In the spring of 2024, Lindsey Hansen, owner of the Future Past second-hand clothing store in the Inner Richmond, sat down at her work table and restored a pair of threadbare vintage Levi 501 jeans using scraps of denim from around her shop.
The repair took about two days, Hansen said. She added patches from the thigh to the knee of each pant leg, and hand-sewed them on using a sashiko cross-stitch — a traditional Japanese denim repair technique.
Over a year later, she saw a corporate fashion giant selling what she said was her exact design.
She had posted photos of the restored Levis on social media back in March 2024, and put the jeans up for sale. They sold two days later for $288.
Business at Hansen’s small Clement Street shop carried on as usual until a week ago, when a coworker sent her a link to a $180 pair of jeans for sale on Banana Republic’s website: the “Mid-Rise Barrel Patchwork Ankle Jean.”
It was an “exact replica of the jeans that I had worked on,” Hansen said. She pulled up photos of her restored Levi’s and the Banana Republic jeans, which had four patches and cross-stitching in the same locations as Hansen’s, on both the front and back sides of the jeans.
“Side by side it was undeniable,” Hansen explained, pointing to the photos.
Hansen thinks the Banana Republic jeans first went on sale a couple months ago, when a “behind the design” promotional video was posted on the company’s social media.
“I really strive to create washes for us that feel naturally worn in, that feel like a vintage find from a flea market,” says an unidentified voice over the promotional video.
As of Oct. 30, the Banana Republic product page had been taken down. The video, as well as a comment from someone who claimed to be the designer that said they were “paying homage to a centuries old Japanese tradition,” has since been deleted.
There appears to be nothing, legally, to stop Banana Republic from doing this. While labels can be protected by a copyright, fashion designs cannot be.
Absent legal options, Hansen took to the internet for justice, creating a video describing what she called a “blatant copy” of her design, and posting it to social media. Public outrage ensued.
“We take their concerns seriously as a brand that supports the local creative community,” said a spokesperson for Gap, the company that owns Banana Republic. “Our team is looking into this matter and will handle as appropriate.”
Hansen has had The Future Past for the last six years. Before that, she spent her entire career working in the fashion industry. Hansen said she wasn’t unfamiliar with smaller businesses’ designs being “stolen” by big companies. But this time, she said, it was “just too close.”
Hansen found the idea of a company “creating this new garment that doesn’t need repair, but looks like it has been repaired” particularly harmful. Her business, she said, was about recycling and reducing waste. Banana Republic, she said, was “making it a trend.”
“It’s not a trend,” Hansen continued. “We need to repair our clothes because we just can’t keep consuming clothes the way that we are.”
Jeans are a particularly loaded subject in a city where the mayor is the heir to the Levi Strauss fortune.
Daniel Lurie — of both mayoral and denim dynasty fame — posted an Instagram video after running into Gap’s creative director, Zac Posen, in North Beach two weeks ago (Banana Republic is owned by Gap, Inc.). Posen said he’d moved to San Francisco a year and a half earlier.
“A place that is happening and is in transformation; that’s the place to be if you’re an artist, if you’re a creator, an entrepreneur, a business person,” said Posen, describing his appreciation for his new city of residence.
“You can recreate a vintage item and it’s a reproduction,” said Krystyl Baldwin, a San Francisco vintage collector. “But to recreate a vintage item that’s been up-cycled as someone else’s art is just dirty business.”