In the first episode of FX’s hit food service drama The Bear (streaming on Hulu), series chef Carmy trades a rare pair of 1944 jeans for a piece of roast beef at his meat supplier. The scene establishes Carmy as a menswear freak at it’s best, the guy who—the hell with simmering pots—would dare to wear a $95 white T-shirt in the kitchen.
As it turns out, the $95 white T-shirt originally came from a store in San Francisco.
Self Edge, a menswear boutique founded in 2006 by Kiya and Demitra Babzani on Valencia Street, gets many calls from Hollywood costume designers. But due to the transient nature of working movie titles and the fact that much of Self Edge’s inventory lacks discernible branding, the store rarely knows when jeans or a shirt will end up on screen. That changed with The Bear.
Internet experts on men’s fashion have found that the shirt from the German brand Merz b. was produced. swans, and there was a flood of stories about the tee. When Babzani saw an Esquire article about the show’s costume designer, Cristina Spiridakis, he searched his email inbox and found his correspondence with Spiridakis. He had, in fact, sold her the shirt in question, as well as some jeans, chinos and another slightly cheaper t-shirt ($95 a pair) by Japanese manufacturer Whitesville, which also appears on the show.
The store design of Self Edge’s San Francisco retail store as it moved to a new location on Valencia Street in 2019.
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“We’re one of the few stores in North America that carry these shirts. Outside of Japan, the Whitesville models are probably only available at three retailers in the world that carry them,” Babzani told SFGATE of Paris Fashion Week over the phone.
As the show became a smash hit, so did the style, and customers flocked to Self Edge’s online store and five retail locations. When customers in the Cabo, Mexico store started asking about it, Babzani knew it was a real phenomenon.
“The t-shirt thing was like the perfect storm of the simplest possible product that can go viral,” Babzani said. “It’s not even a pair of jeans. A pair of jeans can be expensive, but for something that’s gone viral, $95 isn’t a huge hurdle for people used to wearing high-end menswear. It is a pocketless, unbranded and graphic-free white t-shirt. It’s like almost anyone can wear this.”
Babzani declined to say how many shirts the company has sold, but said it was an “embarrassing” number. Halloween triggered a lot of sales and Christmas was even more intense.
“As Christmas rolled around, the number of women who came forward and bought these for their husbands was something I’d never seen before,” he said. The show’s second-season premiere last week prompted another order rush, compounded by the fact that by the start of summer, t-shirt sales typically quadruple (Self Edge’s online store sells a shocking 150 types of blanks -T shirts).
Actor Jeremy Allen White plays Carmen “Carmy” Berzatto in the hit FX series The Bear.
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Although many scoff at the price, Babzani explained that there are many reasons for the price. The shirts are made from 100% organic cotton from Greece, which is completely free of chemical treatments. The loopwheel process used in production is the slowest way to make this style of shirt. Merz née Schwanen owns its own factory and pays workers well above the subsistence level, and all packaging is recycled.
“What people overlook is that it costs a lot to make a t-shirt at this level, where everyone is paid fairly and the materials used are super eco-friendly — and not eco-friendly in the greenwashing sense,” Babzani said.
Price aside, there’s still the question of whether a chef would actually wear such an expensive garment in the kitchen, where it inevitably stains like a dishcloth. But according to Babzani, some of his best customers are service workers (and considering this particular t-shirt is white with no logo, a squirt of bleach could do wonders).
Season 2 of the hit FX series The Bear has just premiered.
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“One of the largest market segments that we sell to from our US locations is people who work in the restaurant industry and baristas,” Babzani said. “Some of our customers are interested in what we sell because it ages over time.” He cited a recent example of a barista who bought a $300 chambray shirt from Self Edge and used it as workwear for four months wore until it showed permanent battle scars from espresso grounds.
While the show’s viral sales surge was noticeable, it wasn’t exactly a groundbreaking event for the company (although it’s having trouble keeping the shirt in stock and running out of large pieces). However, “The Bear” has sparked endless debates at the Slack company, with observant salespeople spotting tiny details in the show’s promotional photos, such as that the t-shirt was cut slightly shorter, or that Thom Browne was the designer behind the Apron worn by Ayo Edebiri’s sous chef character. And for Halloween last year, the entire staff at the Los Angeles store dressed up as Carmy and even got temporary tattoos. They’ve also put together a collection of pretty solid memes.
Babzani himself is simply delighted to have menswear take center stage in a show highlighting the lifestyles of some of his most loyal customers in the restaurant industry.
“It’s kind of cool to see someone on a show that everyone loves and that’s about a genre that television hasn’t fully explored.”
