Recipes for Repair with The Future Past

Quality and longevity are core fundamentals at Gravel & Gold. We strive to design clothing that is seasonless and will outlast trends. We use materials and construction techniques that ensure our pieces will last a very long time...

And with the help of people like Lindsey Hansen, maybe even a lifetime. 

Lindsey has been taking apart and refashioning denim since she was a teenager. She has an art and fashion background and has spent her career building the skillset to bring her passion for well made, preservation-worthy clothing to the forefront.

In 2020 Lindsey took a leap and opened The Future Past in San Francisco's Richmond District. 

The Future past is a place for reviving garments. The ground floor is a vintage shop featuring many re-worked vintage pieces; Altered denim, mended sweaters, naturally dyed knits. Upstairs is where the magic happens, a fully equipped tailoring studio with piles of sourced, second hand denim, used to rework damaged jeans. Lindsey not only revives found vintage for her shop floor, she also takes on projects and alterations from the public.

 While Lindsey is equipped and willing to patch sweaters, do hems and other alterations, her passion lies in extending the life of jeans, through preservation and reinvention.

Lindsey took us through her work in progress rack, showing a pair of her own heavily worn jeans that she has been working on for literally years. These jeans exemplify the many visible and invisible techniques she expertly employs to help rebuild and extend the life of denim.

 She then showed us a "denim recipe" she working on - reworking a pair of size 36 Levis 501's to be a size 27. The process is intensive and requires completely taking apart the jeans, expertly cutting and reshaping, and sewing them back together.

She explained that the result of this project is an ideal pair of jeans, with an extra high rise (the larger the pair of jeans, the higher the rise to work with) and a perfectly wide leg.

 In addition to reviving garments, Lindsey has created practical uses for denim scraps. Scrap denim is processed in her studio to reuse in various ways, from denim baskets to pillows and bucket hats that are also sold in her store. 

There is so much to see and learn from at The Future Past! It's a great place to shop straight vintage and reworked vintage and is the finest option for denim and other special repairs. 

We are very pleased to be working with Lindsey on a project of our own. Lindsey is taking on our denim factory seconds and otherwise damaged denim to enhance and re-sell. We can't wait to see what she comes up with! 

Stay tuned for that!