I've spent most of my life making things.
For a long time, it was clay. The quiet rotation of a pottery wheel, the weight of wet earth in my hands, the peculiar anticipation of opening a kiln. I loved the uncertainty of it. How something so ordinary could become something entirely unexpected.
Eventually, I found my way into sculpture, painting, and conceptual art. I was studying at USC, following one idea into another, with no particular intention of making clothing.
Then there was a trucker hat.
An orange one, with Florida written across the front. I wasn't from Florida, and after enough people asked, I painted over the lettering.
I began painting other hats, embroidering a little logo I'd designed, selling them around campus. The hats became T-shirts, then strange experiments with stitching and fabric. A chance encounter led to Fred Segal. Another led to a denim laundry, a ten-by-ten-foot room, and an industrial sewing machine.
Somewhere in all of that, MATiAS began.
For years, I was less interested in making clothes than in understanding them.
I took garments apart. Studied the pieces. Followed seams to see where they went, and wondered why they couldn't go somewhere else.
Denim was particularly fascinating. A fabric with an extraordinary history, yet so much of its construction seemed to have been decided long before I arrived.
I respected those traditions. But I wasn't interested in spending my life reproducing them.
I wanted to see what else was possible.
Sometimes an idea began with a drawing. Sometimes with an unusual piece of fabric. Other times with a mistake that revealed something I hadn't considered.
Gradually, a language began to emerge. Familiar garments reconsidered. Workwear pulled apart and put back together with a different intention.
I eventually found a name for it: avant-garde workwear.
Not an aesthetic, necessarily. More a way of thinking.
It took me years to recognize how closely this work was connected to ceramics.
A pottery wheel turns. A sewing machine moves a needle up and down. Simple, almost primitive movements, capable of producing an astonishing range of forms.
Clay comes from the earth. So does cotton. There is something wonderful about that — the transformation of ordinary material through water, heat, pressure, color, and the human hand.
The alchemy of making.
For a long time, though, I approached clothing as sculpture. I was making objects, exploring their shapes and surfaces. The fact that someone might wear them was almost secondary.
Then a friend told me how one of my garments made him feel. More confident. Somehow different in the way he carried himself, and in the way others saw him.
That stayed with me.
I had spent so much time considering the object that I'd overlooked the person who would inhabit it.
The work began to take on another dimension.
It took me an equally long time to call myself an artist.
Other artists called me one long before I was comfortable with the word. Eventually, I began seeing art in places I hadn't thought to look before. In engineering, technology, architecture. In the way an idea becomes an object, and an object becomes part of someone's life.
It didn't have to hang on a wall.
These days, the greatest satisfaction often comes when someone connects with MATiAS. Not simply when they buy something, but when they recognize something of themselves in the work.
Of course, give me an unfamiliar fabric or an idea I haven't figured out how to make, and I'm just as excited as I was standing in front of that first sewing machine.
More than twenty years have passed.
The studio has changed. The work has changed. So have I.
But there are still things I want to make.
— MATiAS