Introducing the Mr Justin Bieber-endorsed, minimalist streetwear brand that takes its style cues from the Old West.

At first, Ms Holly Jovenall’s story sounds like the beginning of an early 2000s Americana movie. Growing up on a ranch a couple of hours outside Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she relocated to the Golden State in search of, well, something. “I moved to California with $2,000 and two suitcases. I thought I was going to be a dancer, and I moved to LA because I couldn’t afford New York.”

It’s a good job she made the leap. Fast forward a few years, and Ms Jovenall is something of a self-styled star of the West Coast, and the mastermind behind one of the most exciting brands to emerge from the LA fashion scene. Her label, BILLY, has been worn by a star-studded roster of musicians and celebrities (everyone from Wiz Khalifa to Ms Kim Kardashian West are fans), and specialises in creating clothes that sit on a satisfying axis between workwear and streetwear and has somehow managed to marry these two seemingly-opposite styles into something really quite special.

Workwear jackets and sweatpants might be everywhere in LA (and the rest of the world), but BILLY represents expertise in the craft of contemporary clothing rather than jumping on a bandwagon. This is perhaps because Ms Jovenall is a total vintage nerd, but despite this she doesn’t seem stuck in the past: “I love vintage, I’m always looking how to move everything forward. I always start with a base fabric, but there’s always a process with every fabric that I do, whether it’s me grinding or hand-destructing it myself or at the wash house playing with a really heavy-duty Japanese nylon,” she explains. Evading the crude logo- and slogan-heavy barrages that streetwear all too often falls victim to, the clothes are stealthily high-end without shouting about it: “I want everything to have a feeling to it, without expressing through a bunch of graphics and that kind of thing.”

BILLY the brand takes its name from Billy the man, Ms Jovenall’s father. An old-school American cowboy, Billy runs the family ranch, raises horses, and gave Ms Jovenall the essence of a character from which to build her brand. “I take that character into my mind and exaggerate it or simplify it or twist it a little bit and that’s how I begin to build out the story through the collection that I present.”

It’s easy to talk up BILLY on the basis of its celebrity co-signs – there are many, from Mr Justin Bieber to G-Eazy – but the brand has more to it than that. The quality of its fabrics and the way Ms Jovenall manipulates and enhances them is a process that often takes a lot of time and care to produce. The matching denim jacket and trousers, for instance, are crafted from a Japanese tiger-stripe camo. “It starts off as a very heavy grey camo and so with the washing process you get this really great almost worn colour,” explains Ms Jovenall. “It’s not thick and it doesn’t feel like a new fabric at all. It has that worn in quality. I wanted to put 20 years’ [worth of] wear into this really expensive, beautiful fabric and bring that out in the tonality of the blues.” The jacket has a boxy fit, but the fabric is soft enough that it still has a drape to it, while the military-inspired trousers are cropped slightly to give a contemporary silhouette that still feels rooted in traditional workwear styles.

Perhaps the best thing about BILLY, though, is that Ms Jovenall has farmed her countryside background into her city-dwelling present in a way that feels, well, rather organic. “Yes, the BILLY character is inspired by the countryside and the steel mills and working men, but also he [also] exists in a major city like New York or LA,” she says. “That’s what makes him unique.”

Shop the BILLY collection here

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