Evan Kinori was bent over the drawing table in the back room of his Valencia Street studio, rubbing linen swatches between his fingers. A handful of handsome young employees in roomy trousers and chunky shoes sorted through piles of textiles, while another watched over the minimalist display room in the front.
To this reporter, the swatches of dun-colored fabrics all looked more or less the same. To Kinori, who was seeking material for his spring/summer collection, each scrap conveyed a world of information.
“There’s fiber choice, yarn construction, weave structure, color and dye process, weight, finishing process. We don’t let cheap junk make its way to the table for consideration,” said Kinori, who travels frequently to Japan to meet with family-owned mills. “It all boils down to the ability to imagine a finished garment from a 3-inch swatch.”
Most locals don’t think about clothes that way. San Francisco, people say, is one of the worst-dressed cities in America. The city has caught flak for its fashion for decades and earned a persistent reputation for its banal techie uniform: fleece vests, joggers, Allbirds shoes, AirPods.
But San Francisco is also the home of the United States’ most exciting menswear designer. Kinori has been here nearly 20 years and has worked out of a Valencia Street storefront for the last three. He’s become a cult favorite in the world of sustainable clothing, winning GQ’s Breakthrough Designer of the Year award in 2020 and inspiring Discord servers dedicated to his clothes. Last month, the fast-fashion giant Zara shamelessly ripped off his aesthetic for its men’s suits.
Kinori’s clothes — mostly loose, soft, and earth-toned — represent a new sensibility in a place that hasn’t had a cool local style since the Summer of Love. And he says being in a dress-blind place actually helps him stay focused.
Jonah Weiner, who co-writes the Oakland-based style newsletter Blackbird Spyplane, compared Kinori’s designs to the wood-shingled buildings at Sea Ranch.
“It spoke this very intentionally restricted design language,” Weiner said of the Sonoma County community dreamed up in the 1960s to preserve and honor the coastal site’s natural beauty with minimalist structures. “In terms of Bay Area design values, and how design relates to the natural landscape in Northern California, I think you can see a lot of parallels.”
Andres Giraldo Florez, a chef and longtime Kinori patron, drew a similar comparison between the designer’s craft and the slow-food movement, which was born in Berkeley from Alice Waters’ farm-to-table ethos.
“He and I are extremely conscious about sourcing with seasonality,” said Florez, owner of the Oakland small plates restaurant and natural wine destination Snail Bar. “And about keeping a very tight relationship with our purveyors of, for him, the raw materials of his textiles and, for me, the raw materials that go into our dishes.”
Dressing in Kinori’s clothes just feels different, he added. After seeing his sous chef in head-to-toe Kinori (“He showed up very nonchalant,” Florez said, laughing), he decided to see the studio for himself.
“I went there for the first time and bought the most expensive hoodie of my life,” Florez said. “And I was like, damn. There’s hoodies, and then there’s hoodies. And the only way you can get to that realization is by putting on a piece of clothing that has a weight you’ve never felt on your body before.”
Kinori doesn’t like the word “sustainable.” A better phrase might be “slow clothes,” which Blackbird Spyplane uses to describe garments that are designed intentionally, produced sparingly, and meant to be worn forever. Slow clothes are the opposite of fast fashion, appealing to deep and simple sensibilities rather than trends.
They also cost a lot more. For instance, Kinori sells a coat for nearly $2,000. But he says that’s just the cost of ethical production.
“The Zara blazers they made that look like my store? We probably pay more in fabric than they were selling at retail,” Kinori said. “Those prices aren’t real. The carnage behind that price is unfathomable.”
The “carnage” is twofold. First, there are the ethical compromises that make cheap clothes possible: exploited workers in fields, mills, and factories; pollution from large-scale industry; carbon emissions from shipping garments halfway around the world; and, of course, the heaps of disposable clothes that end up in landfills. This comes with compromises in quality. And these compromises have become the norm.
“It makes it really hard to talk about price, because high prices seem arbitrary, and it seems like you just want to make a luxury product,” Kinori said. “What I’d like to do is try to make something that’s really special, that has a good provenance, a good story — something where you’d be proud to talk about how the thing got made.”
When one situates Kinori within the world of slow and sustainable movements, rather than in capital-F fashion, his two-decade tenure in the Bay Area makes more sense. But it wasn’t farm-to-table cooking that attracted the Connecticut native to the West Coast.
“I came here to skate,” Kinori said. “And just because I wanted to come here.”
After studying philosophy at San Francisco State University, Kinori transferred first to City College of San Francisco and then to the Fashion Institute of Design & Merchandising to pursue a degree in design.
“I started by making stuff in school for myself to wear,” he said. Soon, friends took notice and started commissioning pieces. Before long, Levi’s offered Kinori a design job. He declined, opting to stay independent.
The whole time, he was skateboarding at street spots across San Francisco — well enough that local brands like Rasa Libre and IPATH were sending him free boards and shoes. The city felt different back then, he said.
“When I moved here, the scene I entered felt like a big art-school community,” Kinori said. “I hung out with artists, musicians, and skaters, and while they may not have been wearing a $600 button-down, they had their style and were cool.”
As a designer, Kinori was inspired by the crunchy steez of skaters like Kenny Reed, who now lives in Sonoma County and is leading an IPATH reboot, as well as Nate Jones and Matt Field. These guys rocked corduroy, layered voluminous brown and green garments, and took influences from Rastafarian culture, presenting a secret third option beyond the punk/gangster binary that dominated mid-aughts skate culture.
Now, many artists, musicians, and skaters have been priced out. Parts of the city feel more like a tech startup than an art school. But Kinori said the sartorial ineptitude downtown doesn’t bother him. (“The only thing that’s truly unfathomable is that you make a bunch of money, and then you wear the free T-shirt from the company,” he said.)
Weiner, of the style newsletter, speculated that it may actually be a plus.
“There’s really an advantage to not being in a fashion capital,” Weiner said. “There’s something about being out here that I think has allowed Evan to envision his clothes with more clarity and with fewer voices in his head.”
Weiner added that the same aversion to flashiness driving the yuppie styles that cool guys frown upon also informs Kinori’s work.
“I think of his clothes as similar to when you’re listening to the radio and a quiet song comes on, and you kind of lean in toward the speakers, and you pay closer attention and find things to appreciate about how that song was made,” Weiner said. “Things that didn’t leap out of the radio and smack you in the face.”
