Based in Minneapolis, Minnesota, Bruised Orange is an artistic project focused on creating 1-of-1 denim garments as well as custom collaborative garments with personal details, creative construction, and high quality selvedge denim. Each piece is made in the same small room: designed, cut, and sewn from start to finish by myself, Ben. 

Bruised Orange is focused on the small details, slow and intentional production made one at a time by commission. Pattern details like pockets, stitched details, and patches are improvised or changed from each garment to give each piece a unique identity. Rather than treating the design process as a linear movement from beginning to end, Bruised Orange re-works and alters patterns with different details each time a new piece is made. In other words, nothing Bruised Orange makes will ever be made twice. 

I instill a sense of unpredictability in the process of making clothes - most of my patterning happens at the same time of creating a garment, and I stitch random decorative linework motifs on all the garments. I like being more present in the process this way, being forced to respond to the form and feeling of the garment. For me personally, this allows me to make clothes that I want. I’m interested in making hard-wearing and interesting denim clothing that diverges from the hyper-masculinity associated with workwear culture; these are sentimental objects made from the love of materiality and craft. There's poetry for myself in creating these - as someone who has lived for over a decade with chronic pain, I feel joy in creating garments that will protect and compliment peoples’ bodies. It’s about acknowledging the body’s role in our day-to-day, all the flaws and fading that appear on a pair of jeans mirror the way our bodies change and scar as the years go on. 

Wear sentimentally, 
- Ben