In 2016, Alejandro Gutiérrez landed in Oaxaca at the Bautista Martinez family’s taller (Spanish for “workshop”) while on an internship studying textiles. For generations, the family has produced handwoven fabrics with a fully analog pedal loom, a complex contraption that brings gravity to the arduous task of handweaving threads into textiles. Traditionally, the fabrics are used for tablecloths, pillowcases, and curtains. Gutiérrez wanted to turn them into clothes, so they could be more intimately experienced and adored—at the same time recontextualizing the Oaxacan fabrics for a new audience. 

Gutiérrez, 29, launched the brand Graziano & Gutiérrez during lockdown in 2020, cranking out workwear-inspired designs, like trucker jackets and hearty double-knee trousers ($285 to $610), on a home sewing machine in his spare bedroom. It’s an overgrown design school project, founded with classmate Sam Graziano. Graziano consults on designs, but the day-to-day production of cutting and sewing, logistics and promotion, is a one-man show. 

Despite the company’s humble resources, menswear media took note. “That blew everything up,” says Gutiérrez. Within months, his designs were in GQ, New York Magazine, Gear Patrol, and the Financial Times. Indie rocker Kevin Morby started ordering. Joe Jonas’s people reached out about a jacket; so did Maluma’s. Portland musician and publisher Fabi Reyna ordered a custom suit for her TEDxPortland appearance. The Blazers even commissioned a line of exclusive merch. 

I meet Gutiérrez at his workshop in the Ford Building. “We” are going to make something—meaning I, on Portland Monthly’s dime, am there to be fitted for a custom garment. What garment, exactly, we are going to decide together. I haven’t seen the clothes in person before visiting—Gutiérrez doesn’t currently sell through any Portland retailers. In photos, the workwear-inspired designs present with the structured rigidity of Carhartt double-knees, boxy Wrangler jeans, and Levi’s trucker jackets—they look like they require breaking in. To the touch, the fabrics have the give of sumptuously woven blankets and pillowcases. 

The studio is filled with sample garments that Gutiérrez tests by wearing around town, or loans out for photo shoots. I slip on a trucker jacket—the iconic silhouette of a Levi’s denim coat, but morphed into his own distinct take, in firetruck red contrasted with a buttery yellow, soft and slouchy in just the right way, with a flattering patchwork of intricate patterning. “I love how things age,” Gutiérrez says, as I flail my arms to check the fit. “Twenty-five, 24-and-three-quarters,” he mutters, measuring my arm, then tells me this jacket was his college thesis. 

“This is the one?” I ask. It’s the second one, apparently. “This one,” he says, swinging a coat with a black and white diamond pattern across the room, “is the first jacket I ever made.” The sleeves are awkwardly long, and it’s coming apart at a few seams. But the “design language,” as Gutiérrez calls it, is there. His eyes tell me that honing this jacket has been his central pursuit for years. 

Typically, unless you share a celebrity echelon with, say, A$AP Rocky, namesake designers aren’t inviting you to the atelier to collaborate. But there I was, scrutinizing fabrics for my future heirloom-textile jacket and brainstorming which accents would complement the patterns. This is the norm at Graziano & Gutiérrez: short of selling through two retail outlets (in New York and Sante Fe, New Mexico), all the brand’s items are made to order, sold right to customers. “I just feel there’s so many clothes in the world already,” Gutiérrez says. 

With this model, every garment has a home before the pattern is cut, and customers are free to request slight modifications—in my case, taking an inch off the sleeve. “We talk about this ‘one-size-fits-all’ type of thing, right?” he says, referencing the generic proportions of traditional workwear. “But it’s not. Realistically, bodies are different, taste is different.”

His one-at-a-time model also intentionally slows the label’s growth. Ssense and Mr Porter have asked about stocking the line, but the demands of such commercial retail far exceed the brand’s scale. A very small capsule collection produced for Huckberry, another online retailer, stretched G&G’s limits, then sold out before Gutiérrez realized the sale was live. Outsourcing production to a factory could help keep up, but Gutiérrez says the forecasting, scale, and lack of control that requires would squander his vision for the brand. He is thinking about hiring a few people to help him sew. 

Dashing around the small workshop, Gutiérrez tosses folded lengths of delicately patterned, jacket-weight fabrics onto his workbench. He keeps just a few yards of each on hand. One is a rich green with variegated stripes of black and golden brown intertwined. “It’s like lichen, mossy,” he says, and explains how, because the pattern is much larger than the clothes, he’ll create a patchwork composition: “asymmetrical, everywhere.” Another option is bright honey with dashed, creamy stripes. One is jet black with a braid of red. Another is a network of crimson diamonds. 

We land where we—and he—started, with the mossy green, from the Bautista Martinez taller. I wanted a piece of the muse. I notice accents of red stitching on a jacket on the wall. “Bar tacks,” Gutiérrez says, naming the thick, embroidery-like stitch. “That’s something that we can do.” 

I return a few weeks later as he’s adding the bar tacks with a rumbling sewing machine and riveting the buttons on with a press. He assesses the fit as I try it on, patting down the shoulders and checking how the sleeves lie. It’s a bit like joining an exclusive cohort, the way I imagine motorcycle club members must feel, or varsity athletes. Then he inscribes the date and production number on the tag: 1 of 1.