Lots has been written about Södermalm. Stockholm’s Williamsburg is known for its hipsters, bars, and vintage shops. Skateboarding and skate culture weren’t really part of that conversation until a few months ago when Eva Hardware opened with a mission “to be a part of saving Swedish skateboarding.” Per Larsson Persson, Eva Hardware’s founder, has been skating for decades. “My grandma gave me my first skateboard, and after that I was hooked,” he says. “It was perfectly dangerous and strange.” Not to mention stylish. With the launch of the brand’s first jeans, the Eva byxa, Eva Hardware just might become a stealth fashion source—even if that isn’t Persson’s intention.
Largely spurred by the Olympics (which now includes skateboarding), fashion has embraced the idea of sports this year, borrowing the aesthetics of training gear, if not its functionality and performance aspects. Eva comes at denim from the opposite perspective. Persson speaks “skateboarding fluidly” because he’s been at it for a long time. Eva has the added benefit of having a team to test the denim, which they did for more than a year before they went into production.
Persson says of the Eva byxa, “They are made of 13.5 ounces of yummy denim. They are straight cut, slightly tapered, and we made the legs a bit shorter than normal jeans because the ends are the first thing that gets torn when you skate. So far that’s been very appreciated.” They also have an innovative sizing system, based on how skaters actually shop for pants, and a great pocket detail that becomes more evident with use, much like how denim gets better with age.
The “extra spicy thing about this,” he says, “is that we created a new size, an extra medium that’s in between medium and large. A lot of skaters tend to weigh in between medium and large. And the kids always ask, ‘What’s the smallest size you’ve got?’ so we call the sizes Smallest to Biggest, basically XS to XL.”
As for that secret pocket detail, it’s an embroidered logo on the inside that makes the fabric above it protrude. “The logo gets more visible the more you wear the jeans. The more you flow, the more it shows. The more you wear, the more it appears.”
Achieving this visibility is a very different kind of activation than a blockchain tag and arguably more exciting because it has to do with lived (often shared) experiences, time, and action. You have to put in the work, and that has a certain appeal in an age of instant gratification and flattened global culture.