Carter Young Altman, the London-based, Michigan-born designer behind Carter Young, doesn’t have an issue calling his clothing ‘Americana’. But the slices of the country that inform his five-year-old brand aren’t the sun-bathed boardwalks of Los Angeles, the thrumming streets of downtown New York City, or the dirt-kicking rodeos of the South.
Instead, Altman focuses his attention on the Midwest, specifically the strip malls, high school football stadiums, and industrial suburbs of his teenage years in Detroit—a hodgepodge of references that remain endlessly inspiring to him, even as the city cedes real estate to its glittering counterparts on the American style map.
In the early 2000s, Altman said on a call this week, brands like Abercrombie & Fitch harnessed a version of the corn-fed Midwestern aesthetic to wildly popular effect. (Sofia Coppola’s adaptation of The Virgin Suicides was set two towns over from where he grew up.) “Today,” Altman says, “the cultural lineage of the flyover states is an underrepresented aspect of Americana.”
By remixing the stylistic hallmarks of his youth—artful football jerseys, relaxed tailoring, pared-down western shirts—his eponymous label looks to correct the record. As of this spring, Altman has a significantly bigger platform to do it: his menswear is now available on SSENSE, a huge cosign for an independent designer of his caliber.
As an introduction to his brand, Altman singles out three styles in particular. The first is an exclusive-to-SSENSE colorway of the Newman, an exactingly-cut riff on a fireman’s jacket that’s fast becoming a brand signature, this time rendered in a dusty-khaki cotton twill. He’s also proud of the fabric used to craft his denim shirts—replete with press-stud buttons and western-inspired yokes on the front and back—and his slouchy-but-not-sloppy Big Ben jeans, available this season in black and a buttery shade of yellow. (Both also boast accompanying jackets.)
Altman isn’t the first expat to mine the Midwest for inspiration. But his visceral connection to the “haunted feeling” of the heartland lends his work an authenticity even veteran designers struggle to approximate. In his eyes, the flyover states are just fly, period—and it’s about time menswear did them justice.