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To many, Jordanluca — the London label founded by Brit Jordan Bowen and Italian Luca Marchetto — represents the future of menswear. The brand, founded in 2018, has honed its subversive craft to portray fetishised hypermasculinity and blended kink with nuance — evidenced in its Lonsdale collaboration and with its T-shirts that map out the cruising spots of London. On the runway, it fuses sharp tailoring with a naughty, moody, punk-rock aesthetic, leading the label to become a must-watch in Milan, where it will host its fifth show in the city this week.
“It’s a Jordanluca takeover of Milan,” says Bowen, speaking about the brand’s upcoming Autumn/Winter 2024 show on Saturday, from its North London studio. A certain lore has built up around the brand’s runway outings. Memorable moments from past shows include horse hair coats shaved with tribal tattoo etchings, an SS24 runway appearance by musician Tommy Cash and after-party raves. “I like the idea that it feels more renegade. We shake things up. But the great thing is that this feels well received — we’re not doing it to an empty room.”
This season, the brand is going into Milan Fashion Week with a sharper business plan in place. Ambitions for growth include expanding to new territories and building its direct-to-consumer (DTC) business. The founders hired its first managing director, Radovan Biberovic, who joined from brand accelerator Tomorrow, in October. Sales grew 15 per cent from 2022 to 2023, crossing £400,000. It’s also attracted the attention of global buyers: the brand can be found at Machine-A, Farfetch, Modesens, Slam Jam and more. It’s now a top seller at Machine-A, says founder and buying director Stavros Karelis. “Its statement elongated bell bottom trousers, as well as its strong tailoring propositions, has placed it on the top of the customer demand. I believe that the brand is going to be extremely popular in the coming seasons, establishing it as one of the key fashion players on an international level.”
Biberovic sees this as Jordanluca “arriving at the right place in terms of brand positioning, revenue, global reach and customers”, while allowing the creative duo to play into its mantra: “New clothes for new people.” For Bowen, this means that “over the next few years [there will be] more segmentation, more growth, more exploration with womenswear, which will be seen in the AW24 show. It’s quite vague from my side, but I know where I am going, I am going to keep doing what I am doing, and Luca and I will continue to do what we do together.”
Going to Milan was “the best choice we’ve made in terms of business, growth and everything we could have possibly done”, says Marchetto. “We [discovered that] we have a fanbase outside of London — there is a scene and a gap in Milan,” Marchetto says. “We bring a Londonness to Milan, which has been missing. We’re a community base, a movement.”
Balancing buzz and business
Despite its inimitable identity and brand DNA — which the duo feels “has never been stronger” in the upcoming collection — Jordanluca’s success cannot be solely measured on popularity. With the newly appointed Biberovic the founders are keen to convert buzz into scaling revenues.
“We got to the point where we might have been spreading ourselves too thin, almost in danger of starting to dilute ourselves and our message. It was really important to pull back and push in other ways,” says Bowen. “This works for the show as well. We cut back some of the things that are dead wood to focus on others and let them speak.” For Bowen, “this philosophy permeates across everything — the team, the collection, the colours.” His creative process is cathartic, and “from a business perspective, it’s been a real eye-opener to look hard at the things that will or won’t take us forward.”
As a result, AW24 will be retrospective and simultaneously fresh, referencing the brand’s SS22 “Scrap Yard” show (as it has done each season since) with a bigger focus on high-end design and commerciality.
Biberovic is here to make sense of it all, and has already reined in spending while ramping up potential operational efficiencies. He is also keen to expand Jordanluca in territories like APAC, the US, India and the Middle East, but recognises the challenges ahead. “It’s very difficult to encourage new retail partners in those territories when the situation is out of our hands (referencing the current economic crisis). We have, therefore, strategically pushed DTC e-commerce so we can capitalise on our offering and maximise that channel for our business,” says Biberovic.
E-commerce allows Jordanluca to create a dialogue between itself and its consumer. Marchetto acknowledges that “the pieces that the shops buy and offer are quite commercial”, but with a growing team and a recently founded board of governance, the brand is ready to mature and build out its DTC customer base. That hasn’t been easy, especially when shipping internationally. Marchetto says at one point, approximately 70 per cent of the brand’s online sales were returned as customers didn’t want to pay duties. To fix that, the brand invested in dispersing its network of warehouses to make products more accessible and have them shipped sooner.
Selling DTC has also shed light on what’s shifting, helping the brand adapt each season. “I don’t just need to think about the design, but also how we speak to our customer and who is speaking back,” says Bowen. “What is the dialogue? Who am I talking to directly as a brand? We are now developing that dialogue, pushing our e-comm before we launch our next collection.”
While implementing these changes, Biberovic is keen to remain “sympathetic” to the duo’s aspirations and product ideas, in weighing their creative desires with business sense. It’s a balancing act many founders like Marchetto and Bowen, who founded the brand from their kitchen, know all too well. “Coming from a working class background, we have a tendency to sometimes indulge or restrict so much that we suffer,” Bowen explains. “You can end up suffocating certain projects. That was also in danger of happening.” Now, with Biberovic in place, they feel more able to focus on design for AW24 and beyond.
For two young designers, who’ve built a brand on rebellion, maturing is a concern, but it’s a risk they’re willing to take. After sitting down with the merchandising team, taking notes and learning from its own staff and customers, Jordanluca is “building from [the] outside in”. As Bowen concludes, “We are willing to react, respond and learn. We are growing up without losing the flavour.”
This article has been updated to reflect that sales from 2022 to 2023 crossed £400,000, not £200,000 as previously reported. (10/1)
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