10 Years Later, Noah Still Doesn’t Care What You Call It
“We have to rethink how selfish we can be, and I apply that to myself as well. I’m certainly guilty of making bad choices,” says Brendon Babenzien. “All I would ask of people is give it a little thought first, and if you still decide you need it or want it or whatever, then okay, fine.”
Not a lot of people who own clothing brands would dissuade customers from buying their products. But not a lot of people are Babenzien.
“It’s my responsibility as someone who creates things to say out loud, ‘Buy this and keep it for a really long time, or don’t buy it,’” he says. “If you’re not going to build a life with this product, don’t buy it.”
Babenzien is speaking to me from the office of J.Crew, where he’s been the men’s creative director since 2021. But the topic of our Zoom call is the 10th anniversary of Noah, the clothing brand he founded in 2002, temporarily shuttered and relaunched in 2015 with wife Estelle. Babenzien, like his clothing brand, is far more interested in perspective than clothes. A discussion of product, or even categorization of product, doesn’t feel very “Noah.”
“This emphasis on brand, it feels very much like a business conversation,” he says. “It’s like, ‘What’s your brand?’ And I don’t really care. We see the world and people as interesting and complex and not to be narrowed down to these simple thoughts like, ‘If you’re a runner, you dress this way. If you’re a fisherman, you act that way.’ That’s boring to me.”
Anyone can glean a surface-level understanding of Noah from its campaigns and lookbooks showing handsome people clad in the brand’s prep-ish, classic-ish, menswear-ish clothes. But both Noah’s products and Noah itself are distinguished by awareness of something more. On the former, Noah schools its followers in the stylistic roots of its garments, their fabrics and inspirations, maintaining an in-house blog and laying out reference points for even the quotidian cargo short. And that informs the obsessive side of Noah, the side that goes beyond clothing, even though Babenzien contends that it has only just arrived.
“It took 10 years to get to where I feel like, ‘Oh, this looks like what I imagined,’” he says. “It’s not some strategic decision. It’s putting my life in the form of products. There’s no end goal.” And, though Babenzien is commonly regarded as Mr. Noah, he’s quick to credit his wife and team as equally important contributors to the brand’s vision. Perhaps more important. “If we didn’t share that, it would be really tough,” he says. “If you’re alone, it’s really hard. Nobody can do anything alone.”
This is Noah’s bigger picture. It’s ideas, feelings, lived experiences. Its partnerships with Barbour and The Cure, Vuarnet and PUMA, N.E.R.D. and the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Its people: Beyond its team, whose passions for running and birdwatching often make their way into collections, Noah tends to cast friends of the brand for lookbooks, often on repeat. The more you look at Noah, the more you get a sense of a larger world, one that’s hard to frame neatly.
The clothes, on the other hand, are easy to summarize. “We sell a lot of sweaters, we sell a lot of shirts, we sell a lot of jeans and pants, and they’re just good,” Babenzien says. “There’s not an identifier like, ‘Hey, check me out. I’m wearing this.’ And that’s always been really important to me.” Noah’s shaggy sweaters, harrington-style jackets, and signature rugby shirts typically eschew graphics, aside from slogans or the occasional artist partnership. Buyers get a complete closet of clean clothes informed by the staples Babenzien wore as a youth in the ’80s, discarded as a rebellious skater in the ’90s, and rediscovered during a nearly 15-year stint at Supreme in the ’00s.
As much as Babenzien disdains labels, this earlier phase of Noah’s life — alongside factors like Babenzien’s tenure at Supreme and Noah’s skate team — invites a descriptor he loathes: Streetwear. In a clip from The Cutting Room Floor podcast that did the rounds in fashion circles earlier this year, Babenzien minces no words. “Saying Noah was a streetwear brand was absurd,” he said. “That’s the media’s fault. I had no control over what people said.” He speaks so emphatically that host Recho Omondi is visibly taken aback. Commenters overwhelmingly sided against him.
“The world went crazy over that statement. It’s a bit silly,” Babenzien says now. “You have to understand that anything can be misinterpreted. Even if I was referencing streetwear stuff, which I still don’t think I was, can’t I evolve? And I guess for some segment of the population, the answer would be no because people were really upset. I didn’t push back on any of it publicly because people are entitled to their thoughts. It was bothering me, but then I was like, ‘They don’t really know me. It’s okay.’”
Babenzien doesn’t want to talk about labels. He wants to talk about intent. He wants to talk about Noah being a member of 1% for the Planet, about the intertwining of business and consumer, about making things that last. To better understand Noah, Babenzien doesn’t suggest studying its oeuvre. He instead proposes Dirtbag Billionaire, the recent biography of Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard. “We all have to be better at what we produce and how we produce but the consumer also has to be a partner in saying, ‘I’m only going to buy the good stuff,’” he says. “If everyone went vegetarian, McDonald’s would have veggie burgers within a week. They’re not going to shut down operations. They’re going to figure out how to supply the product that the consumer’s demanding.”
This is the two-way street that Noah walks as it attempts to juggle visibility and quality while also speaking to its clientele about the things it’s asking them to buy — or not. It’s a lot of work for Noah and for Babenzien, who detests buzzwords like “sustainability.” In fashion, there is no such thing. But there are clothes that last.
“The real test is if we say, ‘Are we going to look at this in 10 years and still think it’s good?’” Babenzian says. That kind of substance does not come cheap, nor should it. “I think we have gotten a bit lazy in society. We want everything easy all the time. That makes us very weak,” he says. “You shouldn’t have everything all the time. Because if everybody has it all, there’s nothing left.”
That shouldn’t stop curious parties from visiting one of Noah’s stores, even if they have no desire to spend cash. In fact, Babenzien encourages it. Not only are Noah’s flagships one of the only places to experience its clothes — Noah doesn’t wholesale its product — but they demonstrate the greater Noah project that’s been honed over the past decade. Clothing is really just a venue for something more meaningful.
“If you just came to the store and bought something and that’s all that happened, I’d be wildly disappointed. If it was just like, ‘Shirt, money, done,’ that would be terrible,” he says. “You should be living. You should be having a conversation, experiencing something that you didn’t even know you were going to experience. That’s how you live. It’s not just, like, robotic exchange of things. That’s not a life.”
