The Liet Delusion
An imagined community of finely dressed pacifists
A few months, I joked to Jessie: "If I hire a CEO to run Fluorescent, I am going to need to get a puppy." Within three weeks, quite by chance, I had hired Kyle Bennett, Fluorescent's new CEO, and signed myself up to receive a mini Australian Shepherd puppy. His name is Lenny, and while he is a lot of work, he’s not so much work that I haven’t had time to pursue Liet, my nascent clothing company.
I founded Liet in November of 2022 — well over a year ago—inspired by a small Italian military-heritage brand called 1ST PAT-RN. 1ST PAT-RN is run by a couple who appear to do everything themselves: design the clothes, photograph everything, write about it, and so on. Neither of them are influencers, and you won’t find them at Fashion Week. What distinguishes 1ST PAT-RN from so many other brands is their serious commitment to their craft. Their newsletters are essays describing the thought processes behind each collection. By the end of one of these essays, you’re invested. For someone like me, that’s catnip.
Liet is going to follow a similar path. There are few things I love more than writing and designing, and they come together quite neatly in the business of selling clothing on the internet. I am going to take 1ST PAT-RN’s model and tweak it: I aim to make the business of selling clothing more literary. And, somewhat paradoxically, I also aim to make it more like software development.
Designed objects are never perfect, and they are always an iteration of an iteration of an iteration. I am going to be transparent about that with Liet. I will walk you through each of my decisions, and when I make a change to a staple in our permanent collection, I will tell you what I did and why. My hope is that we can bring the best parts of software development (documented versions, change logs, attentiveness to user feedback) to the business of clothes.
Talk to anyone about their favourite garment and they almost always have a story to tell about it. There’s a leather jacket that I wore for the better part of my undergraduate degree. I remember cruising over Grant’s Pass on my motorcycle at 3am in that jacket. I slept in it in an art flop in Portland. And it was my “in” with a very pretty girl who made a sideways comment about it after I turned up late to writing class. That pretty girl later became my wife. This is the literary nature of clothing and even a new garment can radiate it, provided it has been designed with intention and purpose.
When I wrote my first chapbook, I was writing everyday. I had been working on a series of poems that blended real experiences with imagined ones. Because the poems had a certain music to them, they were always in my head, and I began to feel like I had cultivated some weird delusion that followed me everywhere I went.
Liet is a similar delusion. In the 1960s and 70s, a small group of American draft dodgers fled the United States to a small constellation of islands off the west coast of Canada. I grew up on those islands, and stories of the draft-dodging hippies who grew the region’s cannabis permeated my childhood. If I met one while hitchhiking from island to island in my early twenties, I didn’t know it at the time. But the stories always left an impression on me.
Liet, then, is a Canadian workwear and military-heritage clothing company. The aim of the brand is to capture the imagined sartorial choices of those mythic draft dodgers. Liet artfully merges military elements with touches of hippie counterculture, culminating in durable workwear and tailoring that epitomizes the rugged essence of Canadian attire. The word “Liet” is essentially a prettier version of my name, and I mean to hold the brand close.
That’s it for now. If you’re interested, follow us on Instagram. More importantly, subscribe to our Substack, because the algorithm gods mean to pick the meat from our bones.
—L
PS. I auto imported all my subscribers from my other list but if you’re not interested in Liet, no hard feelings! Simply unsubscribe at the bottom of the email.
