ON SWEATSHIRTS

I saw a dear friend yesterday. She’d left LA to see family on the East Coast, and a few weeks had turned into months. She’s a new mother. It’s a sweet and complicated time, becoming someone’s mother while still sometimes wanting your own close by.

She’s the kind of friend you don’t realize how much you’ve needed to see until you’re sitting across from her. The one you can say anything to. We caught up, I held her baby, and two and a half hours went very quickly.

Our conversations usually find their way to clothes. Different generations, similar points of view, different ways of wearing the same things. We stopped counting the pieces we both own a long time ago. At this point it’s something of a mutual collection.

She’d gone to Maxfield between breakfast and meetings, just to “visit all the things.” The Celine luggage bag, the new low-rise Khaite jeans, the Celine trophy belt. Things we admire online and occasionally want to see in person.

Of all the things, from all the designers, she left with a simple heather grey sweatshirt.

Perfect.

No shoulder seam, a tight cuff, slightly cropped. No logo. She didn’t try it on for me, but knowing her, I could picture it. The kind of grey sweatshirt that catches your eye at the airport. First you notice the girl, the way her jeans hang, how casually she puts classic things together. Then you wonder where she found that sweatshirt.

Every night when I get home, I change into a sweatshirt. It’s probably what I feel most myself in. I have a collection my husband rolls his eyes at, so I know a thing or two about them.

My favorite is a dark green oversized hoodie I bought as a sample in 2020, when two friends and I were working on a surfwear brand. I ordered it from Stateline in New York. One hundred percent cotton, twelve-ounce fleece, made in the USA. Heavy, with a big lined hood. I drown in it. It feels like a hug.

I remember bringing it to a meeting. By meeting, I mean the back deck of a friend’s beach shack after an early morning surf. Three founders in flip-flops, with humble ideas about making things for the life we liked living.

Mostly surfing, but also biking, training, getting into the canyons. Getting outside and getting involved, every day. We felt most alive out in the sun, doing something with other people, and we knew there were others who felt the same.

The world was shut down. Time felt suspended, but we were out in the water together. It was different, and I liked it.

That morning was warm, though we were still a little chilled from the ocean. The dark green sweatshirt, a size large, went around the deck. Everyone tried it on. Somehow it looked perfect on all of us.

Afterward, I packed up, separating the yes samples from the ones that weren’t quite right. I remember folding that sweatshirt and thinking this was the beginning of something.

I like beginnings. I am good at beginnings.

The brand dissolved when the world turned back on. Our priorities shifted. There was less time to spend together, less time for the project. We shut it down in 2021.

The sweatshirt had hung at the office with the other samples while we waited for production. It finally came home with me one chilly evening when I needed something to put on.

Since then, there have been naps after surfing, Sunday football, ski trips, morning walks with the dog. It isn’t as dark green as it used to be. There’s a tiny stain on the left cuff.

Sometimes I think about that morning on the deck. Most of the time I don’t think about any of those things at all. It’s just comfortable.

A sweatshirt is the least precious thing you own. Quietly shapeless, seemingly replaceable, worn without much consideration. And somehow it becomes the one you’d grab in a fire.

I think about this as a designer. You cannot manufacture a most-loved thing. What you can do is build something capable of becoming one: a weight that survives being worn constantly, a shape that improves as it goes soft, seams that hold through a hundred washes.

Everything after that is out of my hands. Someone still has to wear it that long.

After this unusually warm California summer, mine has drifted to the bottom of the stack. At the first hint of fall, I’ll pull it out.

I can’t wait to put it on.

xx lp

Lisa Popp is the founder and creative director of Stillwater, a small-batch women's apparel brand she started in Los Angeles in 2014. Everything is designed in her Los Angeles studio and made locally. Runs Deep is her journal.