In 2001, Bayard returned to the product world, this time as cohead of a skateboard company, Freebord. (He wasn't a skater, either.) Invented by a Stanford-educated engineer named Steen Strand, the Freebord itself was a weird evolution of a skateboard, with six wheels that mimicked the sliding motion of a snowboard, but on pavement. The company assembled the boards at its warehouse headquarters, although in time, to cut costs, it hired a Chinese factory to make the skate trucks. Bayard again worked tirelessly to build Freebord into the next big thing, with only marginal success. "For people who had the fearlessness to do it, they fell in love with it," he said. "But the learning curve was massive. And it was dangerous and shit. Anyway, that consumed eight years of my life."
His next job, running the accessories brand Chrome Industries, proved to be his crucible. The moment when, as Bayard said, he "got conviction" around his American-made ethos. He was thirty-nine.
It was 2008, and the country's culture was going through a transformation. In the '80s and '90s, if a chain like Olive Garden or the Gap opened in your town, you'd made the big time. But now, many people, especially in coastal cities, were turning away from mass production and mass culture, instead seeking out the artisanal, the small-batch, the handcrafted. Farm-to-table restaurants were opening around the nation, along with craft breweries and coffee shops that served certified-organic beans roasted on-site. Bayard saw it all around him in San Francisco, an epicenter of the maker and locavore movements. When the global financial crisis struck, plunging the country into a deep recession, many people began to rethink their spending habits, including on clothing. The new chic was investing in a few select pieces of superior quality, rather than buying cheap stuff to be worn a couple of times and then tossed. For those who could afford it, fast fashion was out. Heirloom was in.
The dominant fashion trend during this period was the heritage movement. Enduring American labels like Woolrich, Carhartt, Filson, and Red Wing were being rediscovered and revived by cool tastemakers living in places like Brooklyn and Portland. Having grown up in rural Pennsylvania among hunters, I can well remember my surprise at seeing young men, many of them with bushy beards, walking around downtown Manhattan dressed in buffalo-plaid shirts and heavy leather work boots, looking like they were going off to a deer camp, not an office building. The "heritage" look—the term was a nod to both vintage styles and long-lived, heritage-worthy brands—came into vogue around 2006 and dominated men's fashion for nearly a decade. Some women adopted the look, too, wearing Carhartt coats and beanies. It was popular not only on the coasts but also in the middle of the country, where regular guys found that they didn't have to reorient their entire identity or risk looking silly to be on trend. After all, they were wearing their grandfathers' clothes. Buying a classic chore coat you would own for the next fifty years was good value, too.
A photographer from Texas went around the country documenting local factories and artisans for what he dubbed the American Craftsman Project. A former theology student taught himself to sew, started making jeans in a Cincinnati workshop, and founded the label Noble Denim. A group of surfers who loved Birdwell Beach Britches, the old-school Southern California surfwear brand, bought the sleepy company and its factory and reinvented it for a new generation. In those years, every week brought more stories like these. The original heritage brands also caught on to the trend, opening their archives and partnering with up-and-coming designers to release capsule collections that reworked their classics. For instance, Woolrich hired Daiki Suzuki, the Japanese founder of the label Engineered Garments, to produce a spin-off collection, Woolrich Woolen Mills. And the designer Todd Snyder created a boutique for J. Crew called the Liquor Store, housed in a former bar in Lower Manhattan, which became a retail temple to all things heritage wear. Aside from quality, a big part of the appeal was that the clothes had long been, or were still, made in America.
The heritage movement could seem a little affected at times. As a writer for Newsweek noted wryly, young men were buying clothes "originally meant for mining or fishing, then wearing them to tapas bars and contemporary art installations." Some adopters of the style went around dressing and behaving as if the twentieth century had never happened. At one point, a barbershop in Williamsburg did a brisk business giving shaves with a straight razor, and a boutique in Tribeca sold handmade hatchets sourced from a secret workshop in Maine—peak trend. Still, the underlying impulse was genuine: a desire for timeless quality in a disposable culture, a search for value during lean times, an appreciation of classic American goods.
The new ethos of quality appealed to Bayard, who had always exhibited an affinity for extreme thrift and an aversion to waste, like some latter-day child of the Depression. Even after he became an executive, he bought his outdated clothes at Goodwill. He drove an old Toyota pickup truck that was dented and patched. Sticky notes slapped on the dash were his version of a daily planner. Rather than splurge on luxury vacations or dine at trendy restaurants, he liked
to hang out with his dog, Bart, a yellow Lab who rode in the back of the truck wherever he went. Alice Roche, a jewelry designer who later became Bayard's wife, recalled their first date. Bayard took her to Gaspare's Pizza House, an old-school spot with red-gingham tablecloths near Golden Gate Park. At the end of the meal, there were a few slices left over. "He started putting everything in the box," Alice said. "He put in the bread rolls. Then he took the little butter pats. I remember looking at him, thinking, 'Why is he taking all this stuff?'" She laughed. "He would have taken the water if he could have put it in the box!"
