Sheel Khemka initially fell in love with jeans in 2003.

Having initially forayed into the denim space in 2003 as a pet project and for a ‘bit of fun’, working with contract manufacturers in the UK and in Italy, it took two years and a landmark trip across the pond to the vibrant garment manufacturing district of Los Angeles for Sheel to put paid his early buoyant fascination with denim and turn it into a true labour of love.

L.A. was then the Mecca for premium denim, and the US was in the middle of a premium denim craze, the consumer buying up anything (almost) that was put on the shelf if for no other reason than a massive jeans FOMO (fear-of-missing-out), underpinned by the sheer divinity- and diversity- of much of what was on offer in the marketplace, in that sector.

There was a new L.A. premium denim brand being born every other month, almost.

- Designers who had successfully built and sold their previous brand, other designers who’d headed up fashion corporates and were braving it out on their own - they all came to L.A.

LA had the resources (its high-end manufacturing, mostly concentrated within a small geographical area), it was also home to a booming, ravenous domestic marketplace (if anything, denim hungry, the great casualwear consumer economy of California and the West Coast- stretching to the East Coast- zealous and in pursuit of all and the latest fashions, and genuinely open to the new kid on the block, all the more so if they had something to offer), and then there was the great global marketing tool that was simply there, by chance, at your feet, on your door-step (Hollywood, none other, and the full force of its resplendent, pervading munificence).

The fabrics were then sourced from mostly the top end long-standing Japanese (and some Italian) premium-denim-focused mills that were in turn relentlessly experimenting with denim fabric and its fabrication beyond the boundaries of their predecessors, and at a pace, churning out artisan-craft- but at the same time in the not-to-be-ignored volumetric scales- specimens that you simply knew you had to grab hold of once they were placed in front of you. Some of these fabrics were next to priceless, it was in the artistry, the hand, and that soft supple silky texturing that came entwined with an inherent durability to boot, to do with the way they were spun (dual-ring-spun as in the old school, traditional method - producing real denim as denim producers had been doing ever since the day denim was invented in the 1500s in Genoa and Nimes, in Europe, but something which had mostly changed- globally- in the ‘80s in favour of faster, cheaper manufacturing to meet the then surge in global demand).

And it is this unabating love for denim- a love also shared by those certain echelons of the rarefied denim industry in L.A., and then the mills in Japan in Italy who supply them (naturally), that for Sheel- like the jeans (that were made from that denim)- has lasted.

So in 2023 Sheel Khemka returns to the denim world to expound on that passion, and with one vision- mind you one with a perspective, of being able to look in ‘from the outside’- but, keenly, a vision to look to the mid and- this being the key- to the longer term, to our generation and also the one beyond, in the search for some kind of permanence within the oft’ fleeting world of our fast and fanciful desires, and, need it be said - whims and fashions.