Von Dutch Women's Fashion Brand

Von Dutch is an American brand with red, white and blue running through its veins, founded in Los Angeles - the shortest patriotic founding statement in this letter, and the brand's whole register is in it. Von Dutch is an American multinational apparel brand named after Kenny Howard, aka 'Von Dutch', an American artist and pinstriper of the Kustom Kulture movement: the name on the clothes is not a founder's surname in the ordinary way, but the nickname of a car-culture artist, carried into fashion after his lifetime.

That naming is the fact a women's shopper most needs from this page, because it explains the product's look and its history at once. A pinstriper's line and a hot-rod movement's graphics sit behind the apparel, so the brand's women's range reads as Americana merchandise rather than as a designer's collection - there is no seasonal couture story here, and none is offered. What it offers instead is a name with a biography, and the biography belongs to Kenny Howard.

1992: The Name Changes Hands

After Howard's death in 1992, his daughters sold the Von Dutch name to Michael Cassel and Robert Vaughn. The clothing brand gained popularity in the US and attracted the attention of celebrities. That is the complete commercial record: a 1992 death, a family sale of the name to two buyers, and a rise to popularity carried by celebrity attention. No founding date is given for the clothing company itself - the brand's apparel era begins, in this record, with the purchase of the name, and its fame is recorded as a celebrity phenomenon rather than a retail one.

For research, the two halves of the record should not be merged. Kenny Howard the artist and pinstriper is the name's origin, documented in the Kustom Kulture movement; Cassel and Vaughn are the name's commercial owners from the daughters' sale; and the women's apparel a shopper finds under the Von Dutch label descends from that sale, not from a Howard-founded clothing company. The brand's own site is carried in this page's References, and its single photograph is in this page's gallery.

Von Dutch Among the V Brands

In its letter, Von Dutch closes the California trio. Vans (Anaheim, 1966) made the shoes the skateboarders adopted; Volcom (Costa Mesa, 1991) was founded by riders themselves; Von Dutch, founded in Los Angeles per its page, sold the same youth culture's celebrity surface - three different ways a brand can be born from a scene: adopted by it, founded inside it, or named from its art. The wider carried links place the brand among the women's fashion brand pages, the clothing store and wholesale directories and the Fashion Designer Directory, and this profile's record stays at that length.

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