Ossou Is Making Cool-Girl Denim To Wear, Tear & Last A Lifetime

There is no word more overused in the fashion industry than “timeless,” with many brands suggesting they’ve cracked the code on modern dressing with basics that will solve all your dressing woes. A lot of clothes may not actually be timeless, but denim — as a fabric, especially an American one — has endured through many iterative fashion moments. This notion was a starting point for Ossou, the brainchild of Nina Khosla and Talia Shuvalov, which seeks to, yes, perhaps be “timeless” but also realize and expound on its place in the denim food chain.

Khosla and Shuvalov are industry veterans with brand-launching experience under their designer belts. (Khosla founded Fforme, and Shuvalov has a jewelry line, Erede.) They both have a deep appreciation for denim, for its ease and ability to elevate or pare back. When I visited their studio in Soho, they were in sync about the start of the brand, often finishing each other’s sentences when “thinking about American denim tropes, but finding our way into it,” Khosla said.

A quick look through their coolly realized look book shows the care put into sculptural jeans and jackets, which all were made with ready-to-wear patterns in Japanese denim and crafted in Los Angeles. The seat of the jeans feels like a silly thing to compliment, but they’ve nailed the rise of jeans for women who want to throw them on with a blazer and bodysuit for a function, or Birkenstocks and a raggedy T-shirt for the school run. The Noon Jean follows the silhouette of traditional straight-leg trousers, reimagined in subtle colors like “Clay,” which will be the hero wash of the brand, and “Dusk.” “We went really dark with the black jeans,” Shuvalov said, and I commended them on finally getting jeans dark enough to merit the term “black.” The hero fit of the collection is the Rider Jean, which nails the au courant oversize moment while still feeling pantlike.

Every piece has an intentionality, which they expressed through their often lengthy discussions about buttons (“we spent about six months designing them”) to the tags (“I don’t even know how long we spent on these tags”). There is a jeweler’s touch to their signature two-tone metallic buttons and an ease to the silky wrap shirts and exaggerated cuffs that do the heavy lifting of appearing put-together yet sitting on the body without any constriction. Another thing they’ve nailed? The prices, which fall in between designer denim (something we lamented in our discussion) and modern contemporary. Jeans average around $400 (my personal pick, the Rider, come in at $450) and the most expensive item is the leather-trim wrap coat at $1,295. It’s something to aspire to for some and a reasonable alternative to cut-and-paste luxury denim for others.

There was the Marlboro man in his 501s, the cowboys in their Wranglers, and now, there’s the Ossou woman in her Lariat jeans, a cheeky nod to the past that doesn’t have any unnecessary bells or whistles. It’s an apt extension of the denim lexicon that feels in line with a customer who takes sartorial advice from both Lauren Santo Domingo and Addison Rae on how to style jeans. There is a timelessness to the collection, sure, yet a newness to it; maybe trendless-ness is a better way to describe it. Khosla and Shuvalov don’t want to be your entire wardrobe; they want to slot into your life without a lot of heavy lifting. In other words, let your jeans do the talking.