What follows is what happened, day by day, mostly in the order I wrote it in a small notebook balanced on my knee at the end of each one or with a head light clenched between my teeth in my tent.

Day 1 — Huaraz to Vaqueria, and the climb to Hammock Camp

I woke up in Huaraz at 4:00 AM. Packed the last of my belongings and set out on a fifteen-minute walk through town with a pack estimated roughly 25 kilos. Whatever worries I’d had about over-packing or under-packing dissolved somewhere in those first fifteen minutes. There wasn’t room left in my head for that kind of second-guessing.

We stopped for a reflection selfie under a streetlight. A hesitation to yield left on an oncoming calle earned us a yell from an oncoming transit van — “¡Yungay!!” — a swift twenty-second exchange in broken Spanish. A woman and two Peruvian men, without a hint of hesitation, tackled our packs and loaded us into the van. Around five hours, and three more solo travelers picked up along the way, we bounced and climbed over dirt paths and paved “roads,” gaining 1,500 meters on shaky car paths that led into steeper and more exposed drop-offs. The man driving was tweaking with a mouthful of coca leaves.

With the arrival at Vaqueria, we started our journey on foot. Our downloaded maps didn’t load, so we pieced together Day 1’s route from screenshots and previously written names and notes. A rough climb to start the trek and a few gunshots from behind signaled an oncoming caravan of young boys herding a bull. We stepped off the path to await the brave you men’s passing.

The valley opens up into wide pastures with grazing alpacas, horses, baby cows. The expanse widens with narrows, jagged snowcaps that seem to get closer and then further away with every stride. Our packs needed adjustment every half hour. We ate generous snacks to lighten the load.

After ten miles we made an ascent up a ridge to a narrow grazing area atop a widened river. 1,500 more meters in altitude. Cows pass and graze without hesitation for humans. We set up camp, exhausted from the new set altitude and getting used to our load. A rushed dinner with the sun passing the last peaks and the light dims and first stars arrive. A failed attempt to make a fire to combat the nighttime temperature drop.

Hammock Camp — 13,000 ft. Fried egg with toast in the village · one jerky stick · a couple of cashews · dried mango · 3L water · one can of tuna · shared bag of pasta, marinara · one Reese’s.

Day 2 — Toward Punta Union, and the steepest ascent yet

Woke up with the sunrise. Woke in the night to a screeching moo of a baby cow. We started the day with a strong brew of local tea we had stashed in a plastic bag in my pack.

We climbed another 2,400 feet on what was planned as a side hike for a view, but as we approached the summit we could see the switchbacks on the mountain across and below the valley that would be our continued trek. At this moment, we decided to forfeit the final views of Punta Union and descend our two-hour climb, backtrack, then ascend the steepest mountainside possible without mixed-use climbing. I would stop every fifteen yards. I drank my last sip of water at what proved to be halfway up the cliffside. Mixed terrain. I sat under a patched canopy of deciduous trees as the clouds let go a light sleet. To finish I gulped down a can of tuna to decrease the weight.

Each step broke me down a little more. The pressure of weight from my pack on my hips traded for a strain in the shoulders. 2.5 hours passed before the summit, and the most expansive view of the valley and surrounding mountains yet — 15,000+ feet. The weather at the top during our victory rest fell into more of a gusty light show, which we then carried down the other side of the mountain. I filled my bottle with running stream water and a micripur tab, then set up camp beneath the valley of mountains yet at the top of an expanse of mountains for seemingly miles.

Two freeze-dried Peruvian named meals. Two blocks of chocolate — Toblerone. Headlamps out before full dark.

1 tortilla · 2 tbsp PB · 1 can tuna with 1 tbsp olive oil · handful of pecans · 3L water from varying rivers · 2 freeze-dried meals · 1 Reese’s · 1/2 block Parmesan · dried assorted fruit · a couple of dates, some raisins.

Day 3 — Lost after dark

It’s noon on July 7th. I have yet to write about yesterday. The most eventful yet.

We awoke at the base of an armor of surrounding peaks. I slept on and off, got up in the middle of the night to gaze outside at a hundred thousand stars. With mountain peaks in every direction, there was no negative space between constellations. I cooked a bowl of pasta and tomato sauce to reduce the weight load for the day. Pasta, a cup of coffee, and a refill from the river into the thermos. Descended into a carved-out canyon which I meditated in, legs hanging off for thirty minutes, repeating “harmony and peace…”, my chosen mantra for the trek.

We started our descent already four miles away from our intended campsite for the previous night. We quickly tackled our descent to a lake. Another descent into a valley with the first people we’ve seen since the day before last. A sharp left leads into another ascending valley, more roaming cows, sheep, and horses. We begin a route alongside the face of the mountain to stay high. A weathered Peruvian woman in vibrant yellow and pink robe with her dog yells “¡No caminas ayí!” and further instruction to follow the stream to the center valley. We trek two miles up into the heart of the valley, then start our ascent of 2,500 feet. More enjoyable than the day before, as we’re finally understanding the weight of our packs.

I stop at a cow graveyard — cabeza de la vaca — and attach one to the top of my pack to assume the spiritual air of the ancient landscape. The mountains show such rigid peaks, their striations almost vertical. The peaks are exposed and so harsh, yet the valleys are forgiving and suitable for off-season grazing.

We make our final ascent around 3:50 PM, with visibility fading. Off the human footpaths, we agree to ascend and stay high on the next peak to our left instead of following our map down and right into the valley. A mule route. We pass that peak, then down and up a more exposed one as the light is running too fast to sit on a thought-out decision.

Our descent maps around 3,200-3,460 feet, and this valley we chose, unmapped, appears more exposed than previously mapped descents. Our side-stepping forms new blisters. 1,500 feet down we pass a lake with a hay-covered puesto covered with barbed wire. We peer in, with no one to respond. 800 more feet down, we’re forced to climb a barbed surrounding fence line to a slightly larger puesto than the previous. The overgrown pasture suggests it’s been uninhabited for some time, or at least since last season.

Now the descent gets less certain. Sun and light fade, and more forested, exposed cliff sides descend into a river valley. Uncertainty ensues on whether we will have to backtrack and we switch on our headlamps. Cole chimed in: “that’s when shit got real.” Each step becomes more uncertain. Loose rocks, mud, ducking and crawling through narrow forested passageways to reach more loose trail. Rash decisions of right, left, descend, stay high, cliffside. All necessarily quick decisions.

We push through a low forest of damp trees and then stay right, high on the cliffside, with no certainty it won’t come to a quick drop-off. Ninety minutes into the dark, we see two fires lit 800 feet below. As we cut across a steep meadow, voices of two girls and a man yell out in mumbles. In Spanish I respond, “We have lost the trail.” As we peer over, we see grid-like piles of seemingly burning trash, 150 yards long by 75 yards down. Tall fields protrude, possibly green peas. The now three voices yell back in a cacophony of Spanish; they have directed us toward our left. We step that way, and they yell “¡NO!” To which we respond “podemos ir ayí”. With a response of agreement. With total uncertainty on whose land we’ve encroached on, and what the seeming consequences may be, we make sure to announce that we are lost and in need of help.

A nine-year-old girl approaches with a flashlight, and we follow her through her field to her possibly older sister and father. A porchlight in the distance. Everyone is nice, in our disillusioned state, but adding to our delusion of where we are, who’s watching, and who wants to punish the gringos. This man stands deranged, with one arm being held by the other, and a mouth that I’m going to hope was dripping red fluids from the chewing of a betel nut. They direct us down a 500-yard dirt road and to the left. At the left we hear the barking of neighboring sheep protector dogs and fourteen pairs of green, sleepy eyes coming from a pen outside this homestead. We hesitate, turn around, and walk into an aged man with a cat and something in his mouth causing mumbling. We understand his assurance to continue past the structure with the dogs. Distrusting of anything in our stressed, dreamlike state, two motorcycles cascade past and we consult an escape route if confronted. “We’ve got to have a plan B in any circumstance,” I tell Cole. They turn the other way. We continue with the silhouette of another man and his daughter, making ourselves known at our confrontation. We explain our search for “un habitación para acampar.”

With his daughter’s urging, they walk us to the community house. He insists on our refuge in the nearside grass pasture for the night. He asks for a tip and we hand him the six loose soles in my the top of my pack.

My headache prevails, caused by altitude four hours before. I down a thermos of water caught from the salvageable runoff. We pitch our tent without confidence, yet find assurance in our safe descent. Too tired to cook food for the night, I crawl into my sleeping bag, sticky with caked dirt around my ankles, hands and neck.

We wake up and the “community house” is a school. Young children from age 6-14 greet us in our tent.

3/4 bag of penne · 3/4 cup tomato sauce · 1 beef jerky stick · 1/2 block Parmesan · 1 electrolyte tab · 2L water (didn’t drink enough — had a major headache) · 1L before bed · no dinner.

Day 4 — Rest day above Jancacucho

We walk up 400 meters of elevation into the glacier-covered mountains to find a plateau of grass between two streams.

Rest day we decide. I wash my spare used socks and shirt in the stream and hang them to dry on some shrubs. I dunk under as well and wash my body. The coldness is revitalizing. We shoo off some cows and calves so they don’t get the wrong idea when they smell our food later. We don’t have enough to go around.

A white horse drinks from the stream and I follow him to six others. I offer one dried fruit, but he doesn’t accept. He still lets me stroke his mane. Rest, read up on Buddhism, and write today.

The view is of mountains with the most beautifully stark contrast of blue glacial summits and charcoal-grey stone running into a dark beige green forested base. The full base is blocked by our surrounding trees in close proximity. The changing light of sun and clouds gives constantly new contrasts to the mountains. Going to sleep under the stars tonight, outside the tent.

1 cup instant coffee · 1 dried arroz con pollo · 1 Ramen · some Skittles shared with school children · handful of cashews · 3L water from nearby river · nibbles of Parmesan.

Day 5 — Jancacucho to Laguna Safuna

Spent the night in Jancacucho. If they tell you it’s a town, it’s not. There’s a house.

Started our ascent at 09:00 AM. It didn’t end until around 3:00 PM. We passed every type of terrain, as expected once again. The first people we’ve seen on the mountain as well. Eight gauchos, or bull wranglers, heeding a bull down the mountain. During one of our summits, a young man yells “¡Bravo bajo!” and we knew to get out of the way. “Brave below”. Nine men, aged eighteen to forty-five, held rope firm from front and back, tiring out the bull down exposed narrow cliffsides. All with darned alpaca wool hats.

During our seemingly final ascent, we confronted a pass with three open passages. With a faint mule path on the rightmost and most exposed zone, we guided our makeshift trekking sticks in front of our feet. A 45-degree trail, we had not confronted such steep terrain as of yet. I couldn’t imagine any steeper without harnesses. Only thirty feet up, but every step was thoughtfully calculated amidst rubble of loose rock and dirt. The path became unclear, as me and my partner each chose our own. A pit swelled in my stomach, but tunnel vision superseded it. The final steps permitted a turn of my head to see my accomplishment.

From right to left:

• Glaciers, peaking jagged 19,000-foot peaks, running off multiple waterfalls.

• The next plateau underneath, fifteen grazing cows, narrow, steep.

• Under that, to the left, a small pool of a dark, glistening blue water shaped within the plateau.

• Down another 300 meters, a longer field widening for dozens and dozens of cows, sheep, horses, and their offspring.

• 400 meters below, into the valley, another larger pool of crystallized turquoise water.

• And just to the left, my view three-quarters of the way up, an assemblage of 90-degree shale faces guarding the entire valley.

One of our highest summits at 15,300 feet. I picked up a rock reminiscent of the peak to bring home as a gift. My partner crosses first, with granted hesitation. He outwardly assures himself.

Six hours in, now an unknowing descent. Three miles down into the valley and the base of another on our left, we’re met by a woman with a spool of alpaca wool and a dog trailed by two sheep. We wait for her, naturally, to hopefully engage. She wants no part. We continue across the field and jump a wide river crossing. I miss my footing and step into the water, landing on my elbows on the other side. I look up to be greeted by what appears to be the daughter of the previous woman. Rural, weathered, but maybe seventeen or nineteen. Traditional Peruvian garb, a tall hat of boiled wool, overtly decorative long skirt, legs wrapped.

Herding 300 sheep, she steps away from her work and engages: “¿Tú tienes chocolaté para el bebé?” She turns to expose a baby on her back. I open my pack and hand a triangle of Toblerone into the baby’s hand. She thanks me warmly. I ask if I can take an image. She looks at the camera as if for the first time in her life. Uncertain eyes.

We watched her depart to tend back to her herding. I regret not engaging her further to ask about her life. But I figure enough was exchanged through the contact our eyes and the energy of our souls meeting.

Cut left into the opening of another valley. Another field of alpacas, two hundred at least, a woman outside her domicile. A man, with a hat, comes out as well. Cole engages the man and offers his cow-leather gloves for his felted sheep’s-wool hat. He inspects the gloves for too long, then with a nod from the woman, hands over the hat and offers a handshake. The woman calls to wait as she runs into her mud hut. She turns back out after little wait, grasping two knit hats of alpaca and sheep, and a chunky, raw sheep’s-wool sweater still with other raw sticks and leaves either from the natural untreated yarn or from already use. She offers it for a trade as if she felt I was left out. They look too rural to be worth the extra weight on my back. She offers to pitch our camp in her surrounding fenced area. The sun peaked over the edge of the valley. We offer a proper goodbye and head another mile into the valley. The sun drips past the boundary of the range. A pink sky illuminates the fogged clouds arching the glacial peaks. We cook from inside the open flap of our tent. A three-meter-wide river offers our cooking water and white noise for the night. 20 minutes of reading up on Buddhism and my eyes fade.

At 2 AM I drag my sleeping pad out to underneath the heroic stars. I gaze up for an hour at the Milky Way and doze off. An hour later I turn my body and wake with the crackle of ice caressing my entire sleeping sack. I ignore it, with the hopes of a soon-rising sun. I wake to just that: a thaw, and a view of eleven horses peering over the hill at our camp. I dip in the river for a quick morning sober-up and brew an instant coffee.

1 cup coffee · 1 cup local tea · 2 tbsp peanut butter · 4 oz Parmesan cheese · 1 pack skittles · Assorted dried fruit · 4 liters river water · Lomo saltado freeze-dried dinner.

Day 6 — A quiet one

Today I’ll let photos describe the day. I need rest.

1 cup coffee · 2 tbsp peanut butter · 1 handful walnuts · 4 oz Parmesan cheese · 8 oz dates and assorted dried fruit · arroz con pollo, crossed out for a freeze-dried dinner.

Day 7 — False summits, and the walk out to Huascayán

Post dated 1 day later. It’s 11 AM the next morning. I’m eating my first hot breakfast in 7 days with extra fresh fruit.

Going back: The false summits wouldn’t let up today. At some point we both, subconsciously, decided to push for our extraction by EOD. Our offline maps were more than cryptic. An eternity of a day.

From below we caught the fatal viewpoint of Alpamayo with the sun rising. We instinctually hugged the mountain’s crest as the valley degraded, seemingly fast, so we didn’t lose our altitude. Passing ruins, I saw the ancient remnants of steep agricultural terraces.

The switchbacks climbed, and climbed, and climbed until 15,800 feet. Another descent and one more accent, and a stop for nutrition. With all the ground needed to cover, I didn’t find myself in a hurry, but I also didn’t find myself in any urge to stay complacent.

As we rounded a placid lake rushing into the steepest valley, the sun was already leaking its last light onto the dramatic, sharp peaks. I tried to stop for a photo, but Cole insisted on a steady push to descend. We managed along an edge for three miles, and emerged with these drastically brutal rows of mountains. I felt for the first time nostalgic and sad of our leaving these beautiful Peruvian shapes.

We both breathed with a slight elation of the finishing of our ascents. At 5:14 we turned on our headlamps and began our final descent. Lights in the distance noted civilization and our possible mountain escape. 3 miles down turned into 4 and 5. And at 8:28 our final step from the dirt trails into Huascayán.

The only man in sight under the single streetlight walked our way, in a characteristic Peruvian tunic. I asked him in Spanish where the town center was. He pointed next to us. We asked if he knew anyone we could pay to take us to Huaraz. For some reason we had confidence that in this town of 150 someone would be willing to make the drive for two stranded foreign trekkers. He pointed to the corner of the town square, where a woman was frying potatoes and possibly meat. We followed and asked her. She told us to wait as she ran in the opposite direction. Within five minutes, a car with three pulled up. We negotiated a price and drove 4.5 hours to Huaraz.

Village and pass names above are transliterated as I heard them in the moment — the standard spellings are closer to Jancapampa, Hualcayán, and Punta Unión. The original plan followed the full Cedros–Alpamayo circuit, usually walked in ten to eleven days; we did it in seven.

I don’t mean a place filled with horrible people. I mean a place where you are just another transient face moving through the incessant bustle of a city whose streets have been in motion for decades. A place where your presence is barely registered.

It’s a good reminder, especially if your mommy told you that you were special and you believed her.

If this is where you choose to stop reading because you haven’t accepted that individual consciousness comes and goes, or that beneath all of this we may be one shared energy moving through different forms, I understand.

I’d recommend starting with Autobiography of a Yogi, where Yogananda takes spirituality out of abstraction by putting it into practice.

By all means, I don’t expect you to agree with every conclusion I’ve drawn from my own human experience. But I do hope that by voicing my spiritual path honestly, I might open some small door of consciousness inside of you.

Or maybe it’s not that profound.

I’m not here to arrive at some grand conclusion about life. I’ve exhausted myself trying to squeeze meaning out of every moment. Now, I’m more interested in wandering with a sound mind. In living. In being.

Nevertheless, my buddy asked me the other day, between surfs and slurping yerba mate through a bombilla, a ritual he’d picked up living with gauchos in Argentina, if there was any conscious debate I’d been grappling with lately. Any bigger-picture question of the world that had breached my discernment.

I told him I’ve started attempting to deem my vision as not my own. Not as Tristan. Not through all my objectives and biases. Not through all my perspectives and lessons. Not through all my weight and attitude. But plainly, as the way things are.

Now this goes deeper than I thought. For example, even the color green already holds your attachments.

Look at Picasso and his melancholic Blue Period. After 1904, there was no chance he could stroll a boardwalk, focus in on the breaking blue-washed waves under the azul sky, and not feel some mourning for that period of his life.

Sit with your grief, and move on when the time is right for you, so you can once again see the color blue unfiltered.

Quick interlude, and a reminder to Self: I do believe that our individual nature gives art and outlook to the world’s most beautiful developments. This is just a practice. A reset if you will.

So I find myself cross-legged and hungry in this cabaña just north of Buchupureo as I ponder my friend’s question. My posture and attitude, probably due to a bout of hangry low blood sugar resulting from a two-hour salmon swim upstream in the current of Buchupureo’s left point break, is a bit on edge and smug. The lopsided dirt floors rock my plastic chair and the hum of Chilean slang echo a chorus that sets my ADD off.

All this to say, my experience is dictated by everything that I’ve been led to believe. My opinions of my surroundings. Not good nor bad. But with a sense of closure. Closed off by my urge to form a thought. To view and not to think. To watch, yet see something as it is. Objectively.

I tried explaining this to my friend. At this moment, I don’t want to sit here, waiting to order empanadas, with any regard to myself. I don’t want to experience the noises, the smells, any of my senses, with any personal judgment, beliefs, or evaluations. I’ve noticed this practice relies on a constant self reminder. A flick of the rubber band. As my judgment kicks in, I echo in my brain the presence of a thought as just that. A thought. Not the truth.

I start my writing with this meddling as I’ve just exceeded one week in the south of Chile. A surf and wandering expedition with zero plans and the sole purpose of breaking loose from my daily routine so as not to reach another burn out. I’ve reached my maximum amount of complete mental breakdowns for the year. My button for a factory reset became so clouded, I almost lacked the keen judgment to let myself explore for a brief moment. It’s like when sometimes I’m just so hungry and past the point of the body telling me, no, you don’t need to eat. Suffer. Rigid. That murky angry filter.

With a duffle and a surfboard coffin bag, I fly the furthest south I can verify with habitation, and let the chase of southwestern Pacific swells take care of the rest.

It’s hard to discern how to pack for a trip when, one, you don’t know what activities you’ll find yourself partaking in, and two, you don’t know how the weather will shift in a country that stretches from beaches to mountains. But over time, I’ve accumulated a quiet sense of my own essentials. The things that layer well. The things that move with me. The things that make me feel prepared without pretending I know what’s ahead. So I felt fairly confident.

I like to put myself in places that make me feel small. Immaterial. To regain perspective. To take the pressure off.

Today, I felt it in my body. The immense pressure of something ancient. Something alive. The greatest force I know to be surrounded by. To be swallowed by.

The feeling of being an insect. A speck inside something too large to reason with. Something small enough to be taken back at any moment without ceremony.

I’ve felt this way in two conditions in my life.

One, among a vast range of snowcapped mountains and frozen gullies, where the terrain offers no roads back to shelter. If you choose to stay put, or if the fallen ice decides for you, your body will eventually decompose back into its natural state.

And the other environment was the one I found myself in today.

There’s a point on the central coast of Chile, four hours southwest of Santiago. A wave prized for its power.

I walked down to the first entryway at the top of the point. Two “lobos,” or wolves, crown the tip of the break. A spiritual rite. Two stone heads serving as protectors. Religious when confronted, the sea breaks with immense pressure against the jagged slate bluffs.

Let me make sure you understand this wave as one of a handful on this coast that seems to release force with intention. As if, when she chooses, some mythical creature is performing her preeminent authority.

I stood below forty steps that dragged their way beneath the hundred-foot face of the cliff, trying to maneuver into the ravine where the waves are partially blocked by the two rocks and the underwater formations that follow. This break gives you a moment to time your descent between the rising waves and the crashes, before paddling your way into the break zone and out into the channel.

If timed right, you can jump in with your board as the water draws back for a breath, letting the last wave pass beneath you before the next one stands up against the rocks. You take two or three mountains of rolling whitewash on your head, get pulled two hundred yards inside, and then finally work your way north into the channel for another five-hundred-yard paddle back to the point.

In that moment, while timing your trek, the absurd power of nature subsides and you make the choice to succumb to the understanding that she will do as she pleases, with no care for you. Her power was summoned up some five thousand kilometers away by massive storms conjured in the deep south pacific that made their way eastward, organized into clean swells on the local coastlines. If you happen to be in the perfect moment to see it you can enjoy Mother Nature’s long journey. But if not, she won’t stop for you and your wandering.

So I stood there, beneath the cliff pinned between the bluff and the two wolf heads. My moment would come, maybe in a minute, maybe in ten. But as soon as I saw a break in the period, I would take that leap. I timed it well, and paddled out with just a couple of oncoming surges of water.

I’d like to believe this experience plays some part in my religion.

Not religion in the way it is usually handed down, but the kind you arrive at in your body. The kind you feel when mission-driven humans place themselves before nature, not to conquer her, but to be reminded of their place within her.

When cold water, rough waves, and an angry Mother spit at you in glory, then turn around and offer you a clean work of art to move across, I don’t know what else to call that.

To be frightened, humbled, and then gifted beauty by the same force feels like God firsthand.

I’d like to believe this experience plays some part in my religion.

The kind of religion you arrive at through the body. Through cold water, tired arms, held breath, and the small bargain you make with yourself before paddling into something larger than you. The kind that does not ask you to explain God, only to feel the consequence of being alive in a world that can humble you without warning.

When cold water, rough waves, and an angry Mother spit at you in glory, then turn around and offer you a clean work of art to move across, I don’t know what else to call that.

To be frightened by the same force that gives you beauty. To be humbled by the same hand that lets you pass. To feel, for a few seconds, both entirely insignificant and completely held.

That feels like God firsthand.

I started with this intentional practice, and I found interest outside of my studio, so I made some jackets for people. That’s kind of the business story in a nut shell. But my taste has never been cheap fabrics. I’ve done my best to democratize my production efforts, and find a balance of textiles that are as special as they are accessible. Even with that notion, I can’t sell a jacket for lower than $1,500. The sourcing, the hand work. In today’s commerce, it takes a production run of 2,000 pieces to meet efficiencies. And that just was never in my playbook.

But then again, it was never about exclusivity. It was about the materials - you can’t replicate an 1890’s hand-loomed coverlet. There was only one family, one community, one tradition, two hands, that made it. Now this meant most people who found STAN could never actually own anything from it.

I’ve taken a lot out of my close work with antique textiles. I’ve learned about longevity in fabrics, construction, a real utility that can only be mapped by time. I’ve learned what materials will last, how they should be handled, and have seen first hand the natural age when real life is introduced to a fabric. I choose materials for how they age, not how they trend.

So, with all this in mind, ever since my first fashion show in NYFW in 2020 when Guy Trebay, men’s editor of the NYTimes, asked me, “so how are you going to scale this”, that question has been in the back of my mind. Not the forefront, because I always knew what was closest to my heart to pursue. At the time, my response: “I just want to sell enough jackets to go on my next surf trip.” But after accumulating more knowledge and understanding of some real truths around textile stories, history, a useful garment construction, I think it would be a waste to not put that into practice and product.

So, May 20 is the first time things change. Well, it’s not necessarily as much change as it is introduction. Three pieces built the same way I’d build anything. And the start of a larger evergreen collection of things that I use, wear, in my life. Based on the utility knowledge that I have learned. Not a pivot, not a compromise, but an opening.

Jeans, a chore coat, and a denim shirt. Built to the same standard. Available to more people.

Learn more.

X, Tristan

Because it’s functional. Because it restrains an overt sense of design. Because it follows foresight as much as hindsight. Because, like the natural makeup of the world, it doesn’t call for attention. A standard is the version that keeps working when the novelty is gone. It earns its place through repetition.

For me, standard is simple: fit that stays right, function that holds, and construction that can be repaired. If a piece needs constant explanation, it’s not a standard.

The lifestyle test

I want to live naturally. I wish I could shed the fuss of stuff. Just stuff, everywhere. Screw minimalism. Hell, let me just live in the nude on a beach. Nothing around.

Yet, alas, I don’t live in a vacuum, and I need protection from the elements and the tools to chop away the brush in my path. I move through different environments often and I need things that can keep up without me thinking about them—to handle the cold, the sweat, the gravel, the clay, the sand and the salt.

In a normal week, that can mean biking to the studio, dragging in dirt, working on machines, dripping oil, sitting on asphalt, and being outside in blazing sunshine or in rain. My test is this: can I wear it all day, then wear it again tomorrow and not feel like I’m performing?

Form follows function.

Restraint and constraints

There has always been some form of confinement in my work. Self-imposed, if not arbitrary. Restraint is how I keep the work honest. It’s also how I avoid designing for attention. When I say restrains overt design, I mean I remove anything that is there to look clever.

Keep the silhouette clean, the proportions useful, and the details limited to what helps wear, movement, and repair. If I’m tempted to add something, I ask: does this help the garment do its job, or does it just decorate the idea of the job?

I need to start with some boundaries, and if they are not inherent in the material at my hands, I must make them on my own. Standards has its own constraints too: a small set of silhouettes, durable materials, simple hardware, and construction that can take repair. Constraints make the decisions faster and better. They stop me from chasing options. They also force me to solve problems instead of styling around them.

Old textiles taught me the rule

On old textiles and making the past wearable.

A brocade tapestry once used to carefully caress an ottoman. Its densely packed fibers are no match for the movement and nature of the physical body. That’s the constraint: make it look as natural sitting on my back and draped around my arms as it is draped around the arm of its original furnishings.

Does it ask for this reinterpretation? Maybe, maybe not. Nevertheless, the intention is there: keep it natural. Make it useful once again; change the use. The rule stays the same: maximum mobility, minimum form.

Working this way has taught me something I’m carrying into Standards: the garment has to move first, and the material has to survive that movement.

Standards is a blank slate on purpose

Putting aside my obsession with old textiles for a moment, now a new picture forms in my head. Something to accompany my old world centerpiece. Allow it to find its place along the form which I’ve built thus far—my uniform.

But this one doesn’t have a story to tell. Well, not yet. The story is yet to be written. And in this case, it wasn’t written by me, it wasn’t written by someone dwelling in their nomad tent 125 years ago. That’s the point: with Standards, the story is written through wear and made for use first.

I’m building pieces that can take on the shape of a life: first owner, second owner, third owner. The goal is not a myth—rather, a long service life.

From product to companion

The idea’s simple but the value behind it is the point. My ideology comes from a value system I’ve developed. I don’t want objects that exist to be consumed and replaced. I want objects that earn a place in my life of using things. Not because they look vintage, but because they become reliable.

On one hand, I don’t like to become attached to objects, but on the other, when one suits my needs and provides a steady rhythm day in and day out, it’s hard not to feel like that object projects an extension of my voice and character. At least in a way that when you pick it up every time, it feels like that supple leather sandal footbed that’s been molded into the shape of your sole.

I don’t like to get emotional or anything about this stuff but objects sometimes have the ability of becoming an extension of my soul. Maybe it’s more objective in that they solve real problems and reduce decision-making. They hold up when life gets messy. They make me more capable, not more performative. I’ll stick with that nuance in value so you don’t think I’m into objectophilia or something.

When something gets used long enough, it stops being a product in the retail sense. The relationship changes. I can stop evaluating it like a purchase and start evaluating it like a tool I trust. A companion isn’t perfect. A companion is proven. Something to reach for without thinking because it’s done its job over and over. It fits your habits and supports your lifestyle instead of competing with it.

This is why I care about repair. Repair is not a luxury add-on. It’s a values statement. It says: I’m not going to treat materials like they’re disposable. I’m going to take responsibility for what I own. I’m going to maintain things instead of cycling through replacements. That applies to clothing the same way it applies to a bike, a knife, a camera, a car, or anything that matters to you.

Pirsig put words to it

I’m reading Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. And his sentiment really illustrated in real time what I’ve been trying to explain.

For context—plainly—Pirsig is describing a life on the road where values come from attention, care, and lived experience, not from appearances.

A note on his leather riding gloves: “They’ve been there for so many years… I can’t imagine any new pair taking their place. They’ve become filled with oil and sweat and dirt… they’ve got a memory of their own.”

On his motorcycle: “You pick up certain feelings about an individual machine that are unique for that one individual machine and no other. A friend who owns a cycle of the same make, model and even same year brought it over for repair, and when I test rode it afterward it was hard to believe it had come from the same factory years ago.”

Pirsig doesn’t romanticize wear, he just describes a bond built through responsibility and repetition. An individual just living the life unique to him.

New things start out as strangers. Over time, they either fail because they weren’t built for real use, or they become long-lasting friends because they were built to keep going and because the owner chose to keep them going. That relationship is earned rather than bought. It comes from choosing quality, choosing restraint, choosing function, and then choosing to stay with that thing through the normal life cycle: use, stress, repair, and continued use.

Why adulthood changed everything

Truly one of the main luxuries of life I’ve found in adulthood. Please allow me to explain.

I recall early adolescence—my body slowly morphing, sprouting hairs, unique smells, and a constant appetite. Consistently stretching into new forms I’d notice at every morning’s glance in my bathroom vanity. That, plus my search for identity—along with trying to stand out with every choice I made (from shoe color to parfum)—gave me an obsolete view of purchase behavior.

Even going back to my avid days of skateboarding in late elementary school: between my shoe size changing every six months and the soles detaching from their bodies every two months due to my incessant trial of skateboard flip tricks—grinding my outsoles on sandpaper—I was constantly going through DC’s, Etnies, and Vans.

As a rough-and-tumble daredevil child, skinning my knees daily and running my garb to the ground—stretching, ripping, and tearing my local skate shop graphic tees—it was hard to hold onto anything with consistency that could become a part of my life in extension.

Even the skateboards I grew attached to would snap at the trial of a new boardslide on a handrail. And of course I thought that was so rad when my fellow skate rats would “oooh” and “aaah.” I’d be so stoked to be ripping that hard—that I snapped my deck—and now I’d have to make a trip to McGills Skate Shop for a new one.

Saying that now really gives me a flashback to the nostalgic experience of childhood: hand-me-downs, disposable gear. Things built for kids to wear through like hell. Skinning your knees to a grueling bloody scab that would soon reveal a new, stronger, calloused layer of skin. The beauty of childhood came from rapid change—experience after experience—and you evolving into your more tried-and-true form through a shedding of things around you. Something breaks. You’re scrappy to repair it, or you just face that that hobby just isn’t for you.

So to wrap up my thoughts on the luxury of adulthood: I get to really hold onto things now that I’m in my late 20’s. I get to see how objects draw out their forms as they move with me through life. I’m very particular about the things that I involve in my life because of this. I get something that fits. My body’s form isn’t changing anytime soon, and I’m pretty consistent on the character of these objects I’d like to curate into my orbit.

Because I’ve taken the time to develop my taste and curate my toolkit of life. There’s an isolated tool kit for each activity, and of course there’s also crossover, and then there’s just everyday stuff.

Learning to see design and quality

I’ve trained my eye into a keen hawk’s vision for determining quality in material and structure. Ever since my first day of design courses in college the world changed from just things to things that are actually designed by someone for something. That word became bold like it never had before. Design.

There it was. Effort in objects and now it was apparent to me. I couldn’t ignore it in anything that my eyes gazed upon, from street signs to shoe laces, a hidden language in plain sight.

Ever since that first day, I’ve inherently developed this vision of patience: watching different materials and construction and whether they can show up day after day, translating a message for their purpose-driven role, or degrade back down to their decomposed origins.

The board shorts example (how I actually decide)

Nothing has made me feel more like an adult than having the luxury of choosing products that are going to fit into my life. Yes, of course it still involves trial and error, due to my converging on the diminishing lack of foresight of longevity.

But it excites me when that one essential ingredient of my life is missing and that golden glow appears in front of the perfect cut swim trunks. 6 inch inseam. 4-way stretch. Allow me to tell you more.

Yes, these specialty board shorts are twice the price as the adolescent pair I wore to shreds after one summer of charging shore break at D-street. But these trunks reinforce my values and that excites me. They are made exactly with the vision of my intent of use.

Like I’m having a conversation with the designer himself describing my activity and extent of use, bend of body, exposure to elements that I’m going to pursue—and I need this specific tool to uniform me. To see how much benefit that comfort will provide me, even if it comes with a slight extra cost, excites me.

I know now through my 28 years of trials and error, the specifics to accompany me, for example, on a 6 day surf trip to a Costa Rican point-break where I will surf for at least 6 hours a day.

Allow me to explain my process in buying a pair of board shorts. A certain material content blend of around 85% eco polyester and 15% recycled spandex or lycra allows performance and won’t chafe my thighs as much as nylon or 100% poly. A dark navy will hide the oils in my zinc and other sun products, the coated layers of board wax, and the general grime of dusty sand. One discreet pocket with a hidden elastic rope for a key ring is just enough to hold whatever I need during any hands-free seafaring activities—surf wax, a credit card or some change for post surf tacos. Welded internal seams need to be accompanied by some sort of overlock and topstitch of nylon thread with thickness greater than Tex 60. The last thing I need is a threadbare crotch to add into the probability of chaffing my inner thighs.

The broader point

So you get the gist on how I’m choosing my products. And this goes from my surfing trunks, to my zinc sunblock and post surf facial care (because I’m a guy and guys still need to take care of themselves), my iPhone case, dirt bike, jeans, blazers, socks, camping lanterns, underwear, knife kit—you name it.

And these have all been adapted to my use cases through trials in disparate activities. Going out into the world. Testing, over and over. Studying the things that will enhance like a silent comrade.

A downright obsession with ergonomics—function over form—wear. And if something’s intended to be used hard, it better be constructed with a plan to repair that item. Take Patagonia’s puffer jackets—snag a hole from bouldering or a stray branch? No worries—mend a heat-set patch on the nylon shell. Tear the sole in the boots my buddy George at George Esquivel made me from flooding my Honda with too many cold start pumps of my kickstart—no worries—he can take that baby right apart and mend a new sole on the original last.

I guess it just came at a point when I realized that I’m just damn tired of inviting things into my life that aren’t involved for purpose. I’m not a minimalist by any means because I have so many hobbies. But in each hobby I really do know what’s necessary for my performance.

And maybe you’re not a performance geared person. All I’m saying is that at least you can have a little pride in yourself. And if you’re trying to sell me something that isn’t made with the real intention of Living, intent specified for its real down and dirty use kind of livin’, then I’m not buyin’.

I love the luxury that has come with adulthood.

Characteristics I look for in a product

• Built for real use (made to perform, not just look good)

• Quality materials + structure (you can see/feel construction integrity)

• Restrained design (not overdone; functional choices first)

• Ergonomics (fits the body and the use-case; comfort matters)

• Use-case specific features (details that solve real problems: pocket/key loop, etc.)

• Proven performance through trial (you test, learn, refine what works)

• Durability over time (holds up under repeated stress)

• Repairability (designed to be maintained; parts can be replaced/mended)

• Material logic (specific blends/finishes that prevent chafe, failure, etc.)

• Color practicality (hides stains, works in real environments)

Memory as feedback, not decoration. And restraint. Memory is not decoration, it’s evidence of alignment. A piece that gets worn develops habits that match the person wearing it—where it flexes, what it needs, what breaks first, what gets reinforced. Those aren’t cool details. They’re feedback. They show you whether the design is honest. They show you whether the materials are doing their job. They show you whether the piece is actually living with you, not sitting in a closet waiting for a photo.

This is also why I keep the design restrained. If the goal is companionship, the design can’t demand attention. It needs to be stable. It needs to work in different settings. It needs to be useful without explanation. A good standard doesn’t need constant updates. It needs consistency. It needs a clear purpose. It needs to take on the load of daily life without becoming a burden.

So the value is not things should look old. The value is buy less. Choose well. Use hard. Maintain what you own. Keep what works. Let objects earn trust through real life. That’s the difference between a product and a companion. And that’s the standard I’m building around.

Identity: from “being different” to “being mine”

I’ve always tried to be different. Or just the inverse of fitting in. I did this by making the off choice—choosing stripes over solids, pinks when only blue or black was for guys. But it wasn’t me. It was just me trying to find myself. Being different allowed me to find a lot of different me’s.

For Standards, I’m done trying on identities. This collection is about me being me: a uniform that repeats because it works for my life.

If you want a standard uniform, here are the rules I’m using:

• Start with repeat pieces, not statement pieces. If you can’t wear it twice in a row, it’s not a standard.

• Choose function first: movement, pockets, durability, and comfort across heat and cold.

• Remove design that only exists to signal taste. Keep details that support wear and repair.

• Commit to a small set of silhouettes and keep improving them instead of replacing them.

• Let time finish the garment. Wear, wash, fix, and keep going until it becomes yours.

When you use something long enough it stops being just an object. It adapts to how you use it, breaks in, gets repaired, carrying marks. Eventually it feels different from any other one like it. That’s what happens when something becomes part of your life. It’s not meant to stay new. It’s made to be worn, worked in, and lived in until it takes on its own character.

Standards is me designing for that outcome on purpose.

X

Tristan

I started with the question of what I actually wear.

Not what photographs well. Not what feels clever. Just the things that make it into the rotation without effort. The garments that get pulled off the back of a chair in the morning. The ones that survive travel, work, long days, and neglect. The ones that don’t ask for attention but earn it anyway.

Standards came out of that inventory.

For years, STAN has been built around rare objects—textiles with long histories, fragments of other lives stitched into new forms. That work still matters to me. But somewhere along the way, I felt the need for a backbone. Something quieter. Something repeatable. Something you could live in without thinking about it too much.

Utility became the filter.

Not utility as a trend or a look, but utility as function. Does it move with you? Does it age honestly? Does it get better when it’s worn hard? If the answer was no, it didn’t make it through.

The Standards are not meant to impress.

They’re meant to endure.

Each piece was chosen because it has precedent. The engineer jacket exists because it always has. The workshirt, the five-pocket jean, the heavyweight T-shirt—these shapes weren’t invented. They were refined by use. Decades of labor, repetition, and necessity stripped them down to their essentials long before I ever touched them.

My role was to curate, not redesign.

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That was when it clicked: denim is not finished when it’s made. It’s finished when it’s lived in.

At the time, I was still chasing things like newness, and precision. My mom taught me watercolors and painting outside of the lines, but I never could ration with the whimsical. My childish OCD urged to play boundaries. The illusion of control. I wanted things to look right before they were right. I thought quality lived in arbitrary perfection of clean lines, symmetry, untouched surfaces. Denim didn’t care about any of that. It didn’t reward attention. It rewarded neglect. It asked only that you keep showing up in it.

Born as work cloth, bleu de Gênes, cloth of labor and endurance, it was meant to resist, not to flatter. To hold up against friction, weather, repetition. Its beauty comes later, earned slowly, through strain and persistence. Indigo doesn’t fade gracefully; it surrenders in stages, revealing time the way a map reveals terrain. In small bites that catch up to you as you're doing other things.

I learned this not in theory, but on the road.

Sourcing textiles has a way of stripping you of romance fast. You imagine candlelit rooms and poetic exchanges. What you get instead are cold warehouses, dust in your throat, the smell of lanolin and diesel and old wood. You handle stacks of cloth that look identical until they don’t. You learn to read wear the way others read labels. You start trusting your hands more than your eyes.

I’ve stood in barns where denim was folded and forgotten for decades. I’ve pulled bolts from shelves where mice had nested between layers. I’ve held fabric that felt dead; over-processed, over-corrected, sanitized of any future. And then I’ve held cloth that felt alive. Cloth that resisted you. That pushed back.

That resistance matters.

What begins rigid and uniform becomes personal. Creases settle where the body bends. Fades emerge only where pressure insists. No two outcomes are alike. Denim becomes a quiet ledger of effort, jobs done, places stood, miles walked. A material less concerned with trend than with testimony.

Somewhere along the way, that understanding bled into how I dressed, and then into how I thought.

The idea of a uniform didn’t come from wanting simplicity. It came from exhaustion. Too many choices. Too much noise. Too much energy spent deciding how to present instead of how to be. In the end, all this did was take away presence. I wanted to remove the friction between waking up and getting to work. I wanted clothes that didn’t ask questions.

A uniform isn’t about sameness. It’s about trust. Trust that the thing you put on will carry you through the day without asking to be noticed. Trust that you don’t need to reinvent yourself daily to stay relevant. Trust that repetition, done long enough, turns into clarity.

Denim helped teach me that.

Worn long enough, it stops belonging to the maker and starts belonging to the wearer. Not as decoration, but as proof. Proof that you stayed. That you endured boredom, discomfort, weather, routine. That you didn’t abandon the thing the moment it stopped being exciting.

That idea runs against most of what we’re sold.

We’re told to upgrade, refresh, replace. We’re taught to confuse wear with failure. But wear is information. Wear is honesty. Wear is what happens when something is allowed to exist in the real world instead of being preserved for a version of life that never arrives.

I still wrestle with doubt around this. Doubt that slowing down is enough. Doubt that restraint can compete with spectacle. Doubt that making fewer things, better, will survive in a culture addicted to constant output. There are weeks on the road where the uncertainty is loud, where I question whether patience is discipline or just fear disguised as principle.

But then I come back to the objects. The garments. The denim that’s been worn hard and repaired quietly. The pieces that don’t photograph well at first glance but reveal everything up close. The ones that feel better after five years than they did on day one.

That belief, that endurance has a look, is still forming. Still being tested. Still unfinished.

Denim is resilience you can put on. A second skin shaped by time. It doesn’t shout. It doesn’t rush. It waits for you to meet it halfway.

And if you let it, if you really let it, it teaches you that the things worth keeping don’t reveal themselves immediately. They ask for presence. For repetition. For a willingness to stay long enough to be changed.

That lesson applies far beyond fabric.

X,

STAN

I. The Living Past

Now, stand still in the center.

Look toward the opening above you. The same sky students saw seven centuries ago.

Prayer still echoes from this place each day.

The scent of cedar. The cool marble. The hum of the city outside.

It all connects you to a living past.

You’re standing inside a piece of time that has never stopped breathing.

II. Tongue-Tied in Alexandria

Fourteen days, and all I managed in Arabic were shokran and ma ismuka — “thank you” and “what’s your name.”

Sneering kids in groups of three shout “welcome” and “where you from” as I pedal through the streets at 9 p.m. beneath a half-moon.

At a tourist gathering point, I spot a Western couple, which explains the greetings aimed at the white guy in a San Diego surf cap, snapping photos of fish markets and cow heads hanging from hooks with a disposable QuickSnap.

But I just want to fit in.

I want to do as the locals.

In my experience, the further you drift from a foreign city center, the harder it gets to order food. Yet, in Alexandria, even at the landmark cafés and seaside diners, I stumble through menus, mispronounce every dish, and nine times out of ten, end up with something entirely different from what I thought I’d asked for.

A city once conquered by Alexander the Great in 300 BC, and then again by Persians, Arabs, Ottomans, Napoleon, and finally the British, Alexandria has never been one thing.

Maybe that’s why it’s so easy to get lost here.

III. The Masculine Urge to Become Lost

Let go of your idea of enlightenment, and enlightenment appears.

The masculine urge to become lost and unreachable; to wake up the same as always, but hold onto nothing that once felt important.

Normally, I drown in the obsessive churn of my own making; overstimulated by research, production, the grind of doing. But here, that static is replaced by something purer: the hyper-stimulation of color.

Shades of terra-cotta and sandstone.

The aura of perfume and smoke.

The clatter of carts and cascading baskets of cumin, coriander, saffron.

A blue wooden pushcart sizzles baba ghanoush and pita for thirty cents.

And beside a cow’s head dripping onto the pavement we’re meant to pass by, a man offers me dried meat.

I’m unreachable again. A familiar disconnect, the kind I’m used to finding in nature.

I step onto a cobbled path that demands full presence.

Here, ocean waves are replaced by donkey carts and pedestrians weaving through each other in a choreography of trust.

Car horns, hooves, prayer, and shouting souks fold into a single harmony that’s echoed since Alexander’s time. A wave of noise that never stopped.

At the edge of a marble staircase, I tilt my neck back.

Two buildings align. One crowned by a mosque’s dome, gilded and ornate, built in remembrance of conquest.

In its reflection, people move through light, indifferent to their surroundings.

I find it fascinating that life doesn’t pause. It’s a constant, unscripted performance.

I used to think the chaos began the moment I looked at it, and that I triggered it by noticing. I’m not ashamed of my early narcissism.

But now I know: the world has no pause or play, no audience cue.

It’s always been rolling like a film that never ends.

IV. The Moving Shape of History

The masculine urge to start new.

To never mention the past.

Did we forget where we came from?

Did we forget to give thanks to creation itself, or to the witnesses who’ve watched the pages turn?

I can peer into an unfamiliar world.

Eat unfamiliar food. Navigate roads without names.

But when I close my eyes, I can’t shake how I got here.

The impermanence of presence – the permanence of movement forward.

The urge to move on like nothing ever happened.

V. Two and a Half Million Stones

Egypt isn’t like I remembered from sixth grade history books, when we’d dress like pharos and carve into sandstone.

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Temporary. A reminder to ease my hesitation toward vulnerability. To pick my ego up, set it aside, and—just for a moment—unveil the armor.

My dad was the funniest man alive when I was growing up. The kind of funny that children have before they learn self-consciousness—pure, imaginative, unfiltered. It never left him. For a long time, I thought laughter belonged to him alone. In grade school, when classmates cracked jokes and the classroom filled with laughter, I stayed silent. No one else had the right to make me laugh but my dad.

I’m not sure when that loyalty faded. I wasn’t sheltered—just comfortable inside the small rituals that built my sense of home. My culture was everything: how we ate breakfast, the way we loaded the car for the beach, the snacks we packed, the pit stops on the road out of town. Patterns that felt sacred. No rebellion. Just familiarity.

But the sea changes things.

Diving down into the coral today, I felt it again—the disarming of self. Everything down there exists without question: the anemones pulsing in rhythm, the parrotfish carving quiet graffiti into limestone, the coral breathing in unison with the tide. I am you. You are me.

I am a flower.

I’m a dandelion, as I perceive a dandelion.

You are a cowboy-shaped cloud, as you see it.

The color yellow. The Gulf Stream. A lily reading grasshoppers.

My consciousness is not trapped inside me—it surrounds me. I’m aware of thoughts as they move through, belonging both to me and to something larger. We can all be one being, if we are conscious.

Before emotions form, there are seeds. Each is stored deep inside, born from collective consciousness: past surroundings, experience, ancestors echoing through our frames of mind for centuries.

I found joy in a passage by Thích Nhất Hạnh. He wrote,

“Our ideas of beauty, goodness and happiness are all steady as of our society. Every winter fashion designers show us the fashion for the coming spring, and we look through the lens of our collective consciousness. When we buy a dress, it is because we see with the eyes of the collective consciousness. Someone who lives deep in the Amazon, who would not spend that money to buy a dress, would not see it as beautiful at all.”

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He could have chosen any metaphor besides fashion, and I’d still be captivated. The truth is there: maybe we aren’t making our own choices at all. Maybe they’re extensions of the seeds planted before we arrived.

I’ve spent my entire creative life—really, my entire life—finding those seeds, dragging them into the light, and often burning them to open new gates forward. I’ve burned versions of myself that trapped me. Seeds of comparison. Seeds of guilt. Seeds disguised as muses. Each time I confront one, it cracks, and I move closer to something true.

Creation, for me, is this ritual of clearing. I’m constantly sifting, releasing, refining—removing what’s borrowed, keeping what’s born. That’s why I’ve never confined my work to one space, one product, one way of thinking. The foundation of my practice is built from the wide, wandering influence of far-off places and unexpected people.

When I focus too narrowly, I lose that freedom. But when I listen—really listen—to the journeymen, the hand-workers, the tribal orders, the coral, the tide—I feel connected to the larger consciousness that moves through all things.

My goal has never been a destination. It’s expansion.

To gain the broadest perspective through the widest experience.

To be shaped by everything, not filtered down to one version of myself.

That’s why I love what I do. Because when I lift my hands off the work, it begins to breathe on its own. No past, no present, no future critique. Only movement. Only tide.

Swamis holds my firsts: my first memory of overhead surf, my first ten-second hold down, the first kiss of my high school crush, my first meditation after a day in the water, and years later, my first quiet introduction to meditation. Back then I never connected Swamis to religion, which somehow feels right. The quietness of the practice hides in plain sight.

I grew up a weekend Christian. I’d follow my parents on Sundays mainly for the occasional Switchfoot concert. Loosely tethered to faith I was guided by an autonomous spirituality, looking to mentors, occasionally praying to Saint Christopher, baptizing myself in salt water, and reciting my grandpa Bob’s Christmas prayer every year since he passed. Later, a Hindu woman told me that you don’t pick your guru, they come to you when the timing is true. My mailman, Mick, confirmed this in his own way, sharing our almost-daily conversations of light and love. One afternoon, he told me about his volunteer work at the fellowship at Swamis. It was 2023 before I realized my home break was more than just a surf spot, it was the foundation of yoga and meditation in the West.

These revelations became part of me. My life began to feel like a series of converging compartments, surf, prayer, ritual, work, all pushing me toward the same thing: to seek meaning without forcing it, to love, to replace suffering with joy, to find meditation in presence.

That presence first came to me through surfing, but a USC professor, Kate Crowly, gave me the words for it when she introduced me to the flow state. At the time, I only knew that feeling as the obsession I had for the pocket, for pressing up on my mid-length board just beneath the lip, feeling nature accelerate me forward until I was one with Her.

Later, I discovered that flow in other places: flying down the road on my special edition Lemond TDF 89’, catching a tailwind for 150 kilometers; cutting through pavement in my Hoka Carbon X’s until I lost the distance between mile two and ten; and when I cut into an 18th-century jajim and stitched it into a chore coat from breakfast through twilight. The road, whether ocean, asphalt, or cotton warp, became endless in both directions. There is no beginning, no end, just a continuous line.

Eventually I met the teachers and swamis who put words to what I was feeling. They taught that if we invite healthy nutriments into our lives, happiness can replace suffering. All four types. Edible food, what we put in our bodies. Sense impressions, what we take in through eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body. Volition, the will and desire to attain what we want. And consciousness, what we consume in the collective and as individuals.

I think about these four often. What we consume becomes who we are. What we wear becomes who we are. The microplastics we ingest are not just a crisis in the ocean — they are in our blood, our breath, the water we drink, the shirts we put on our back. They become part of us, whether we want them to or not.

The jackets I own are different. They are aged with essence, softened by time, carrying traces of work and weather. Their previous lives make me feel stronger, more durable. When I wear them, I feel stitched into something older and more enduring. These objects feed me, not just in the way they clothe me but in how they remind me that I can be a more rooted, rich human of meaning.

I do not just wear them, I soak in them. I take in their patience, their history, their quiet stubbornness to exist. They are proof that what we choose to consume, whether food or fabric, is never neutral. It either makes us heavier and numb or more awake and alive.

We live in an age of such abundance, perhaps the most abundant period in human history. The overload is to our detriment. We are fed a standard that continuously grows outside our reach, urging us like a succulent stretching toward light to seek more, which is not always better for us as individuals.

So I sift. I pay attention to who and what I let in, because that becomes the difference between suffering and joy. I have learned that what is right in front of me, the thing most obvious and unadorned, is enough. Not the sugar-coated glamour of manufactured polyester that lingers like an unwelcome guest long after its use, but the straightforward, quiet hand.

For me, this has taken the shape of a handful of constants. I’m not a routine guy, but I have go-to’s I’ve returned to so many times that they’ve become anchors. Elevated by taste over time. I like denim when I need to present myself, but I mostly like my Birdwell shorts. I don’t wear shoes unless I’m running, then it’s my carbon Hokas. I have two bikes: one for going fast, one to carry my surfboard, either my 7’2” Chris Hall or the 5’6” Christensen fish hand-me-down from my neighbor.

I’ve only owned two cars: the Golf I drove from 15½ until it died under the 710 freeway, and the 2006 Honda Odyssey that ticks every box but sexy. I drink Stumptown coffee from the French press gifted to me in college. I collect memories more than objects. I care more about the practical nature of my objects than their appeal to someone else. Looks fade; utility stays.

When my white tees get too dirty to wear, I soak them in coffee grounds to cover the stains. When they darken past coffee, I soak them in indigo. If I stripped my closet of the thousands of samples I’ve sewn over the past five years, it would look like a traveler’s, light, pared down, ready to go. These small, repetitive movements remind me that I already have everything I need.

It’s easy to picture Buddhism or Hinduism or meditation practice as a practice belonging to a monastery far away, but I find mine right here. In the fall swells at Swamis, I am present. Thích Nhất Hạnh calls this “washing the dishes just to wash the dishes”, being fully present in the act.

My work creating STAN isn’t separate from this practice. In commercial terms, it isn’t a typical business, I don’t make products for every occasion, or to provoke endless need. I’m not an addict, and neither is my brand. I make good things. True things. They’re honest. They’re hard-working.

There is no sugar to coat them, just flax and stains to remind us. Every touch of cloth slows me down, just as the harvest once slowed to ripen the grain that filled the sacks I turn into coats. They whispered until it was time.

I’m reminded of this slowness through my work, and I hope to create objects that remind others too — not only through ownership but through existence. Thích Nhất Hạnh says, “The miracle is not to walk on water. The miracle is to walk on the Earth.”

I am here walking on Earth. A miracle we are living in. But most of all, it’s all right here. We just need what’s in front of us.

With love,

Tristan

After my last New York show, I made the decision to shelve my collection. Sixty-seven samples. Made with the effort of expansion. But what was that, really? My first interview when I was 21, Guy Trebay of The New York Times asked me if I wanted to be the next big thing in fashion. I sat on it for a while. Well, isn’t that the only way? To find my way to the top?

When I first started making products, I told myself: “Fashion isn’t IT.” It’s just a gateway to the stories I want to tell. And those stories can be held within anything. Objects. Media. Food. People. Craftsmen. My last collection wasn’t right. You know why? Because it was just fashion. I did it for no other reason. Sure, I made a story for each single piece — “this one’s for the beach, this one’s for the mountains because I feel connected to them.” Bla bla. Bullshit. Not me. I couldn’t put work into the world that didn’t carry the weight of story.

But I was stuck in the rut of rushing onto the next thing, the next “growth” step that sounded good on paper. Pausing felt like failure at first. But it was the only way forward. The pause was stillness doing its work. Forcing me to strip things back. To choose fewer, truer objects.

Slowness is not a virtue I was raised to worship. In California, you grow up on the cult of speed. My parents were hustling entrepreneurs. Steady in forward motion. Not stagnant. Stagnant meant death. And they’re inspiring. Faster waves, faster cars, faster lives. But the older I get, the more I realize the people who impressed me most weren’t the ones sprinting ahead — they were the ones who could sit with the moment. Who found something centered. Who let the storm pass and kept their hands steady.

For me, it’s always this picture of an old Japanese farmhand. He sits, solemn. He moves when his animals call. Besides that, he waits and works slowly. Not because he’s old, but because he’s in the middle of himself. He doesn’t live outwardly. I’ve seen it everywhere: the Turkish weaver retying her warp thread with unhurried precision, even as the market around her was chaos. The Japanese dyer lowering fabric into indigo vats at a pace that felt like prayer. A shepherd in the Oaxacan hills pausing mid-story to take a long pull of mezcal, letting silence do as much talking as words. Those are lessons speed could never teach me.

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Lo estoy haciendo al chilazo. I’m doing it on the fly. Rough, instinctive, no plan. That phrase stuck with me. Listen for it when something’s thrown together, unscripted, but still works. The best stuff never happens on an itinerary anyway. You get lost, you end up somewhere better. That’s the tradeoff. Control versus story.

I’m a pretty big fan of improvising. Not in the half-assed sense. But in this way that means trusting your gut before your brain catches up. There’s something kind of sacred about that.

There are a few unspoken tenets that steer me, in regards to travel, when I can get my monkey brain out of my own way. They’re not written down or even consciously acknowledged most of the time, but they drive most of my movement through the world. They’re sometimes broad, but also can be very narrow at certain times:

• A compelling story.

• A culture that is different from mine.

• A moment of preservation—of food, ceremony, or some fading form of craft. And that doesn’t always look like a grand ritual. Sometimes it’s a guy like Javi, passing on surf wax and stories to a kid in a town that not long ago wasn’t safe to walk through. That’s culture too. Quiet, alive, and still being written.

• A misunderstood belief or reality that deserves more curiosity than judgment.

• Bonus: good surf.

That’s usually enough to get me on a flight.

A couple of days after arriving in El Salvador, Javi and Felipe loaded up me and my buddies’ boards into the back of a 4x4. We bounced through sugarcane fields for two hours, hired a fishing boat, and rounded into an inlet flanked by Texaco and Chevron plants. The boat dropped us at a remote left point break with no one in sight. Just us and the incoming pulse of the Pacific.

Why do we do this? Fly across borders, bump through backroads, and hop into boats to catch 20 seconds of water folding over itself?

Because it’s there. And because it feels like a call. Something primal and ancient is shouting your name and you either show up or miss it entirely.

Everywhere I’ve ever surfed with good waves has had good energy. It’s a theory I’m confident in.

When energy moves through water for thousands of miles only to crash into land, it changes something. Shifting the coastline, it’s energy transfers into the ground. But also into the air. In the people. In the way conversations happen. Surf towns breathe differently.

Javi, 34, long sun-bleached hair, dark skin with a streak of zinc across the top half of his face, stocky frame carved from three decades of paddling. He sat in the back of the truck holding down our board quiver, “yeewww-ing” through the curves past trucks hauling lumber and narrow tunnels with a wide grin.

I heard his uncle was shot seven times in front of him. That was normal here. That was life for a lot of kids growing up. He said, “We had to keep our heads down. Even a smile could be dangerous.” That stayed with me. What does it mean to smile freely now? To cheer in the back of a truck like a kid? That’s not just joy, it’s survival turned into celebration.

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A friend I met outside of Bursa, Turkey, taught me a word he revered in his culture: Zanaatkar; a testament to a true craftsperson. Of the tenets he expressed, one stood out most: sharing. To be a true artist, a true craftsman, you must extend your craft to others. Teach. Give. Open up. Because if you really know your craft, you can talk about it until the sun comes up.

Through my practice, I’ve spent thousands of hours alone; day after day, night after night. But in the end, sharing this process outwardly is what matters most. Yes, it takes grueling experimentation and iteration to understand what you even want to put out into the world. And no, you’ll never reach that perfect expression you think others deserve. But there’s something essential in letting go of what you have in the moment.

This is the everlasting, always-changing journey.

The product may seem steadfast, but just as the world evolves around us, so does our work. We may strive for a lifetime and never find that golden light we’re chasing. But there are moments in the striving, in the motion, that stick. Sometimes represented in photos, sometimes in objects. They mark a period in time.

Knowing that an object can hold all that came before it, I want to create something that lasts, changes, and continues. As an artist, as a brand, we share these moments through the things we make. Shapes. Textures. Light. Each piece is a story. Not just of what it is, but of how it came to be, and what it might inspire next.

That, to me, is the role of a craftsperson: not just to make, but to trace the wake an object creates as the world moves around it.

My own journey pulls from far and disparate corners. Staying in one lane has never served me. It confines. So I drift; past ocean waves, down Fir-lined rivers. I gather, observe, gestate. I listen to muses, guided by some omniscient current.

On Humbling Displacement

I’ve never excelled at just one thing.

I was an avid soccer player. A slightly-above-average student. A creative but scattered artist, like my parents. I didn’t only play soccer from age three. I skated the YMCA park after school. I surfed before class. Played beach volleyball on Saturdays. Soccer on Tuesdays and Thursdays. More volleyball Mondays and Fridays. And when I should’ve been studying, I’d sneak into my mom’s jewelry studio to paint or mold waxes.

I studied math and science, but if the surf was good, I bailed.

I learned to enjoy intellectual conversations about signs and religion. But I also loved thoughtless adventure, wandering, gazing at nothing, and the quieting of the mind. Introspection before I even knew the word for it.

See, my interests are diverse. I’ve never held tightly to any one thing. So I’ve become alright at a bunch of things. I drift in and out of groups, clubs, social circles, countries, sports, and stretches of solitude.

As a visitor. A weekend warrior. A passerby.

I jump into new adventures, art forms, and conversations all at once, carrying the perspective of the last into the next. And each time, I’m humbled. Stripped of ego. Especially when standing beside those who’ve given their lives to that one thing.

I compete until I’m sore enough to call it a day, then test another muscle group tomorrow.

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Like the changing hue of wood. Unpainted. Like a fine wine, it gets better and more interesting over time.

Asymmetry, not evenness.

Natural decay, not synthetic.

Minimal, not ornate.

Rustic, not polished.

Withered, not fresh.

Being inside when it’s raining outside.

This worldview, aesthetic, way of life—the Japanese call it Wabi Sabi.

The Japanese have a common dental surgery that intentionally imperfects their smile.

I remember moments of happiness that have passed, marked by wrinkles and creases that appear over time.

My golden retriever always stops by a certain flower bush that never quite gets the sunlight I thought it deserved. He likes the smell, and I’ve always wanted to rush past because there’s nothing to look at but wilted shrubs. But recognizing the beauty in that has brought me more solace than rushing to my bluff to catch the next set of ocean waves. They will always come again, anyway.

The only object I can appreciate in its pristine, clean sparkle is an airplane. Imagine if it were dingy, parts missing from storied travel. Dirty and misplaced gear, cluttered. Now, that is probably the only outlier—for purely safety reasons. But my bicycle? The chain I keep uncorroded. The brakes fastened and tight, spokes in line, and tires pumped.

When I was training for my second Ironman, I bought this bike new, spending an ungodly amount on a bicycle. I worked so hard I owed it to myself, and I remember, for the first two weeks, keeping that thing so clean, unscratched, as perfect as it was on the rack. But after two years now, I notice a scratch on my left-side Shimano shifter from that one brick training day with my crew—when everyone missed a parked car mirror but me. The divot on my frame from when it was pouring, and my buddy Jon led me into the bushes. I keep a box of at least two dozen inner tubes, and I can go through each one and remember where on the PCH each flat happened. That one up in Malibu, when the sun set, and I hit a screw—my friend drove an hour to pick me up.

When I was little, I wanted to keep everything neat and tidy. OCD. I’d neurotically line up everyone’s shoes in the hallway. I fell on my bike on my fifth-grade birthday, bombing “Dinosaur Hill” with my dad after spectating the ENLL baseball game. I followed his lead, bunny hopping, and lost control. The mark on my face, where my mustache doesn’t grow, was the result of a night in the ER and a reconstruction of my upper lip. I learned to embrace marks and their stories after I turned ten.

Life is sometimes soft, sometimes rough. Sometimes we throw our car keys on the dashboard after a heated phone call, and they crack the windshield. Not a good memory, but it evokes a feeling. A reminder. If it weren’t for these accumulations, who would we be? And what marks of everyday living would we have to show for it?

Wabi Sabi, to the Japanese, is not about having the latest things. It’s when you rediscover a jacket you haven’t worn in months and remember how good it fits.

No one likes talking about the pains and dull moments of life. Especially in the moment. But sometimes, when I look back on a dark time, I can see beauty—maybe even share a laugh if it was with friends.

Something attracted me to things that show visible age and stories. And it wasn’t this—because I didn’t think this deeply when I was 19. Whether a guiding muse or whatever you call it, my story is mine. My jeans, worn in the mud, are mine. My white shirt, the one I spill coffee on every single time I drive with an open mug in the car—that’s mine. It’s who I am. My clothing has aged on me.

And that’s the way I want it to be.

Gone are the days when style was a byproduct of work—when what a man wore wasn’t dictated by fleeting trends, but by the demands of his labor. In 1935, an American railroad worker in JC Penney coveralls, buckle-back Lee denim jeans, and a Carhartt coat wasn’t making a fashion statement. He was getting dressed with purpose—wrapped in the toughest, most functional fabrics available, garments designed to withstand a life of movement, strain, and time.

Hands worn, boots scuffed, denim stained with oil and sweat—yet the clothing, just like the work, remained. American workers were tough; their uniforms were too. A pair of Sears Roebuck engineer boots, a sturdy 15oz pair of selvedge denim, a chambray shirt, a Levi’s Type I jacket—staples not by aesthetic but by necessity. And yet, in their pragmatism, these garments became something else entirely: style at its most authentic.

In a documentation that opened my eyes to a fashion sentiment that shaped my home country “Denim: The Fabric That Built America 1935-1944,” they wrote a line that stuck with me: “An accidental fashion statement.” Archived images that paint a portrait of back-breaking jobs, and one fabrics role in lifting America out of the Great Depression. An iconic cloth and a celebration of style's most enduring inspiration.

Today, you can type “vintage American utility style” into Pinterest and scroll through sepia-toned, archival photographs that could just as easily be the cover of a modern menswear magazine. These weren’t models; they were welders, cattlemen, linemen, factory workers—people who wore hard-wearing fabrics for hard-working jobs. And yet, here we are, nearly a century later, still borrowing their uniform.

Workwear Never Went Away—The Work Just Changed

In early 20th-century America, what you wore was dictated by what you did. Clothes weren’t designed for fashion; they were chosen for applied labor. And yet, if you compare the silhouettes of then and now, very little has changed. The difference? We’ve replaced the practical need with an aesthetic one.

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A Chance Encounter with a Keeper of History

That morning, I wasn’t supposed to be at Yardage Town. But forgetting my thread led me to a story worth stitching together. Standing in the aisle, scanning colors, I felt a tap on my back.

“Claire Wedemier-McKarns,” she said, extending her hand before me, following up with: “What’s a strapping young man like yourself doing at a sewing store?”

It wasn’t an insult, but it wasn’t exactly a compliment either. More like curiosity wrapped in a generational gap. I told her about my work—turning antique quilts into wearable garments as I was stoked to tell anyone of my newly harvested passion. She listened, her expression shifting to delight.

Claire had been collecting and making quilts since she was a little girl in Connecticut. She rarely invited people into her world unless they had earned their place. Yet, somehow, in the span of ten minutes, I had secured an invitation to her home. The next day, I drove down a long dirt path to the oldest homestead development in San Diego, stepping into a space that felt untouched by time.

Claire met me at the door with two bags of Earl Grey and led me inside. It was a quilting workshop lost in time. Piles of quilts, some folded neatly, others stacked in precarious towers, filled the space. She walked me through each one.

“This one I made,” she’d say.

“This one I found in a barn.”

“This one—I followed a pickup truck for forty miles just to rescue it from being a moving blanket.”

She had spent fifty years making, saving, and studying these quilts. Her first was a doll quilt, sewn by her mother during a Christmas when money was tight. Later, she became an ER doctor, stitching people back together before dedicating herself fully to quilting. Now, she restores and preserves, pulling history back from the edge of obscurity.

I ran my hands over a quilt hand-stitched in 1915. The needlework was writing in thread.

Quilting Circles: The Original Storytelling Spaces

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The journey began far from home, wandering the forgotten corners of Europe. In a German market, I ran my hands over stacks of patched grain sacks. Each was rough and honest, stained with sweat and earth, carrying whispers of harvests long gone. They smelled of damp wood and time—tactile reminders of labor and survival.

Have you ever experienced synesthesia? A melding of senses that blurs the lines between sight, sound, smell, and time itself? For me it was stumbling upon a forgotten treasure that humbled my simply by its existence—a relic that demanded reverence. I can’t remember much from before the time I turned eight. That was around the end of 2007 when the financial crisis hit my artist entrepreneur parents. That was when I first felt the weight of responsibility. Our life turned into survival mode, but I also realized an awakening of my senses and the presence of my soul. For the first time I understood what it meant to contribute, to carry something forward. Then it was our family, all the work my parents put in to save our home from financial cataclysm.

That perspective shift shaped me, widening my gaze beyond the four walls of our home. Suddenly, the world wasn’t something distant—it was tactile; alive. And maybe that’s why, when I hold a textile worn with tears and dirt stains, I remember where it came from—not in an abstract, historical sense, but like I’ve been there. I can feel the dust of that rural farm settle on my skin and boots crunching shedded barley. My grandfather’s hands guide mine as we mend a grain sack under fading light, stitching not just to repair, but to prepare—to make sure we had what we needed for tomorrow’s harvest of wheat and barley.

Maybe that’s the magic of these textiles. They’re not just things; they’re invitations to remember something deeper—something you may not have lived firsthand but recognize in your bones.

In Portugal, I stumbled upon a shop so crammed with textiles that the air felt heavy with history. I unearthed quilt tops buried beneath piles of linen, their stitches deliberate, their patterns humming with purpose. Eastern Europe was quieter, more stoic. There, I found woven treasures tucked into shadowed stalls, the kind of artifacts that don’t demand attention but reward those willing to linger. And then, there was France. A Hungarian bed cover with bold, defiant embroidery stopped me in my tracks. The threads felt alive, a rebellion against time that refused to fade.

But as much as Europe gave, the story didn’t end there. Some pieces of history were waiting closer to home.

The East pulled me back—to Wendy, a woman whose life’s work was preserving the textiles of an era most have long forgotten. She lived in a Civil War-era barn, a building steeped in its own stories. First, a messenger’s waypoint during the war, and now, a sanctuary for hundreds of thousands of fabrics. Cabinets groaned under the weight of grain sacks, quilt tops, and bed covers, each piece saturated with the lives that shaped it.

Earlier this year, Wendy had sent me a note that still resonates:

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It’s been a devastating past few days here in Los Angeles. I wanted to take a moment to thank everyone who reached out to check on me. I also want to send my love and prayers to everyone who has lost so much in this horrific disaster.

So many of my friends, loved ones, and neighbors have been affected, and my heart goes out to every single person—and every animal—that’s been impacted. I’ve been in Venice, where the fires haven’t reached, but I’ve been pulling my hair out, trying to figure out how I can help.

In moments like this, every act of kindness matters. I’ve put together a list of ways that all of us can step up and support those who’ve lost everything. Whether it’s a donation, volunteering, or even sharing this info with others—every effort counts.

Thank you to the fire fighters and responders on the ground doing all that they can around LA to stop the fires.

Ways You Can Help

1. Donate Money

California Fire Foundation Provides immediate financial assistance to fire victims and firefighters.

Red Cross Disaster Relief Fund Offers emergency shelter, meals, and emotional support for affected communities.

United Way of Greater Los Angeles Wildfire Relief Fund Supports long-term recovery and rebuilding efforts for low-income families.

Global Empowerment Mission (GEM) Provides cash assistance, supplies, and long-term support to displaced residents.

Baby2Baby Distributes diapers, clothing, and essential supplies to children impacted by disasters.

2. Donate Supplies

You can donate much-needed supplies to local shelters or drop-off locations.

Here are key items in demand:

• Non-perishable food

• Bottled water

• New blankets and sleeping bags

• Hygiene kits (toothbrushes, soap, etc.)

• Baby essentials (diapers, wipes, formula)

Salvationarmy.org also accepts clothing, food, and household essentials.

Los Angeles Regional Food Bank – Accepts food donations to support families impacted by the fires.

3. Volunteer Opportunities

American Red Cross Volunteer Program Help at evacuation centers, assist with disaster logistics, or support meal distribution.

Team Rubicon A veteran-led disaster relief organization that focuses on recovery and rebuilding efforts.

World Central Kitchen (WCK) Prepares and distributes hot meals to families and first responders.

Los Angeles County Animal Care Volunteer to rescue, foster, or care for animals displaced by the fires.

L.A. Works – Connects volunteers with disaster relief projects across Los Angeles.

4. Animal Rescue and Care

Pasadena Humane Society Accepts donations to provide shelter and care for displaced animals.

ASPCA Offers emergency rescue, veterinary care, and pet sheltering services.

Los Angeles County Animal Care – Offers foster programs and rescue assistance for animals.

If you want to donate pet supplies, here’s what’s most needed:

• Pet food and water bowls

• Crates, leashes, and blankets

• First-aid supplies for animals

A Note of Gratitude

Thank you to the brave firefighters and first responders working tirelessly to protect our city. Your heroism is beyond words.

If you’re feeling helpless, know that even a small action—donating $5, volunteering for an hour, or sharing this information—makes a huge difference.

Sending all my love and prayers to those affected and to those who continue to fight for our safety.

Take care of yourselves and each other,

Tristan

I will most likely refer to Stan as a personified character. Because when I woke up with the four-letter word in my brain five years ago, I also woke up with the presence of this cicerone who, as I continue my quest and both struggle and succeed in gaining grounding in my internal and external pursuits of meaning, I find myself calling upon more and more often. It’s as if ‘he’ traveled from a place back in time when intentionality was built upon a foundation of fortitude—not a cursory slate of conformity. And he’s brought with him insights on how to navigate the busyness and pressure: taking a moment, living a little slower, expanding your perspective, sharing a story, realizing that meaning isn’t in the end result, but in the process.

Post Purpose:

BTW, these posts will be a mix of many different things—stories I’ve found about incredible people around the world, stories about things I think are cool and more people should know about, my process of taking something old and my tactile methods of transformation, as well as how I started working with my hands. I’ll share my philosophies on sustainability, craft, living with meaning, and the things we surround ourselves with that play a significant role in our lives. And of course, studio updates on how I am growing my artisanal craft practice into something bigger than myself.

I’m grateful you’ve chosen to listen to me—who are we without an audience? I also really want this to be a dialogue, a space for open conversations, including anything you’d like to discuss, learn, teach, or share.

First Story:

And with that, I’m going to share my first story because it marks the moment I started thinking differently in my life. The moment I began thinking for myself. When my consciousness was born and I began to knock down my sentient barriers. Before this moment, my memories seemed like compiled stories from others. But after this, I began making my own choices—especially in terms of design.

One word stood out to me during that time: autonomy.

In design school, we began going on tours of graphic design companies and product design firms, learning about internships and exploring work environments where group thinking was the norm. Don’t get me wrong—I’m inspired by others, by how they think and collaborate—but I found that my process diverged from the conventional path my teachers were encouraging.

The Design Manifesto Project:

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With the creation of STAN, I’ve intended to honor these stories by transforming textiles into garments meant to be cherished for lifetimes. But I’ve often felt there was more I could share—more than photos and captions could capture, more than a virtual post that I simply press “share” on and move on.

That’s why I’m launching this Substack. This space will be where I slow down and share the wherewithal of my journeys—a closer look at what shapes the ideals that have become more than a job, but a deeply ingrained moral practice. I want this to be a place for thoughtful discussion and connection between us as a community.

1. Textile Tales from the Field

From Vermont’s quiet barns to Anatolia’s bustling markets, I’ll take you with me on the hunt for rare fabrics and the stories behind them.

I’ll share the story of the first quilts I acquired in 2019 from a chance meeting with a quilting group in the oldest town of the city I grew up in.

2. Process and Craft

A behind-the-scenes look at how antique grain sacks, toile de Nîmes, and Kilim blankets are transformed into bespoke garments in our Los Angeles studio.

• How I discern resilient textiles that can be created into wearable form.

• Tips on my craft process.

How do we preserve the integrity of a 200-year-old fabric while crafting it into a modern silhouette? I’ll show you.

3. Sustainability and Garment Care

Practical advice on extending the life of your garments—whether it’s a STAN piece or a vintage heirloom passed down in your family.

4. Exclusive Access

Early announcements, live Q&As, and community discussions about slow fashion and craftsmanship.

5. Personal reflections—what inspires me, what I’ve learned from artisans I’ve met, and why I believe in creating fewer, more meaningful things.

6. I want this to feel like a dialogue, not a monologue. Share your thoughts—are you drawn to textile history, the making process, or the storytelling? Let me know in the comments or by replying to this post.

Why This Substack?

While Instagram has been an incredible way to share my work, I’ve always wanted a space where I could slow down and take you deeper—into the textures, the process, and the history behind each piece. Why I wake up every day inspired to continue on this path. Here, I can share the full story—unedited and uninterrupted.

Whether you’ve followed STAN for years or you’ve just found your way here, this space was created for you—for those who believe in the power of heritage, sustainability, and artistry.

How It Works

• Free Subscriptions: Short updates, collection previews, and quick discoveries from my sourcing trips.

• Standard Paid Subscriptions: Long-form stories from my textile journeys—like the forgotten hand-loomed coverlet in Vermont or the Kilim treasures of Anatolia. Detailed breakdowns of the design process, from sourcing to bespoke creation. Advice on garment care, working with antique textiles, and sustainability tips.

• Founding Member Subscriptions: Everything from the Standard Tier, plus: exclusive invites to live Q&As, virtual studio visits, and process deep-dives. Early access to limited edition pieces and collection drops before anyone else. Recognition as a Founding Member and a personal thank-you for your incredible support.

A Note of Gratitude

Thank you for being part of this journey. I started STAN long after my practice was in full swing—when I humbly realized that my work was worth sharing. My goal is not to craft for the masses but for the individual; someone who makes choices and efforts that sustain meaningful human effort.

Not one drawn into trends or sensationalized group thinking, but someone who shares values that make us unique individuals and stronger as a community.

Whether you’ve followed STAN for years or recently discovered it, your support allows me to continue preserving and honoring these values, legacies of artisans, and cultural stories from across the world.

I hope this Substack becomes a place where you feel inspired, connected, and part of something rare and meaningful.

Let’s start this new chapter together.

—Tristan

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