Libertine
The Label
Libertine works like this: Johnson Hartig (based in Los Angeles) finds vintage pieces to recut and reassemble with exposed stitching and raw edges. Then he sends them to partner Cindy Greene (based in New York), who silk-screens nineteenth-century images (skulls, birds, leaves, Abraham Lincoln) onto them. Every piece is necessarily a one-off, since the designers are cherry-picking the vintage crop, but their sophisticated, rough-edged collections are united through themes like Victoriana, Goth, and punk. Although the collection was only started in September 2001, it’s been influential enough that Karl Lagerfeld has made it a mainstay of his wardrobe. Rock stars like Mick Jagger, Michael Stipe, and Dave Navarro like it, as do Brad Pitt, Liv Tyler, and Gwyneth Paltrow.
The Look
Arty-punk but still sophisticated sportswear fashioned from vintage clothes and customized with silk-screening.
The Designer
Neither Hartig nor Greene studied fashion design. Greene, from Ohio, was a graphic designer working at DKNY and singing with the band Fischerspooner when she sent her friend Hartig, an aspiring actor in L.A., a T-shirt with a gorilla silk-screened on it. He recut it and wore it to a party (Hartig was already selling vintage clothes to Maxfield and Fred Segal), and in one of those “next thing you know” occurrences, the line was being sold at Fred Segal. The duo are considering starting a more traditional secondary line that wouldn’t rely on vintage.
