Some fashion designers use cotton. Others wool. Chad Nazam uses stuffed animals.
Nazam, 22, a bubbly Virginian who speaks as if he had just chugged three Celsius energy drinks, has built a small but swelling profile in the online fashion community by taking perfectly good jeans and sewing at least 200 stuffed animals along the pants legs. “In fashion, a lot of things are boring,” said Nazam, who runs the brand Le Reve Nazam. His Beanie Baby-ish jeans are not: “I’m able to kind of do what I want and be a little wrecking ball in the industry.
” In this case, think of him as a plush, candy-coloured wrecking ball. The US$650 (approximately RM2,850) jeans fall somewhere between Burning Man and Build-A-Bear. Imagine contorting a Mike Kelley sculpture into streetwear.
Picture wool chaps, but instead of wool, you have squishy pigs, monkeys and bears. Nazam began selling the jeans in April, but he is not the first person to take needle to plush. Madcap Red Hot Chili Peppers bassist Flea wore teddy bear-coated jeans in the music video for Young MC’s 1989 hit Bust A Move .
More recently, ASAP Rocky has worn Gucci jeans with plush zoological brooches, and Swae Lee of the rap group Rae Sremmurd modelled custom Flea-inspired stuffed animal-stitched jeans in a photo shoot. Nazam is also not the first crafter to stitch ministuffs onto jeans. Tierra Gray, 27, a clothing designer in Las Vegas, was sewing small plush animals onto pants as far back as 2022.
Her pinnacle was a fully co.