You don’t expect utopia from 3055 Wilshire Boulevard, from its 12 stories of beige and brown and tan. You don’t expect utopia from the fourth floor either, home to the law offices of Domingo & Domingo, and of Jacob Borenstein, attorney at law. But utopia—or some version of it, at least, articulated through exactingly designed T-shirts, socks, underwear, and more—is exactly what Scott Sternberg is trying to build here, behind one of those black plastic nameplates that reads: Entireworld Enterprises.
Entireworld, which launched earlier this week, is a clothing line—Sternberg’s first since Band of Outsiders, the beloved brand he built from scratch before leaving, somewhat mysteriously, in 2015. It began, he tells me, before he’d even left Band, with a conviction that no one—himself included—was paying enough attention to the simpler stuff, the building blocks of a wardrobe and of a life. “It started with this very clear idea that I wanted to make socks, underwear, and T-shirts,” he explains. “There was no doubt in my mind that, after spending years tailoring and crafting all these beautiful, expensive clothes that didn't really feel expensive, quite purposely, that I wanted to flip that and focus on what might seem like everyday, banal things, but that I live in.”
He’d spent some time on Teshima and Naoshima, Japanese islands converted into living, breathing museums, down to the Yayoi Kusama polka-dotted pumpkins by the water. He’d been thinking about brands like Patagonia and Marimekko and Apple: companies that created self-contained worlds, like Band did, just on a massive scale. Consequently, he’d been thinking a lot about utopia, he says, or at least the way people in the past used to think about the future: the way, after World War II, “making the world a better place” felt like a concrete possibility, achievable through technological innovation and human kindness, and not just a cynical marketing scheme. Could a clothing line channel that spirit in an authentic-feeling way?
After more than two years of his plugging away on the question, Entireworld is his answer. Above all else, he says, it’s designed to be democratic. That goes for distribution—direct-to-consumer e-commerce, rather than wholesale accounts at Barneys and all the rest—but also for the prices, and the clothes themselves. Gone are Band’s $200-plus, achingly twee, extra-slim-fitting oxford shirts. In their place are baggy hoodies and roomy trousers and boxy T-shirts, all in unexpected colors like red and lavender and goldenrod—and, maybe most unexpectedly, everything in the initial offering retailing for less than a Band button-up. (There’s a women’s line, too, just like at Band.)
This shift is due in part to the way menswear has mutated since Sternberg left Band of Outsiders in 2015, after spending more than a decade dressing regular guys and red carpet celebs in shirts, ties, suits, and inside-out boat shoes. Something shifted even in the brief period Sternberg has been off the scene: In three short years, menswear has seemed to leap at least a couple of generations, to the point where a guy is more likely to shell out for a cool hoodie than a cool dress shirt—and heavy industry forces are engaged in an arms race to give him just that. Sternberg is a hoodie guy now, too, and he’s adjusting. “How do I want to wear a hoodie right now? I want to wear a fucking big hoodie right now!” he says, pawing through the first set of Entireworld clothes to release. “Kind of like nothing that would have been in the Band of Outsiders universe. But at the same time, if I was doing it now,” he adds, a little mischieviously, “it might be.”
We’re sitting in his office, a glassed-off box with a red Craftsman chest for storage, floor-to-ceiling views of the Hollywood Hills, and a bed for his dog, Zod. His six employees (plus a couple of web developers) sit outside, plugging away for the launch. “This looked like a dentist's office from 1982 when I got here,” he says, warmly. “There's nothing chic or insider about this. The café in the lobby: When you order French fries, you see them taking the bag out of the freezer, the crinkle-cut fries, and putting the Lawry's seasoning salt on them before they give them to you.”
It is indeed an unlikely office. But it also fits—the new line is all about finding joy in the basic. His outfit speaks volumes: a far cry from the shrunken shirts and ties of Band, he’s in loose navy trousers (Entireworld prototypes) and a vintage IBM tee advertising the Personal System/2 computer. I get the sense that he wants Entireworld to run in that vein—not churning out vintage IBM tees, but rather as a clothing company that can operate like an IBM, creating systems of dress with taste and flexibility. But his clothing utopianism, he cautions, shouldn’t be mistaken for ignorance. “It's not a Pollyanna optimism,” he says. “It's more pragmatic: Wipe the slate clean, and figure out how to build something people want to live in.”
“Wipe the slate” is an instructive phrase. Because Entireworld, of course, is also the answer to another question: What happened to Scott Sternberg, and to Band of Outsiders? The story, he insists, isn’t all that scandalous—certainly not worthy of the hyperventilation it caused in the fashion press three years ago. And over the course of the day we spend together, five days before he sends his newest stuff out into the world, he explains it all: how Band’s success doomed it to failure, how he coped, where he’s been. And why he’s back now, with a line that seems to have more in common with Everlane than it does with the one that made his name.
Entireworld is the answer to a simpler, possibly more difficult, question, too, that Sternberg, in gold wire-rim glasses and with a splash of gray in his scruff, poses in his office. Zod—an eerily human Brussels Griffon, the dog George Lucas reportedly modeled the Ewoks on—putters around under his desk. “What was so clear starting this brand was: Man, why isn't anybody putting that much love into simple stuff? What happens when you put the love into the simple stuff?”
Sternberg opened Band’s first American store, a large, airy space on Wooster Street in SoHo, in the summer of 2014. And on that very day, Sternberg says, he knew things were heading south. “Really, that day, I had emotionally let go of the brand,” he says. We’re grabbing lunch at Cafe Stella, a haunt in Sternberg’s Silver Lake neighborhood. His neighbor, a stylist, eats next to us with her daughter and mother, a picture of east-side chic the likes of which Sternberg used to gin up for Band.
The end of Sternberg’s version of Band was a car crash in extremely slow motion. “Sales weren't plummeting, ever,” he explains. “Not some horrible season that happened, or some event. We didn't raise enough money, and I didn't have the right people to really initiate a growth plan.” He’s measured—not cagey, just not entirely sure why people are interested.
“There were plenty of opportunities to tell the story” of his exit from Band, he knows, “and that would have gotten some quote-unquote good press or whatever. But it just felt like, well, to what end? What am I promoting here? This seems a little indulgent. It's somewhat banal,” he says. “This is the age-old, you know, creative vision/business vision clashing sort of thing.” The story, of course, is interesting: How does a brand go from fashion-world darling to the edge of bankruptcy? And what does it teach you when you’re ready to make your comeback?
Band of Outsiders launched in 2004, back before boot-cut jeans had ended their reign. The origin story is menswear lore by now: Sternberg, fresh off a gig as a junior agent at CAA, made up a small line of super-skinny, retro-patterned ties. “They were preppy clothes about preppy clothes,” he’d explained on the drive from the studio to lunch. (Appropriately for an environmentally conscious steward of a democratic fashion line, Sternberg drives a black Toyota Prius, though not only for the reason you might imagine: “I'm not a reckless driver, but I do tend to attract accidents,” he noted.)
The line would pick up an account at Barneys and grow to include a full men’s collection (shrunken corduroy suits, baseball jackets, trippy sweaters), two distinct women’s imprints, and a lower-priced collection of polo shirts. Sternberg did it all from the margins, setting up shop in the then fashion backwater of Los Angeles. He was embraced by the industry: He’d throw genuinely novel runway shows, win the approval of editors, win a coveted CFDA award. It had taken him two years of scratching away by himself on it, figuring out how to produce samples of shirts and neckties, and then he started building a team, and then there were runway shows, and surrealist anti–runway show scavenger hunts, and meetings with the biggest names in the industry. “I still can't even explain to people how I ended up doing this for a living,” Sternberg says. “It's weird. It just sort of happened.”
He was early to just about everything. Band’s marketing campaigns were Polaroids Sternberg took of celebrities, some of whom were his friends—cool ones, too, like Jason Schwartzman and Michelle Williams. Again, this was the early aughts. The whole thing felt like Instagram before Instagram—and then Instagram showed up in time to become a natural home for those photos, now featuring up-and-comers like Frank Ocean and Greta Gerwig. He recognized that Los Angeles was a great place to live—the perfect place to be a “creative”—a decade before every last one of your friends did. He collaborated widely and frequently, now a prerequisite for any designer. And he opened up shop right at the moment that men realized they could care about getting dressed. He taught them how in his own way, too: with one overdyed, shrink-to-fit oxford at a time. The vibe was prep unmoored from Waspiness. It was Ram-era Paul McCartney hiding out not on a farm in Scotland but in Silver Lake, wearing that killer sweater vest to Oscars parties by the beach. And while the clothes were expensive, there was something welcoming, even generous, about the whole thing. It was as if Sternberg, so inspired by film, had endeavored to serve as the personal costume designer for every guy who bought his clothes.
He had created an entire universe, one where fashion wasn’t intimidating or scary. And it was working. On the strength of its women’s business, and thanks to a slot as the guest designer at the men’s trade show Pitti Uomo in 2012, Band, still independently owned, had been growing so fast that Sternberg needed to raise money for the first time. He also needed to hire people to help manage that growth.
Things didn’t go as planned. He needed a CEO, or maybe just a couple of operations people, but he says he couldn’t persuade the right fashion-world folks to move out to Los Angeles. The brand was doing a $15 million wholesale business; Sternberg went out and raised $5 million, which he says wasn’t enough to sustain that growth. But by the time he went out to investors a second time, the brand’s business plan was geared toward scaling, not profitability—making it even harder to convince the private-equity folks he met with that things were, you know, actually good. And spending time pitching investors on his own, without that sorely needed CEO by his side, was draining. “Honestly, I was so exhausted going into 2014. So tired. At that point, I had already emotionally started to let go of the brand. I was like, This is not cool. This is not worth it. And we're getting further away from what's important to me, what I want this to be.” So by the time Band opened the store on Wooster, things were far more dire than anyone on the outside might have expected. And, sure, the store was big. “The rent was really good, though!” Sternberg says. This was bigger than a bad lease.
“Literally the day the store opened, the last private-equity firm that we'd been holding out for passed,” he recounts. “This is right before the opening party, and I'm doing all this press, and holding my fucking dog, and posing for pictures and all that stuff. And trying really hard to enjoy some of the moment, because it was beautiful, that store, and my team worked so hard on it.” He got through it. “Five milligrams of Ativan and half a joint, was that party,” he says, laughing.
There was one last-ditch hope: CLCC, a Belgian investment firm that Sternberg had met with early on. They were still interested, so, with Sternberg needing to ship a resort collection and not wanting to stiff his suppliers, they put together a term sheet late in the fall: what a CLCC representative describes as a “convertible loan,” a two-million-dollar investment that would turn into equity for CLCC, with the option to invest a further $10 million in the brand. But then CLCC did further due diligence and added conditions for the remaining investment. “For us to get the remaining $10 million, I would have had to agree to a set of terms that had markedly changed from before the time they signed up,” Sternberg says. Among those terms: Sternberg would have to relinquish his control of the men’s line and design only womenswear. (CLCC also said that Sternberg would still be “responsible for the general brand direction, marketing, and DNA.”) Sternberg wasn’t inclined to go along—and anyway, felt that things were getting out of hand. “By that point,” he says, “it was all so, like, What the fuck.”
He’s not bitter. “I want to make this clear, and I hope you print this,” he says firmly. “These are investors who are not stupid people, who were perfectly well within their rights to do what they did... The chemistry wasn't there with them, but I think that it's a hard business. There's just no shame in any of it.” He knows he made mistakes. “Just practically, we shouldn't have made shoes,” he says. “That was fucking stupid. Shoes take up a lot of room in a warehouse. They're very heavy to ship. They're expensive as fuck: molds, development costs, out of control.”
But the irony—that the investors wanted a company he had built, that was valuable expressly because he built it, but on the condition that his role be radically reduced—was not lost on him. And then it happened: He left, in debt to CLCC, he says, and the brand was turned over to three European designers, who in turn yielded it to yet another designer. It lives on today. “It was pretty gnarly,” Sternberg says of the very last days. “So I wasn't going to, like, Tulum and living it up.” But a couple of consulting gigs fell into his lap, so he decided to take a break for the first time in more than a decade.
There was one more lesson, too, once he’d had time to process it all. The New York store was great, but it might have been too big. Too much. “We should have opened a small hole-in-the-wall store three years before,” he says. “Just thrown clothes in there and sold the shit out of them. I wanted it to be some conceptual paradise. And that was the mistake.” He wanted, it sounds to me, to build a utopia, only to find that pie-in-the-sky thinking got in the way of running a growing, changing, suddenly struggling clothing brand.
He doesn’t plan on repeating those mistakes—in fact, an observer might conclude that everything about the new line is precision-built to avoid him finding himself in that situation again. “That's very much where this idea of experimentation and iteration for Entireworld comes from,” he says. “I just want to try things.”
The funny thing about the end of his time with Band of Outsiders, Sternberg says, is that he’d been thinking about it for a while. “I don't know if the market conditions ever would have truly allowed Band of Outsiders, at that price point, to just scale. I know the brand ethos was scalable, but I don't know if that market position was scalable,” he says. “There's a part of me that's quite entrepreneurial, and wants to hit it out of the park and make something big, something large, of breadth. And I think the mistake with Band was, that's not what that brand was. That was a tiny brand.”
And while Band’s demise might have been avoided—while, in some strange way, it has been avoided, still owned by CLCC and pushing out menswear inspired by “South California” and “pop art,” among other things—Sternberg’s exit isn’t an isolated incident. It’s harder than ever to sit in the middle in fashion—to run an independent brand, to sell mostly to wholesale retailers, to stage runway shows and maintain an Instagram presence and dress celebrities for the red carpet, without the backing of a major conglomerate. Or, at least, without scaling all the way back: going directly to the consumer and cutting out as much of that overhead as possible.
Which is where Entireworld comes in. To this point, the direct-to-consumer business has largely been a Silicon Valley–style play: a solution-oriented approach to clothing, the kind practiced by venture capital–backed brands like Harry’s and Allbirds and Outdoor Voices. But “I don't know how real all those problems are that are being solved,” Sternberg explains. And he’s not sure how well you can design a T-shirt by algorithm, anyway—or why you’d ever want to.
He’s excited to have the data that his new business model will generate, but he’s not going overboard. “The problem with data is you're looking at the past. It leaves no room for ingenuity and inspiration. So all these companies that think they're going to completely survive on that, unless they're fast fashion and they're knocking everybody off, it just seems like this horrible downward shame spiral that you're never going to get out of,” he says. He’s animated. “You're just going to know what people wanted. When I got into this business, what appealed to me was this idea of, you can kind of convince people what they want.”
Sternberg has been plotting this for a while, has had time to analyze his successes, his failures, his desires. “When I was at Band, I had spoken, as a lot of designers do, to Target about doing one of those collabs.” He did one, eventually: Christmas cookie cutters. But at the time, he says, “I was pitching some other concepts to them, one of which was kind of the beginning of the thread of what Entireworld is. And then, as I was wrapping up Band, I engaged them and a few other people about the concept: organizations who could support something that was at a democratic pricepoint. Something that felt incredibly modern, in terms of how it's produced and distributed. And something really kind of pure and essential in terms of the product range.” But Sternberg likes to go it alone (he says he turned down post-Band overtures to design for other brands, which he doesn’t name), so after he left Band, he tabled the idea. He took a couple of consulting gigs, visited those art islands in Japan.
All the while, he was collecting references: screenshots, photographs, blueprints, film clips. They all circled that utopian ideal: the iconic modernist city of Brasília; the Case Study House program; Bob Marley in a perfect denim shirt; Miles Davis in khakis; the “I’d like to buy the world a Coke” ad. He wanted to channel all of that into clothes. So he hit the road, found investors, and hired back six former Band employees to help him make them.
He’s careful to stress that this isn’t a bargain play. It’s of a piece with that bygone midcentury ethic: quality for the masses. “I want to reach a much larger swath of consumers, but I want to make as good or better a shirt as I did at Band,” he says. That’s just a line you’re giving me, I say. It seems too good to be true. “Dude, no!” he yelps. “It's not just a line I'm giving you.” And then he dives into the math that makes it possible. “There's a multiple from wholesale to retail of 2.4 to 2.6—so if you just take a $250 Band of Outsiders shirt, and you take away the wholesale-to-retail margin, that's a hundred-dollar shirt. So I'm not doing much!” He’s being careful about what he makes, too. “We used to put out over a hundred SKUs of shirts a year. Different plaids and checks and stripes and all this shit. [With Entireworld,] we have, you know, seven that we're launching with. And they're exactly what they need to be and should be. The consumer doesn't want any more choice than that.”
Some consumers, maybe. But the world of menswear, I point out, is a far cry from what it was in the Band days. Sternberg may have opened a generation’s eyes to clothes, but most of them have traded in those oxfords for a graphic tee. He thinks he can win them back. “For a Supreme guy,” he explains, “that guy still needs a white tee, and he needs a pair of boxers, and some socks, and a super comfortable hoodie.”
Plus, Sternberg feels like the product itself will convince people. The big Craftsman in his office, or his classic Swingline stapler, or the calculator he encourages me to clack on: these are design objects with soul, with a point of view. “There's choices being made there,” he says of the Craftsman drawer. That’s what he likes and wants to make himself. “I'm just so attracted to design that is not minimal but is perennial. That is not nostalgic but has an emotion to it.”
The clothes he shows me in his studio meet that bar. T-shirts are cut just so—not generic slim but a considered, right-now boxy slouch. When I see and heft the black fisherman’s sweater, I think hard about ending the interview and walking out with my bounty. Some underwear is ribbed and of the tighty-whitie persuasion; another pair splits the difference between boxers and briefs (but isn't a boxer-brief). Both types come in packaging that reads, “The Entireworld is in your pants.” And the oxfords—in white, navy, forest green, and light purple, with same-color matte buttons—produce the same lust that Band’s did, even if they’re not cut impossibly small. Those button-ups cost $95; that sweater, $165; the underwear, $20 a pop. Everything gets minimal Entireworld branding. And in a nod to Sternberg’s utopian leanings, there’s a taxonomy to it all. The first denim shirt he’ll produce is called “Shirt, Men’s, Type A, Version 4”; drawing on sales data or consumer feedback or just his own design interests, he’ll produce future editions with corresponding names. It’s a little military, and a little Edenic: Once you’ve got Types A, B, and C, you’ve got all the shirts you need.
Entireworld will drop new products, Supreme-style, every month. Sternberg’s not quite sure how it will go. It’s not the painfully curated world that Band of Outsiders created—which, I realize with a jolt, is the whole point. “We have a bank of a million ideas, but we really only have stuff created for the next three or four weeks,” he says. “And we're not only completely comfortable with that, we know that that's the only way to do this. Because otherwise, everything's going to feel prescribed and overly planned—and that's not how to connect to people right now.”
On our way back from lunch, I tell Scott that I e-mailed Band once, asking to borrow a dinner jacket when I was a high school senior looking for something to wear to prom. But my e-mail, I realize, wasn’t about the jacket. It was about desire, and belonging: I wanted to live in a world where someone might plausibly wear one—where everyone had reason to wear dinner jackets and shrunken oxfords and deck shoes and bow ties. I wanted to live in Scott Sternberg’s world, if only for a night.
I don’t think I was alone—Band of Outsiders inspired that complex, out-of-time longing in a lot of people, no small number of whom were famous. And when Sternberg’s Band shut its doors, it wasn’t just the end of a designer’s run at a well-loved brand. Sternberg took with him an entire aesthetic universe—one that, thanks to the ebbs and flows of fashion, seemed unlikely to crop back up again. From this angle, Entireworld looks like a savvy business play—but also like a bigger, bolder, somehow more ambitious attempt to rebuild that lost Band utopia. It’s a brand, but it’s also an ecosystem, a set of codes, a taxonomy: a delivery system to give that Band feeling of belonging to anyone who wants it. Clothes for—yeah, for the entire world.
