1. None More White

“We're trying to make a whiter merino,” Tyler Clemens says. It’s a warm August afternoon, and Clemens is walking me through the hundreds of fabric swatches lining the Williamsburg studio that’s home to Outlier, the clothing company Clemens founded with Abe Burmeister nearly a decade ago. He grabs a small white rectangle off the wall to show me.

“But they fucked it up—twice,” Burmeister interjects, “they” being the mill Outlier is working with to develop the fabric. The merino tee is a core Outlier product, which is to say a basic-looking object whose basicness obscures the fact that the people in this room—Burmeister, Clemens, and their 20 employees—have spent months and months engineering every last detail. Outlier has been selling a version of the Ultrafine Merino T-Shirt since 2009, but never in optical white. Turns out it’s essentially impossible to produce a snow-white merino wool; the stuff just comes off the sheep slightly discolored. But to Outlier, wrong-colored sheep are merely an eggshell-tinted speedbump.

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First, they attached a white cotton facing to the merino, marrying aesthetics to function: the merino against your skin, naturally wicking away sweat; the cocaine-white cotton gleaming unto the world. “But then what we realized is, you can't bleach merino,” Burmeister says, visibly aggrieved. “So we were selling this white cotton tee that's great until it gets dirty, and then you're like, Uh-oh.” Recently they asked the fabric mill to apply a stain-resistant treatment to the cotton, obviating the need for bleach. The mill is having a difficult time with the request. It’s probably wondering the same thing as you: Does the world need a better white T-shirt? Or an equally good white T-shirt that is simply more white? But these questions are irrelevant to Clemens and Burmeister. “The compromise part of the market is very well serviced,” Burmeister says. “So we go for the uncompromised.”

Matt Martin

The perfect white T-shirt is of a piece with the pared-down, teched-out basics that are the foundation of Outlier’s business—pants that stretch and move without busting at the crotch, tees that sop up sweat like a sponge but don’t leave Rorschach blots at your pits. These are the products that have become wildly, unexpectedly popular with a certain kind of farmers’-market-shopping, commuter-biking, extremely pragmatic urbanite since Outlier was founded in 2008. The company has filled a gap in the market—ultra-high-quality, deeply considered, fastidiously high-performance staples—that no one previously knew existed. Or, maybe, that gap didn’t exist until Outlier pointed it out.

In addition to the essentials—the tees, hoodies, chinos, and button-downs, all made with technical, often custom-developed fabrics and all suitable to wear to a 2:30 check-in with Karen and the rest of the consumer marketing team—there are what Outlier calls “experiments.” These are niche items made in small runs, designed to solve problems no one’s ever had (“My poncho isn’t water-repellent enough!”), find excuses to use progressive technologies, or serve as trial runs for eyebrow-raising silhouettes (turning that poncho into a merino wool "thing"). Outlier’s End of World pants, released earlier this summer, fit in this bucket.

They look like a pair of jeans, only they’re lined with a double layer of a cool-to-the-touch space fabric called Dyneema (“simply the world’s strongest fiber”). Outlier shot marketing images for the End of Worlds at Newtown Creek, an unloved corner of Long Island City filled to the brim with waste-management plants, scrap metal, and gravel. Seeing a model scramble over the mounds, you get the intended insinuation: If you can wear these pants to scale a post-apocalyptic scrapyard dystopia, they’ll hold up just fine walking through a light drizzle to pick up a grain bowl.

Courtesy of Outlier

It’s an odd market to target—or it would be, if Outlier worked with a market in mind. They don’t: “If you're designing for an imaginary person, you're going to solve for imaginary problems,” Burmeister says. They claim to just make the products that interest them. And yet these stain-resistant pants and unrippable jeans have struck a chord: The company's revenue grows by about a third annually, they tell me; they've gone from making a single pair of pants to some 80 new products a year. Outlier is privately owned, and Burmeister and Clemens don't like to disclose too much about the company's finances—they do tell me that the company is profitable, and Wired has reported that it brought in $2.7 million in 2012.

But another question remains: Does anyone really need pants built to survive the apocalypse? Or even that nature-defying white wool T-shirt? Outlier’s most vocal fans—a newly discovered species of menswear fanatic born deep on Reddit—seem to think so. But how, I wondered, is that need strong enough to drive significant annual growth for a relatively tiny clothing company? And why do those End of Worlds—and Outlier in general—feel particularly relevant these days? As I spent some time with Clemens and Burmeister in search of an answer, the world outside their Williamsburg studio continued to strain at the seams. An answer started to present itself. Outlier’s success began to look less like the product of its founders’ canny futurism than of their bone-deep understanding of the present moment.

Courtesy of Outlier

2. Born from Pants

The story of Outlier starts and ends with pants. One pair in particular, back in 2008, before the extra-clean merino and the space-age jeans. “I was going through a pair of jeans every couple months,” says Burmeister, who had been biking all over New York. So he walked over to the button-and-thread kiosk on Seventh Avenue in New York’s Garment District and started asking questions. Clemens, meanwhile, had been working at Seize sur Vingt, a custom suits-and-shirts shop in Manhattan, but felt something missing. “How come no one's taken technical fabrics and made some nice tailored clothing with it?” he wondered.

And then, because it was Brooklyn in the aughts, their fortuitous connection came via a shared barista, who put them in touch. The guys met, and Outlier’s first piece, a pair of pants called the OGs, was born. If you squinted, they looked like chinos. Up close, though, they were something different: constructed from a fabric that could stretch, breathe, and repel all manner of New York City fluids. The pants were a few iterations away from actually passing as office camouflage—the space-age fabric was a bit too nubbly, the way it stretched a little too un-boardroom-esque. But they appealed to an underserved market: Engineers, techies, and outdoorsy guys who spent their day jobs dreaming about getting back outdoors. In short, guys who treated their clothing like gear.

Just as important as the statement the pants made was the way Outlier sold them. This was 2008—nobody shopped online. Direct-to-consumer clothing companies and subscription-box services promising to refurbish your life tastefully and painlessly, the Warby Parkers and Birchboxes and Caspers, were years away. Rather than pass the savings on to the buyer, Everlane-style, Outlier reinvested the money into the garments themselves, hoping guys would understand the value of a $200 pair of pants that could handle anything.

And while the Internet helped with the brand’s sales model, it also served as a sort of informal PR mechanism. (Things have changed: A publicist sits in on both of our meetings.) Outlier saw success thanks to a wave of outdoors, tech-friendly, and menswear-leaning blogs, but it also benefited from a rapidly growing menswear following on Reddit. As is typical for the website, Outlier’s subreddit is full of obsessives, people asking in-the-weeds questions like “Co/Weight vs. Doublefine: Which fabric do you prefer and why?” or “Any Outlier bag that can serve as a dog carrier?” These are customers for whom Outlier serves as the answer to just about every clothing-related question in life, because these are men—and they are almost entirely men; Outlier has dabbled in womenswear, but doesn’t make any at the moment—for whom every question, even one about something as subjective and personal as style, has a discrete answer.

Matt Martin

Jordan Borth is one of those fans. He’s not a fashion guy, he explains, but he follows Outlier’s every move. “My wardrobe's really tiny,” he says. “I have three T-shirts and two pairs of pants, and they're all Outlier.” Borth, 28, is a software designer who stocked up on Outlier when he moved to San Francisco for a job earlier this year. “I like simple and intentional living, and having less stuff but better stuff.” So he wears his two pairs of pants (the Slim Dungarees) and his three shirts (the Ultrafine Merino T-Shirts); Outlier’s materials obsession means he rarely has to do laundry. “It's pretty epic that they go out and create their own fabric to build their products,” he says.

Borth speaks about Outlier almost as if it were a tech company, building and creating and iterating. It’s a key part of the brand’s appeal, at least to its hardcore fans. Outlier’s rejection of “fashion” tropes—seasonal collections, high markups followed by heavy discounts—attracts guys who don’t care about, or simply dislike, those qualities. The company’s vaguely dystopic affect helps, too. Back in 2008, when the world was teetering on the brink of global financial meltdown, Burmeister pulled the name from economist Nicholas Nassim Taleb’s book about unexpected catastrophic events. “I guess we're making all kinds of prepper shit undercover,” Burmeister joked to me back in the studio when I asked about a run of dark, tactical-leaning gear, including hyper-light, hyper-strong bags built to adopt military-grade accessories. Which isn't really the case. Outlier isn't looking to outfit a militia. It's just getting a little bit...weird.

3. Outlier Gets Weird

In recent years, I’ve picked up a taste for what might charitably be called stupid pants, and Outlier reappeared on my radar because it’s recently entered the stupid-pant game. Here was a pair of high-rise, gusseted-crotch, loose-and-slouchy pants (since discontinued). There, a pair of ’90s tear-away warm-up pants, only made out of super-engineered linen (only $295). These seemed to be clothes that you’d buy only if you were an Outlier completist—or someone who worked at a fashion magazine and actively sought out ways to win confused looks from the less style-obsessed.

Outlier’s gestures toward capital-F fashion have always been there, but weren’t always so obvious. Burmeister grabs an Outlier button-front shirt and draws my attention to the “pivot sleeve”: an extra piece of fabric running from the hip to the shoulder that lets the wearer lean over a pair of handlebars without the shirt riding up his forearms. “We were studying all these Everest garments from the 1920s and contemporary climbing gear,” he says. Burmeister’s breakthrough came at Barneys, where he stumbled across a piece from the avant-garde label Comme des Garçons. “It was purely aesthetic, but they were chopping up the sleeves and doing all these overlaps.”

It only makes sense that a shirt now beloved by bike-riding Bay Area techsters was inspired by postmodern Japanese fashion once you see the corner of Outlier’s sunlit Williamsburg studio that’s stocked with reference materials on art, design, architecture, and fashion. Outlier may be popular with the anti-fashion crowd, but its founders know—and care deeply about—their history. The stupid pants are weird, but they’re weird with intent.

These changes occasionally cause confusion on Reddit, where Outlier’s biggest fans would very much like the brand to keep making anonymous technical pants. “People get really mad if we don't do exactly what they dreamed of,” Burmeister says, laughing. “But we learn more by putting them out there and having people yell at us and shit,” Clemens explains.

They learn where their own deep love of fashion and their fans’ tolerance for Outlier whimsy reaches a limit, but those online believers also reframe whatever it is Burmeister and Clemens think they’re doing. “Is Outlier a life style [sic] brand?” a user named kevin_jazz asked recently. He hit on something slippery in Outlier’s DNA.

Being a fan of a label usually means adopting the image its designer sketches out. Buy a Donald Duck–embroidered Gucci sweater, for example, and you’re a member of Alessandro Michele’s cheeky tribe. Buy a long-and-skinny John Elliott T-shirt, and you’re a walking advertisement for his ur-L.A. silhouette. Outlier is mutable, though. Some customers buy it to join a club of clean-living, globe-traveling cycling enthusiasts. Others, like Borth, the software designer, buy believing that the purchase puts them outside any club: For them, Outlier is a tech-futurist’s solution to fashion. And others still (I fall into this last group) buy because the brand is one of very few marrying real technical wizardry to progressive fashion. We all think Outlier is something different—something made just for us. From these disparate groups, each of which looks to the brand for something slightly different, Outlier has cobbled together a rabid following. There’s something that connects the dots here, that pulls coding ninjas and weekend hikers and fashion editors into the same pool—and it's something that's bigger than just two guys in Williamsburg trying to make better pants.

4. Clothes for the Darkest Timeline

A week later, I see Burmeister and Clemens again. Since our last meeting, Hurricane Harvey has made landfall, twice, in Texas. The president has pardoned Sheriff Joe Arpaio and suggested, via Twitter, that conflict with North Korea is inevitable. The center isn't holding. Now we're standing in an active construction site, 20-foot piles of refuse overhead. It's a warm, bright day. They're both wearing Outlier gear. My heavy cotton chinos feel like a relic. They made their clothes for an imagined future, and now that future, curdled and strange, has come roaring in on top of us.

I’d asked Burmeister and Clemens to take me somewhere in the city that felt important to the brand’s history, so we’ve come to Newtown Creek, the location of that particularly apocalyptic photo shoot. The creek divides Long Island City from Greenpoint, Brooklyn, from Queens. It is where many of New York’s water bottles and soda cans and meeting printouts and ruined pieces of construction equipment are brought, sorted, and packaged onto barges. The duo fold technology and ideology into their clothes, hiding them beneath zippers and water-repellent fabric. The creek does the opposite: The guts of New York City are on display. Clemens and Burmeister like to see how things work.

But Outlier isn’t the only place Burmeister does this sort of cultural archeology. On his Twitter account, @abe1x, he muses about Apple’s product design, and the fluidity of 21st-century capital. He wonders about that private-equity investment in Supreme. He interacts with pioneering sci-fi novelist William Gibson (who, when I reached out to him by e-mail, says he loves the brand’s “heroically over-engineered” socks). The feed casts Outlier in a new light: Just as the pivot-sleeve shirt obscured Clemens and Burmeister’s high-fashion curiosities, the brand’s plain-Jane chinos had a whole ocean of social and cultural theory rushing just beneath the surface.

There’s always been a pervasive futurism to the project; it’s not for nothing that the brand’s stated desire is to “build the future of clothing.” And while futurism isn’t necessarily optimistic, it is biased toward solution: Whatever happens, more technology will help us survive it. But there’s something a little downbeat in Outlier, too, that’s surfaced over the past year or so. The brand’s recent clothing seems attuned to the darker undercurrents in modern American life: to the idea that, one day, maybe even soon, your pants might actually need to perform. Outlier also seems deeply aware of the way a certain kind of fashion—the work of designers like Rick Owens or Rei Kawakubo, real artists whose clothes are charged equally with vulnerability and power—can serve as a protective, expressive layer. (It’s no coincidence that “armor” came up often as Burmeister and Clemens talked through the brand’s next wave of new clothing.)

Matt Martin

“One of the interesting things about Outlier is how seamlessly it seems to blend with other clothing, something not all technical garb does,” Gibson told me. “For me it's really all about Errolson Hugh's idea of clothing as ‘wearable architecture,’” referring to the Berlin-based designer behind Acronym. “What I'd call technical clothing is purpose-built contemporary wearable architecture. I'd definitely rate Outlier as that.”

These days, with its combination of old technical classics and new, stranger silhouettes, Outlier’s gear fits even more hand-in-glove into Gibson’s world. If you squint, the bike pants reveal themselves as self-cleaning trousers that would come in handy for rising sea levels. The bags are compatible with military-grade add-on components, in case you need to attach a half-dozen canteens of potable water.

But the brand’s politics are subtly woven into everything they make. “That was not about being at work more, you know?” Burmeister had told me the first time we met, referring to the bike-to-work premise that inspired that first pair of OG pants. The company was designed to be “a pathway out of that world,” Burmeister said. “Not a way to be more comfortable there.”

Those politics are evident even in what the brand chooses not to make, too, like the blazer it's taken out of production. “We have much less desire to make anything conservative,” Burmeister had said, “just because it seems to have a very different meaning all of a sudden.”

In 2008, Outlier was conceived as a kind of utopic company, making chinos a guy could bike in. Now the nature of day-to-day survival has changed. We’re all looking for something like comfort, in different ways for different guys. And Outlier's pants and ponchos and white merino T-shirts provide that comfort, whether you've got a bug-out bag or a country house, or both. So Burmeister and Clemens will keep making the pants that got them here. They’ll keep making the End of World pants, too. Who knows? One of these days, they just might come in handy.

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