The Dress Code Is Never the Dress Code

 

John Pack, Designer
Photo Credit: Britt Carpenter
Creative Director/Producer: Mykel C. Smith

Ask John Pack what his collection is arguing against and he doesn’t reach for a mood board.

“There are no rules to design,” he says, “and the dress code is never the dress code.”

I stopped him right there and told him he’d just handed me something I was going to use. He said it the way people say things they settled a long time ago, with no build and no flourish, about fifteen minutes into a conversation he otherwise kept trying to hold at a modest volume.

I met Pack earlier this season through an invitation from Mykel C. Smith, the creative director of his show. Mykel brought me in for a private preview of the collection during the campaign photo shoot. We ran into each other again a few weeks later at another event, and both times he was steadier in the room than most designers are this close to a debut.

John Pack, Designer
Photo Credit: Britt Carpenter
Creative Director/Producer: Mykel C. Smith

John Pack Takes BiCoastal From Custom to Ready-to-Wear

On September 15 he shows in New York for the first time. The collection is spring–summer, it is ready-to-wear, and it is the first time in a long working life of making clothes that he will be making them for people he has never met.

That is the part worth sitting with. Pack is self-taught, and he is from Trenton, New Jersey. He built BiCoastal one client at a time in the custom world, where the work is a private conversation between two people and the fit is the whole argument. Ready-to-wear asks something else of you. It is a bet placed in advance, on strangers, with your own money.

Turning Down the Money

I asked what version of himself he had to retire in order to make this collection. He answered in the language of subtraction.

“I have to make myself less available,” he said. “Turning down things that I just don’t want to do, where before I probably would have thought, let me just do it, because it’s still work, it’s still monetizing, it’s still keeping my name afloat. But it’s not moving me in the direction that I want to move into.”

Since he started this process he has turned down a number of jobs that would have paid. There is a specific discipline in refusing money that isn’t wrong, only misaimed — the kind of work that keeps the lights on and the name in circulation while quietly holding you exactly where you are. In fact, most people can’t do it. The ones who can usually have something in view that the rest of us can’t see yet.

Photo Credit: Britt Carpenter
Creative Director/Producer: Mykel C. Smith

The Number Nobody Says Out Loud

What frightened him was simpler, and he didn’t dress it up.

“Financially, I was afraid. Wanting to jump into ready-to-wear has been something I wanted to do for some years now, but I never really took that leap. Besides going to manufacturers and semi-starting the process of trying to figure out how I could get my designs reproduced on a mass scale — I never went past that.”

I’ve produced enough shows to know the arithmetic he’s describing. You can hand a designer a budget and the budget will still surprise him, because something always turns up that nobody planned for. What’s rare isn’t the surprise. It’s a designer willing to say the number out loud. We celebrate the moment in this business and stay very quiet about what the moment cost.

“They only see the outside,” he said. “They only see the celebration.” What they don’t see, he added, is “the behind the scenes and everything else that leads to that.”

The Part That Isn’t Finished

Becoming assumes something unfinished. When I asked which part of his design language is still under construction, he didn’t name a technique. He named the whole aesthetic.

He calls it luxury sport. It’s the register he’s been working in for years, and the unfinished part, in his telling, is “completing that design aesthetic and then finding the lane for it.” Of course, anyone who has tried to build in that space understands the difficulty. Luxury comes with entrance requirements. You have to satisfy them and still sound like yourself, and plenty of people who satisfy them stop sounding like anyone at all.

Then he said the harder thing.

“Within this time, with social media and everything at your fingertips, it’s hard to create new. You can always alter something to make it your own, but it always goes back to something that you’ve seen. So sometimes as a designer I have that block. That’s what I mean when I say unfinished — just trying to set myself apart.”

That’s an unusual thing to say out loud three weeks before a debut. Most designers arrive at a first New York show with the volume turned all the way up on certainty. Pack told me which part he hasn’t solved.

What He Won’t Unlearn

Which is why his answer to the next question surprised me. I asked what he believed about his own work a year ago that he no longer believes. I use that question to find the limiting belief somebody has outgrown. He sat with it for a while and came up empty.

“No, because I’m a self-taught designer. I didn’t go to school. Everything that I know as far as design, I’ve taught myself. So if it’s something I don’t know how to do, I’ll figure it out. I surprise myself with things that I produce. So I don’t limit myself.”

Nobody ever sat him down and told him what he couldn’t do, so there’s less for him to unlearn. The block he described a minute earlier wasn’t doubt. He simply hasn’t decided the thing is finished.

Photo Credit: Britt Carpenter
Creative Director/Producer: Mykel C. Smith

Fabric First, Sketch Later

His process starts somewhere I didn’t expect. Not with a sketch. He doesn’t really sketch.

“If I have an idea, I’ll sit with it for a little bit. My mind runs, so I’ll have more than one idea at a time, but if one sticks out, I’ll come back to it. I like to source fabrics first.”

For this collection he’s working with an illustrator. They meet, she draws, he scraps things and comes back to her. The night before we spoke, he sent her a fabric and asked her to lay it over a drawing they’d been sitting on for weeks, just to see what it did. That was the night the piece finally worked for him.

It runs the other direction just as often. He walks into a fabric store, finds something he has to have, and has no idea yet what it wants to be.

“It isn’t always one, two, three. It could be three, two, one. Start from the end to get to the beginning, or start from the beginning to get to the end.”

The least glamorous part of the job, he says, is pattern drafting. The most tedious part. Then, without me asking, he added that it’s also the most important. Ultimately, the order people put those two in tells you most of what you need to know about how they work.

A Tuxedo in the Wrong Fabric

If there’s a thesis piece in the collection, a garment that explains the rest of the room, he says it’s a men’s tuxedo. Two-piece, sitting under the bridal side of the collection, cut in a fabric nobody would ordinarily use for a tux, and still unmistakably a tuxedo. Classical in silhouette. Unconventional in construction. His own line about the dress code, made physical.

When I asked whether that made him a disruptor, he took the word and filed the edges off it.

“Not an over-the-top or loud disruptor. But we’re going to always push it in some way.”

Quiet disruption, then. He liked that.

What His Son Sees

Ask where the inspiration comes from and he doesn’t give you a city or a decade or another designer. He gives you his son.

“He’s 17. He randomly texted me last night just telling me how proud he was of me. That really touched me, because he isn’t with me day in and day out of everything I go through, but he sees it from the outside looking in. He knows where this started from, and he sees where it is today.”

We talk constantly in this industry about parents who support their children’s creativity. We almost never talk about what it does to a grown man to be believed in by his own kid.

For a reference outside of fashion, he gave me discipline. Not as something he has, as something he’s still working on. “Within fashion, that’s something you have to be, because it takes a lot of time. It takes a lot of hours.” Every creative I know eventually runs into that tension. The structure you need to sustain the work is the same structure that can strangle it, and learning to wrap one around the other without crushing anything is most of the job.

Photo Credit: Britt Carpenter
Creative Director/Producer: Mykel C. Smith

Confident and Seen

There was one question he couldn’t answer in the room. I asked what he wants someone to feel when they put his clothes on, not how they look but what they feel, and he asked to come back to it. Then he asked to come back to it again. I told him to take his time. Some answers need to sit.

It came a few days later, in writing.

“I would like my clients to feel extremely confident and seen. I want my clothing to put you in a mood that makes you escape any worries or frustration you may be currently feeling, because you know no matter what you look good — and you’re now living in a BiCoastal world.”

Seen. That’s the word doing the work in that sentence, and I don’t think it’s an accident coming from a designer who spent years dressing people one at a time, in fitting rooms, where being seen is the entire transaction.

What he wants the room to understand about him after the show came out just as plainly.

“That I’m a young Black designer from Trenton, New Jersey. Again, I’m self-taught. This is my first time showing in New York. I want them to enjoy the show.”

Then, after a pause: “I don’t got all the words.” After all, he has them. He just won’t inflate them.

Dreams Become Reality

I asked what would tell him, a year from now, that this collection worked. Still, there’s no poetry in the answer, and there shouldn’t be. He wants it produced by a manufacturer instead of by his own hands. He wants it sold. Beyond that, he wants interest, and he wants people talking about it in rooms he isn’t standing in. That’s what success looks like from where he’s standing, and I’d be suspicious of a different answer.

The clients he’d like to see in BiCoastal: Teyana Taylor, Fabolous, Colman Domingo, Rihanna, Usher, Chris Brown. You can read the aesthetic straight off that list. People who wear tailoring like streetwear and streetwear like tailoring. People for whom the dress code has never really been the dress code.

After this he wants autumn–winter. He wants to keep showing, and he’d like the next one sponsored rather than self-funded. He wants, in his own words, to be a household name.

And when the money is tight and the hours are long and the drafting table is the least glamorous place on earth, the thing he says to himself is three words.

“Dreams become reality.”

He explains it by counting. He can go back to January and walk you point by point to where he’s sitting now. One thing, then the next thing, then this. “If it’s something you dream about, if it’s something you want, all you have to do is put in the work and it’ll be reality.”

Before the Room Fills Up

On the 15th the room fills, the lights come up, and the collection stops belonging only to him. Everything that made it happened before any of that, in fabric stores and text messages from a seventeen-year-old, in the jobs he turned down, in hours of pattern drafting that nobody photographs.

He’s been becoming this whole time. The show is just where the rest of us catch up.

For more information and to join the BiCoastal Collection movement, follow @bicoastalcollection on Instagram.

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