Before Aaron Maldonado built up a following for Brigade and received cosigns from designers like Heron Preston, and artists like Bones and YSL’s T-Shyne, he worked under Graig Parker.
Parker isn’t a fashion designer, but was Maldonado’s manager at Giacomo’s Pizza in upstate New York. After dropping out following his first two semesters at Dutchess Community College, where he was studying computer science, Maldonado was a pizza delivery worker for Giacomo’s. At least until a car going 60 miles per hour T-boned his driver’s door and left him hospitalized with a concussion. He came out of the near-deadly car accident with a new lease on life.
“Everyone was like, ‘You’re here for a reason,’” says Maldonado. “So I decided that I was just going to start a brand like I’ve always wanted to.”
The son of Puerto Rican and Dominican New Yorkers from East New York, Brooklyn, Maldonado was exposed to the idea of making a brand early on by his own father, who ran his own local streetwear label out of a small boutique in Poughkeepsie. In the eighth grade, Maldonado traded six pairs of sneakers on the Sole Collector forums for a used Toshiba laptop, which he used to design his first T-shirt and mixtape covers for local rappers.
Despite that, it never dawned on him to launch a brand until he nearly died in that car accident. So in 2014, at just 19 years old, Maldonado took the $500 in tips he made from pizza deliveries to make a run of two T-shirts and a coach’s jacket for a brand he named Brigade. A Supreme reseller in his past life, he shared the brand’s first garments with the humble following he developed on his Instagram page. To his surprise, the brand’s first drop sold out in a day and made him $1,500 in sales. It was the first time Maldonado remembered ever seeing a comma in his bank account.
Today, his independently owned label now makes over six figures in annual revenue with little to no major stockists. But the brand’s roots have always been maintained. “The original idea for the brand came from always feeling like an outsider. So I wanted to make something for kids who felt like me in a sense,” says Maldonado. “That’s why it’s called Brigade: It’s a militia, a unit, a group of people. And when people feel beautiful, they act beautiful.”
Brigade is not a clothing label that came up off large celebrity or influencer endorsements. And it’s never been formally acknowledged by organizations like the CFDA or stocked at old guard department stores. And for many years, Maldonado juggled full-time gigs to keep the brand going. Yet somehow, the label’s fans line up early for its New York City pop-ups—the brand has only held five since being founded nearly eight years ago. A line also formed at its first sample sale which took place at the Sneak EZ streetwear boutique in the Lower East Side this past March. The pop-up drew visitors who traveled from as far as Washington, DC, and fans that camped out for five hours to enter a raffle for a 1/1 sherpa fleece hoodie sample.
Maldonado emphasizes the brand’s cult fanbase isn’t new. Within the first three years of launching the brand, one fan even had Brigade’s original logo permanently tattooed on his bicep.
“Moments like that are inspiring because you know this shit is real,” says Maldonado. “It’s really cool when you have a brush-up with your impact on people because that’s kind of like the whole point of it, isn’t it? Brigade was always about the betterment of the people who fuck with it.”
A longtime commitment to quality, authenticity, and building community is what makes Brigade one of this year’s ComplexLand ‘Brands To Watch,’ which is where Brigade will exclusively release its ‘Peace and Unity’ collection. The sky blue collection features a “summer-weight” pigment–dyed hoodie with no drawstrings ($116), a pair of French terry sweatshorts with a script logo made from organic cotton ($72), and an exclusive core logo T-shirt printed on the brand’s 9-oz cotton heavyweight blanks ($42), will be available at ComplexLand from May 25–27. The label’s upcoming appearance at ComplexLand arrives when the 27-year-old designer is only looking to elevate his small but rising New York-based label.
“I quit my job around May of 2021 and have been doing Brigade full time since. It’s made a huge impact on the brand. I’ve learned a lot since then and there’s an infinite amount of things to learn still,” says Maldonado, who previously worked as a lead photographer for a creative agency for several years. “The brand has also found its language and place in the past year, which has been tight.”
Like Supreme, Brigade unveils its seasonal collections through well-photographed lookbooks that feature a healthy mix of apparel boasting strong graphic T-shirts alongside elevated cut and sew. And like the aforementioned archetypal New York City streetwear label, Brigade closely aligns itself with the subcultures and underground artists it’s passionate about highlighting. One of the brand’s recent collaborations highlighted the surreal digital art of Noah Kocher, who printed his work on the brand’s popular heavyweight, 9-oz cotton T-shirts that are all manufactured in California.
The brand’s Spring/Summer 2021 lookbook shined a spotlight on the underrated Los Angeles synth-punk star N8NOFACE, who modeled elevated pieces like a brushed zebra mohair cardigan. And while major brands are lining up to collaborate with the same graffiti artists over and over, Brigade instead looked toward Uptown Manhattan and tapped the young graffiti vandal Skam, who was filmed tagging in a reversible sherpa fleece vest lined with taffeta nylon in a recent Brigade campaign and made a “God Save NY” T-shirt for the brand’s Fall/Winter 2021 collection.
For Maldonado, Brigade was never about just moving products with a logo slapped on it. It was about building a brand that could disseminate the eclectic interests of himself and his team.
“Since the beginning, even when we had 100 followers, I knew Brigade wasn’t going to be a brand for what a brand meant back in 2014,” says Maldonado. “I feel like a brand back in those days was more product-based. Whereas this is a platform now to talk to people and teach people things. We want to introduce people to certain music or certain artists. The whole point is tastemaking.”
Aside from introducing its fanbase to underground cyborg rappers like Orrin or rising New York drill artists like Spliff Happy, Brigade has also aspired to be a more conscious brand. Years before many streetwear labels were moving to take action following the racial justice protests that defined 2020, Brigade collaborated with nonprofits like Behind The Book and The Sierra Club to sell T-shirts and raise funds that would help increase literacy rates within disadvantaged neighborhoods in New York City and address environmental conservation. The brand has continued this mission by releasing Earth Day T-shirts annually to raise profits for an environmental charity. They also recently raised funds for organizations like the American Library Association after the increase in book ban efforts across the United States this year. And yes, they post the receipts.
“I’ve never really thought much about why we did stuff like that. But just look around and see what’s going on in life. It’s not just about wearing cool clothes all the time and taking nice pictures,” says Maldonado. “Beyond Brigade’s idea being about the betterment of other people, the way that I retain knowledge the best, personally for me, is if I teach it to somebody else. So I think it’s really just about teaching people that there’s more than just trying to look cool on the internet.”
Like other successful New York City-based designers, such as Colm Dillane of KidSuper, Maldonado never went to fashion school to grasp how to design, cut, and sew. Instead he learned the ropes through the trials and errors of connecting with overseas manufacturers through Alibaba.
But Maldonado has always strived for Brigade to be more than just another streetwear brand that produces T-shirts and hoodies. Past collections included rings, waterproof utility cargo jackets with volcano prints, chore coats, and anoraks with reflective streaks of lightning. In recent years, Maldonado has looked more toward manufacturers in the United States to produce leather varsity jackets with chenille patches, knit woven blankets, hand-dyed hoodies, and samples for knit sweaters.
As a designer, Maldonado aspires to meet the production quality of brands like Supreme and Ralph Lauren. Like those labels, he hopes to one day work with technical fabric labels like Pertex or luxury fabric suppliers like Loro Piana on garments. Maldonado is also not afraid to praise other young designers like Steven Mena, who’s behind the popular and rising Los Angeles label Menace.
“I’ve honestly been inspired by Steven from Menace because he puts together collections where every piece is a showstopper but they somehow work all together,” says Maldonado, who hints that Brigade’s upcoming Fall/Winter collection will unveil the brand’s own Gore-Tex-esque fabric. “For Fall/Winter, I’m going to try to test this idea of making every garment a piece that makes you say ‘Oh shit!’ Because usually the way I design, there’s always one showstopper and everything else complements it.”
While Brigade is set to be stocked at Concepts this summer and is currently stocked alongside Off-White, Louis Vuitton, and Rick Owens at R3bel in Richmond, Virginia, his goal is to spread his distribution to at least 10 stores by next year. He laughs at the thought of pulling in an investor and believes he will be able to make it in the business while remaining strictly independent.
“My goal forward is that we want to stay small forever, internally, depending on what’s needed. You never want to have an unnecessary amount of like 200 people for no reason,” says Maldonado, who adds that Brigade is a small team run by himself, his wife, and several of his closest friends.”I would like to just be, like, lead design and creative direction. Where I’m pointing the ship in what direction it should sail while also designing a lot of dope shit. Although my main goal is to get better as a designer, I would also love to have a team of designers with me who have their own perspectives.”
When speaking about the success of his label, Maldonado doesn’t dwell much on how viral SoundCloud rappers like Krimelife Ca$$ or Lil Xelly wore the brand’s earliest pieces in their music videos and seems to care little about celebrity cosigns the brand has received over the years. And aside from collaborating with Hidden.NY on accessories and Zippo on a lighter, he’s turned down offers to collaborate with larger brands, simply because it didn’t feel authentic to Brigade.
Despite the love he’s received over the years, Maldonado says he still struggles to see himself as “a designer with a capital ‘D’” even though fans of the brand constantly ask him to drop certain cut and sew pieces he released years ago.
But one thing Maldonado is comfortable with talking about is the community Brigade created. He enjoys when fans of the brand become friends after meeting at certain events or getting to know each other in its own online forum. That sense of community Brigade built was alive and well and it’s most recent pop-up in the Lower East Side this year, where many shoppers stuck around on a cool spring day to just chill and relax with old and new fans of the brand.
“Anyone could come in, people were laughing, vibing with people, and smoking together. From my perspective, it felt like anybody could pull up and everyone would be like, ‘Yo, what’s good,” remembers Maldonado. “Whereas at other pop-ups, I feel like people just want to be really cool. Yeah you might look cool, but it’s not a vibe to be sitting in the corner and not talking to anybody. I think that’s a part of the secret sauce of how we made Brigade work. We make people feel welcome and we’re not judging anybody or trying to be too cool for ourselves.”
