Indiana Street in Houston, Texas, is an unspectacular stretch of road. Tucked into a quiet pocket of the artsy Montrose neighborhood, it’s a two-way road of worse-for-wear asphalt lined with red brick houses, wood-sided bungalows, and apartment complexes, capped off with a Chipotle and an auto repair shop.
There is one anomaly: A black, three-story cuboid with huge street-level windows, a glossy tiled exterior, and “GLASS” stamped above the door. This is the home of the craft-obsessed fashion label Glass Cypress. Marble floors, dark walls, and enormous paintings set the scene for appointment-only shopping in the front rooms. Walk past those and you’ve found your way to Neo, a restaurant serving an 18-20 course omakase menu in a converted kitchen space (a separate venture also owned by Glass Cypress’ founders).
If its headquarters stick out like a sore thumb, Glass Cypress’ artisanal, street-casual clothing is similarly distinct from mass-produced “luxury” fashion. Its sibling founders, Saber and Samee Ahmed, were raised in Houston by Bangladeshi parents and incorporate elements of South Asian craftsmanship in their work.
One of these is Nakshi Kantha — a centuries-old hand-embroidery technique that Saber Ahmed compares to Japanese boro stitching. A team of 150 women at a studio in rural Bangladesh carefully creates the abstract figures on the back of a generously cut, washed-out black denim jacket (priced at $420), or hand-applies Australian pearls to a distressed and overwashed baseball cap ($315). “There’s a deep luxury heritage in Bangladesh that most people don’t know about,” Ahmed tells me from his Houston home. “We wanted to bring that out.”
The brand has “something special — something the fashion industry is lacking,” says Berlin-based creative consultant Lawrence Von Mohl. “When you feel a Glass Cypress fabric, you don’t want to take it off. The clothes are made by humans, and you can feel that. It’s like when you go home to your mother and have a homemade dish — it’s cooked with love.”
Von Mohl was first introduced to the brand in 2019, three years after it was founded and around the same time it opened its store. “They were still very green. They were screen-printing T-shirts, and I came from a very different part of the industry,” he says. As a result, he declined their invitation to work together.
When Mac Hadar, the buyer for LA-based boutique H. Lorenzo, reintroduced him to the label two years later, things were very different. (In 2021, Hadar was the first person to agree to stock Glass Cypress. He sold out in about two months.) In place of screen-printed tees was an artful selection of hand-embroidered, naturally dyed clothes. “I thought, ‘This has legs now.’ It was a much more artisanal product,” Von Mohl says. He took the team to Paris to present their collection to buyers.
Von Mohl woke up to Glass Cypress’ charm around the same time as Bad Bunny, Drake, Justin Bieber, and G-Dragon — only a handful of the brand’s celebrity admirers. This wasn’t the work of a savvy stylist, though. The brand very rarely sends out free product. “We had this moment where every day it was like a new celebrity, or athlete, or actor was wearing Glass Cypress,” Ahmed says. By now, even renowned couturier John Galliano has been seen in their clothes. In late April, the brand made its New York City debut with a pop-up and capsule collection with Scarr’s Pizza.
The key difference between Von Mohl discovering and then re-discovering Glass Cypress was that, in the intervening years, the brand’s founders connected with their Bangladeshi roots. “We’d worked with some factories in Italy, wasted a bunch of money but learned a lot,” Ahmed says. ”Then my mom started showing us the capabilities of Bangladeshi craft — there’s no way we could make this stuff in the US or Italy.”
More elaborate Glass Cypress designs can take up to three days of constant work for one person to complete. “It’s worth it because of what we get out of it,” Ahmed says. “There’s no way to perform a stitch exactly the same every time. Those human errors create something.” They help the wearer “feel a deeper energy.”
This is slow fashion, where everything is done by hand, including the embroidery, the washing, the manual distressing. There are parallels here to other crafty independent labels producing in neighboring India, both in terms of the careful production and the aesthetic. You’ll find hints of Story mfg.’s neo-hippy-isms in the block dye tees, for instance, and loose embroidered shirting not dissimilar to that of Kartik Research. But while Glass Cypress is part of a new wave of designers reconceptualizing South Asian craft, its ironic perspective and punk-style distressing keeps its identity distinct. Plus, that detailed Nakshi Kantha embroidery is only found in the Bengal region.
That’s where the humanitarian side of Glass Cypress’ clothes comes into play. “Bangladesh is not like India; it’s grungy,” Ahmed says. “We have to go back every year to feel the humility. It’s grounding. It puts a feeling in you like, man, this isn’t just about the clothes.” At one point in our chat, I even dare to call the brand’s work serious. But Ahmed shakes his head. “The approach is serious, but the philosophy itself? It's really about saying nothing. Pure expression, things should be whimsical, they should be effortless. We’re real punk because we’ve got nothing to say. If you’re saying something, I’m gonna cuss you out.”
That is the tightrope that Glassy Cypress walks. The brand isn’t joking about the art of traditional embroidery, but its provocative statement tees sure seem like they are. “Adderall” is carefully hand-embellished across one boxy-fitting number, for instance, while another 100% cotton T-shirt has its dusty pink fabric embroidered with “stop thinking you narcissist.”
Really, that’s about as close as you’re going to get to a Glass Cypress mission statement. Its clothing may be gorgeous — exquisite, even — and priced to match. But don’t you dare think too hard about it.
