Spencer Phipps Wants to Take It Outside

If you've spent any time on Spencer Phipps's Instagram account, you might be surprised to learn he's a seasoned fashion designer working out of Paris. Instead, what you'll have seen are rugged hiking trails, Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, Asics shoes, and sweat shorts—all accessorized by an impressive beard. It's a far cry from what you would expect from a former LVMH Prize finalist, but his brand Phipps is full of such exciting contradictions: fine tailoring paired with activewear, impressive growth with an eye to sustainability, design headquarters in France led by a distinctly American vision. With every new collection, Phipps uses these contrasts to tell a nuanced story about the world we live in and the way we live in it.

Throughout his San Francisco upbringing, Spencer was always conscious of fashion. "I fixated on clothing. I had a very deep obsession with the stuff that I was wearing," he recalls. And what he was wearing had its own distinct flair: When he wasn't pulling random pieces from his parents' closet, the many vintage stores open at the time provided relics from the Seventies—"the shit you can imagine you would find around the Bay Area"—for him to play with. "I think I looked really cool, in hindsight," he says. "I look back at my high school style and I was really fucking bold. I didn't give a fuck."

Spencer went on to study fashion at Parsons, immediately working at Marc Jacobs and then Dries Van Noten after graduating. It was at the latter where he began to toy around with his own style. "I got to dressing really nice around the time I started working at Dries, where I thought that was what was expected of me," he says. It proved to be a short-lived experiment, especially given his penchant for an active, outdoor lifestyle: "I sort of attempted to dress like a dandy and wear really nice clothes, nice wool trousers, which I would just trash all the time, and kind of hated it and felt like, 'Ah god I'm going to ruin all of this.' Pretty quickly, after my first year there, it kind of devolved into me wearing a dirty hoodie." That experience proved to be formative for his own design sensibility, revolving around the type of clothes he could see himself and those around him actually wearing. "I like the [finer] materials," he admits. "Obviously they're beautiful fabrics. I like to work with them, they make beautiful garments. But it's more like, who are you dressing at the end of the day there? Who's that guy?"

In 2018, Spencer launched Phipps, catering to a more grounded customer and always keeping one eye on nature. Graphics often reference our connection to the natural world, from using Smokey Bear as inspiration to bluntly inscribing tees with the words, "Save The Fucking Whales." Designs and fabrications often lean to the sporty and are often styled together with more classic pieces like suits or double-breasted coats. Hiking is the clearest reference point, and Spencer doesn't hide his love for the outdoors. In centering on this æsthetic, Phipps has tapped into something capturing the attention of fashion consumers, who are increasingly trading in both streetwear and high fashion for elevated outdoor brands like Salomon, Arc’teryx, and Moncler Genius.

"I think a lot of fashion brands have picked up on this credibility of outdoor brands," Spencer explains, recalling that, even just a few years ago, companies treated this burgeoning category as an afterthought. "No one had really thought of the outdoor stuff, because the products are really complicated to make, in a sense that the fabrics are really technical. There’s a certain element of functionality to it. A lot of fashion brands used to do heat-sealed jackets and things like that, but it would cost like five thousand bucks and would be horrible quality—and you could just get an Arc'teryx one. Yeah, it's still expensive, but it's going to last you your entire life." Though Spencer cites designers like Alexander McQueen, John Galliano, and Martin Margiela as fashion influences ("these crazy artists, showmen, so far gone from reality that it's just like theater basically"), he was even more influenced by Patagonia when setting up the label. "I think as we've mixed and matched our wardrobes a little, people have come to the realization that there is that whole product universe, because it's not just a category, it's an entire other style of dressing."

Though Americana is nothing new in fashion, Phipps often references peculiar strains of American culture that traditional brands eschew. His vision centers around the eclecticism, fanaticism, and idolatry of the American character. "I honestly think that most of it is my weird experience of America and my natural attraction to outsiders and the lesser known," he explains. "Everyone knows varsity culture, what [Americana] looks like, but there are all these other groups that people don't talk about."

Phipps's Spring 2022 collection was the most vivid exploration yet of such characters, with the designer thinking about the archetypes our culture uses to define masculinity. Much as various cultures throughout history would use ceremonial rites of passage to usher in manhood, Spencer considered the ways men today create their own rites. "Is that your first rave party in a forest? Is that the first time you win a fight or win a competition?" he considers. "Then thinking a little into the future in a more abstract sense, maybe you're on a journey somewhere traveling." The collection put forth everything from leopard-printed skirts and neon cycling shorts to logo hoodies and patchwork pinstripe suits, each look carrying the energy of modern tribalism that inevitably forms in our culture—as Spencer puts it, "just acknowledging these moments, acknowledging these markers of masculinity, and then mixing and matching them and shoving them all together."

The Spring 2022 collection also showcased select pieces from Phipps's Gold Label line, a collection of vintage pieces that Spencer sources and customizes with logos, screenprints, and other embellishments. The line is growing and becoming increasingly important to crafting the image of the Phipps man, which is in keeping with the way people actually shop and dress. With such a strong influence from a brand like Patagonia and an authentic connection to nature, it's no surprise that Phipps is defined by its sustainable practices, but Spencer acknowledges the difficulty in making the industry truly progress. "It's a lot of well-intentioned people doing absolutely nothing," he says. "The whole conversation about sustainability is a little bit touchy in fashion because the only way for it to work is for the entire industry to basically shut down and start completely again, and people don't want to hear that."

Still, Spencer is an optimist, albeit one who recognizes that there isn't always a perfect solution. "Every single thing has this negative and a positive. It's always this balancing act of intention," he explains. "Just try to do the best you can with what you're able to get at the time and try and hope that you can do better as you build." In creating a brand that reflects the way he lives, he's creating collections that are deeply connected to the world around him. Even at its most theatrical, there's still something recognizable in a Phipps collection: It's grounded in reality. "I think we'll figure it all out," Spencer says before pausing, considering the practicality of it all. "Or we won't and the whole thing will go up in smoke—and we'll just deal with that when it happens."

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