The husband and wife team behind denim brand Ginew create impeccable work wear inspired by their Native American ancestry and heritage
Text by Martin Cizmar
Images by Amanda Smith and Courtesy of Ginew and Justin “Scrappers” Morrison
Erik Brodt was staying at El Cosmico, a bohemian hotel in Marfa, Texas, when he had the jolt of inspiration that made his career as an apparel designer. He took out a black gel pen and drew a denim jacket on a few napkins lying around the safari tent where he was staying with his wife, Amanda Bruegl. “I just drank too much coffee and had this idea about wanting a coat that was designed after my great-great-grandfather,” he says. “I designed it in the morning. I figured out what components I wanted in it, and we made a small run for friends and family.”
Almost a decade later, Brodt and Bruegl are still making that jacket for Ginew, their ever-growing denim company based out of Portland. Both are Native American—Brodt is Ojibwe and Bruegl is Oneida and Mohican. As far as they know, theirs is the only Native American-owned denim company in the world.
“It’s about connecting with our relatives and who they were, and who we are because of who they were,” says Erik Brodt of Ginew, which he started with his wife, Amanda Bruegl. “It’s almost like a living, tangible, tactile history of our family.”
Ginew began as a small leather goods company, an outgrowth of the leather belts the couple made using buffalo hunted by Brodt and his father to give to those who had participated in their wedding. The company still produces a few leather goods, but apparel has since become its mainstay. Along with the denim jacket inspired by Brodt’s great-great-grandfather, other Ginew designs include a jacket inspired by those worn by the Mohican Civilian Conservation Corps work crew that built infrastructure for the community of the Stockbridge-Munsee Nation reservation in the 1930s, and a down vest made with leather from elk they hunted on eastern Oregon’s Zumwalt Prairie.
This apparel side of Ginew started when Brodt got his first pair of selvedge denim jeans from Portland company Tanner Goods. He still has them 10 years later. “I was trying to buy fewer but better things,” Brodt says. “We focused on having things that were made to last and had more purpose and meaning behind them.” Among those fewer, better things was the jacket he designed to echo his great-great-grandfather’s coat. After it was made, Ginew posted a photo of the jacket to Instagram, where it was noticed by Clutch, an influential Japanese fashion magazine. Ginew was promptly invited to the magazine’s annual Clutch Collection Show in Yokohama, Japan’s second largest city.
“I was like, ‘Amanda, we just got invited to do the Clutch collection show in Japan,’” Brodt recalls. “She was like, ‘Umm, maybe we should go next year, because it’s pretty tight right now.’ And I said, ‘I don’t think there is a next year.’ So from there, it’s just been history. We’ve slowly added an item or two every year, but that jacket is what people know us for.”
The Heritage Coat is a great thing to be known for. The beautiful, carefully crafted piece is made at an American factory with selvedge denim from Greensboro, North Carolina. (The couple stockpiled this fabric when the last remaining denim mill in the United States closed in 2017, but when they run out, they will switch to Japanese-made denim.) It’s then lined with wool custom-woven for Ginew by iconic Western brand Pendleton. The details are impeccable, down to sleeves that are lined with quilted silk. It retails for $595.
“A lot of what we do is inspired directly by our family—by our ancestry, by our heritage,” Brodt says. “We listen to the stories as passed down through our families of specific relatives. … It’s about connecting with our relatives and who they were, and who we are because of who they were. It’s almost like a living, tangible, tactile history of our family.”
For them, it’s a very personal project and a way to highlight the forgotten connection between their families and denim. “We have access to pictures from private collections or tribal museums or national museum collections, where there are photos of our actual relatives. They are pictures of people wearing work clothes,” Brodt says. “It’s not the romanticized, staged images that people are so accustomed to. Actually, the clothes our family was wearing was, by and large, denim and heavy canvases and very practical utilitarian clothing.”
Both Brodt and Bruegl are also physicians. He is a family medicine doctor, and she is a surgeon. Ginew is dedicated to celebrating the relatives who similarly “dedicated themselves to the hard labor of providing for their families.”
“In the fashion industry, there’s a lot of appropriation of tribal designs and symbols, and people using tribal names,” Brodt says. “We’re bringing a contemporary American Indian voice to fashion.”
The nuanced creations the husband and wife develop honor their heritages. “Everything that’s in our work is a direct reflection of our tribal symbols, and our culture—it’s not like we’re borrowing design ideas from other tribes,” Brodt says. “We’re really focused on designs and patterns and symbols from our community.”
http://ginewusa.com