskowitz and Berman, who were first introduced at a Chanukah party in San Francisco in 2003.
Moskowitz, a Hebrew University alum, spent his junior year abroad with Berman’s younger sister. Berman had also studied at Hebrew University, and both had spent time at universities in England. Berman was an attorney by profession and creative-blooded Moskowitz worked in foreign policy.
While the two had plenty in common, it wasn’t until they discovered they each had an entrepreneurial itch and a dream to start a fashion label that they realized their joint venture was beshert. A third founder, Oakland-born Michael Eiselman, later joined the project.
“It’s a labor of love that makes some money,” Berman says. “It enables us to fulfill our entrepreneurial passions, create cool products, and relive and reinforce that connection to our past.”
Translated from Old English, Gytha Mander means “A Gift From Me,” but one can’t be sure if the gift the founders are referring to is the uniquely designed, finely constructed garments, or the lurid background stories interwoven with the collections.
Each collection has a strong narrative tying its pieces together, based on a time, place and idea. In a tribute to Jewish history and the diaspora, Gytha Mander’s fall 2006 collection is titled “The Urim and the Thummim,” a reference to the descriptions of the priestly garments in chapter 28 of Exodus. The collection includes pieces inspired by 17th-century Yemenite tribal finery, 19th-century Viennese aristocratic garb and 20th-century Bolshevist and early Zionist apparel.
Even the names of the clothes are significant. Every style has a name from Jewish history: Men can buy a Hillel dress shirt or choose between T-shirt styles Ariel and Bibi; women can wear a Sheba trench coat over their Miriam button-down. Accessorizing means deciding whether you’re more comfortable with a Ben Gurion holster or a Rashi scarf.
In designing the collection, Moskowitz found that he has a nearly endless amount of historical styles from which to draw inspiration.
“You have tremendous artistic license to interpret freely, because it’s very malleable and it borrows from everything — from 14th-century loose desert threads to protect against wind to 18th-century aristocratic garb,” Moskowitz says.
The resulting fall 2006 collection is heavily influenced by the Austro-Hungarian Empire, with its refined, regal styling and attention to detail, inspired by Moskowitz’s admitted idealism of the World War I era as a time of unapologetic decadence.
But Moskowitz says that Gytha Mander’s line, filled with garments that will set customers apart from their peers, is targeted to “men and women of discriminating taste with a keen eye for subtlety and a dispensable income.” The collections are filled with clothes intended to command the attention of those around them without being outlandish.
“Our audience ranges, although it’s mostly male, aged 25 to 40,” Berman says. “You will see hipsters who will be wearing our mustard faux-croc-leather holsters used to carry cell phones, keys and PDAs, and you can see a really conservative lawyer with a house in Marin wearing one of our suits as he litigates in court.”
The Gytha Mander collections are not always inspired by Jewish themes. Next on the label’s plate is the spring 2007 collection, “Baghdad Re-imagined,” with pieces influenced by the idea of what Iraq would be like today if it had remained a monarchy.
Though he’s yet to put pen to paper for fall 2007, Moskowitz says the collection is scheduled to draw on the 18th-century enlightenment in France and the United States.
While the creators infuse their company with Jewish intellectualism and occasionally Jewish themes, the fashion label has a customer base of both Jews and non-Jews.
“It’s not necessarily our goal to focus on Jewish customers. I don’t know if we’d survive as a company if that were the case,” Berman says. “But I can’t help but think that many Jews will be attracted to what we have based on the back story. The majority, probably 90 percent, of our customers are Jewish.”
Gytha Mander is growing, and is in talks to license their name to larger manufacturers. And with the company’s success and widespread recognition, Berman feels proud of his contribution to modern Jewish life.
“As much as we’re out there to sell and make money as any capitalistic commercial venture, we’re proud it also enables us to share our background and open people’s eyes to something they might not have known about,” says Berman. “There are 15 million Jews out of 6 billion people in the world, and it is incumbent upon many of us to ensure our survival.”
Moskowitz acknowledges how contemporary Judaism shapes his creative process, and is fascinated by the new Jewish identity he feels his company is a part of.
“I think that people draw inspiration from a rich mosaic of tiny pieces, and the majority of those things (for me) have been deeply influenced in my identity and my unique sense of purpose as a Jew,” Moskowitz says.
He noted that “there is a new Jewish identity as the result of assimilation that Gytha Mander is a part of. The kind of stuff we’re doing isn’t an isolated phenomenon. But it contributes to a much broader dialogue to how we can most meaningfully participate in the Jewish experience.”
For more information about the company, visit www.gythamander.com.