The Hobbyist #17: An Interview with Wythe Founder Peter Middleton
The designer chats about running a small business, Ralph Lauren, and jackets
Graphic design by Thomas Euyang
There’s this jacket. It’s suede shearling and it’s beautiful. It’s the clothing item I would most like to own in this world, but having it exist in the world without it being mine is okay, too. The hunt is always better than the feast. The jacket is made by Wythe, a New York City menswear brand founded by Peter Middleton. Peter is a great dude. Proof? He’s from Austin and he used to work for Ralph Lauren. Need I say more?
Sure, I wanted to talk to Peter because this jacket has become an object of particular fascination. I imagine when you put it on you feel a bit like what Warren Beatty had to feel like in McCabe & Mrs. Miller when he was wearing that coat. You walk around like a prince, perhaps a bit sweaty during a mild NYC winter day, but a prince nevertheless. But while jackets are great, you don’t call up a guy as busy and esteemed as Middleton to just chat about shearling. We all got things to do! I wanted to learn more about Wythe as an operation; why he founded it and the roots of its take on Americana, westernwear, and classic capital-D Dude clothing.
Middleton, I learned, wanted Wythe to capture that feeling of finding the perfect item at a vintage spot, while eliminating all the annoying variables that come with buying used. When he began making his first Oxford shirt, he wanted to capture those worn-in vibes of a perfect vintage piece while making sure it was the best fitting shirt on the market. “I love vintage Oxford shirts. I don't love the fit, but I love the collar, I love the fabric, I love the way it's broken in,” Middleton explained. So, he used that experience from his early days at Faherty and Polo to make his ideal Oxford shirt, the first item ever released by Wythe. Now? It’s hard to find many folks doing it better. Check out our full conversation below.
We gotta talk about the suede shearling jacket.
Peter Middleton: Dude. It's so good. We each have our own favorite personal pieces, but it’s the best. It's such a warm jacket that we [Peter and Mike Parenti, director of wholesale and marketing] would be wearing it on 50 degree days and we would just text each other, ‘Dude, this thing is way too warm.’ But we’d wear it anyway.
Sometimes you gotta suffer for fashion.
PM: If I have to wear a jacket and I have an option, I’m just going to wear this one. I have so many jackets in my closet. I haven’t needed any clothes for 10 years, but it's still fun to find the pieces that you keep wearing, even when the situation maybe isn't really right. It speaks to the item when you just really want to wear that thing.
You’re from Austin, right?
PM: Yep. In South Austin.
What was your introduction to cool clothes? What made you want to eventually get into this world?
PM: It was definitely a process, and I think a big part of it was growing up in Texas. I didn't know anyone that did that. For other people there was maybe more of a clear path, but I always knew I wanted to make things, whether that was designing sneakers or designing buildings or cars or houses. I had it in my mind that you couldn't really be a fashion designer and support a family. The only designers I knew were Billy Reid and Ralph Lauren, and I couldn’t be either of them. I also wanted to have a family and wanted a home. I went into engineering because I thought it would be cool to design houses, too. I thought that was what engineering was, but that was actually architecture [laughs]. I was in engineering for a year and a half and felt blocked, knowing it wasn’t what I'm called to do. I convinced myself to study fashion in undergrad because that way I could do architecture for graduate school and wasn’t giving up on making money. It was just a pathway.
I wouldn’t be able to get into architecture school from the engineering program, because my GPA wouldn’t be high enough. I thought I would be able to crush it in fashion school, and then get into a good architecture program. I told my parents and I remember my mom saying, ‘Yeah, your dad and I never really understood why you wanted to be an engineer.’ I was just like, ‘Why didn't y'all even push back a little bit?’ That was how my parents always were. They just supported me as best as they could. After the first semester of classes in fashion, I understood that this was what I really wanted to do for the rest of my life, whether I could make money in it or not.
Did you go to UT?
PM: Yeah, I I got a textiles and apparel design degree from Texas.
When you graduated did you stay in Austin?
PM: Part of my personality is not wanting to do what anyone tells me to do and not wanting to do what I see other people doing. I didn’t want to go to New York, I wanted to make my own way. It wasn’t realistic. I ended up interning at Faherty and moved to New York to do that. The year prior I had reached out to them and asked them about the internship, and we got to the point where it was probably gonna happen. They offered it to me, but I didn’t really want to go to New York. They were like, ‘Well, okay.’ The next year I was like, ‘That was really stupid. I was being an idiot there.’ By the time I was graduating, I understood that going to New York or LA were the only two real options.
Was Faherty as big back then as it is now?
PM: I was an intern during its fourth year. They were really, really open with me and taught me so much. As design goes and my creativity, that got way more refined when I got to Ralph Lauren. But so much of what I do now, I could not do without the internship at Faherty. We were doing everything. I was working on tech packs, talking to the factories, doing production, helping with market, designing trims. The design team was so small that I was helping with every single thing I could. That was really, really amazing. It was a head designer, an assistant, and then a women’s designer. Mike Faherty would have meetings with us maybe once or twice a week, depending on availability, because they were opening five stores that summer. He was flying for trunk shows and this and that. Looking back, it’s very interesting to see how they did it because it's very different than what I do with Wythe. Wythe is Mike and. Mike does wholesale and our sales, and I do the design and production and that's it. There are no interns, no assistant designers, no anything else. It's just us. Then we have the guys in the shop. It's interesting to see how different companies do it and what works for everyone.
When did you go to Polo?
PM: That was after the internship, in the fall of 2016. I got in through a staffing agency. Faherty was upfront about not having a job for me after an internship. I was applying to all these jobs, but I wasn’t getting anywhere. I asked for a letter of recommendation, but they explained that at publicly traded companies, a lot of job postings are not real postings. A lot of them are internal hires. I eventually met my now past boss for an interview, and it was for a fabric development role with the women's luxury side. I didn't even know that was a job. I didn't even know there were people that only focused on the fabric side of things. I was really, really excited to talk to her and see what their team did. That was the job I ended up getting.
How many years were you there for?
PM: Four and a half or so.
When does the idea for Wythe start percolating?
PM: Since I was 17 or 18, I knew that if I was going into fashion, I wanted to do my own thing. That was more solidified in school. That was how the Texas program approached it. I don't really know how FIT or Parsons sets it up, but the Texas one tried to teach you what you needed to do your own thing. Whether you’re successful with it or not is of its own thing. But it wasn’t about, ‘How do we teach you to be an assistant to a designer?’ That may be best for a job, but they very much were like, ‘If you're owning your own business, this is what you have to do.’ During that program, I thought about a few things: If I was going to do my own thing, what would it be? What would the inspiration be? What would the market be? What's the price point? I went to Faherty and Polo to learn. I wasn’t doing this to get promoted, to become a VP. I did it because eventually I wanted to do my own thing. That’s what allowed for the abysmal pay and no benefits and long hours. In the back of my mind I was like, ‘Okay, cool. I'm not doing this to get paid. I'm not doing this to have a big resume. I'm doing this because I want to learn every single thing I possibly can.’
Had you started getting the brand ethos together while you were still at Polo? Or did you quit and then really start refining Wythe?
PM: Even when I moved to New York, I was like, ‘I can't let up with this dream.’ Even then, I was trying to get myself into a seasonal calendar where I wanted to design two collections for myself every year. I just started the process. I would finish work, I would come home and refine my ideas.
What was the first piece Wythe dropped?
PM: Our Oxford shit. That was in 2019.
When do you start doing Wythe full time?
PM: We had been furloughed since April of 2020 during the beginning lockdown period of Covid. I was just able to work on it full time at that point. Previously, I would come home and do whatever I could until I had to go to sleep. In August or September of that year, I told HR I wasn't coming back.
What was the first moment that you realized Wythe was working?
PM: I knew it was false, but even up to a year ago, I would constantly be like, ‘Hey, this could fall apart tomorrow.’ I fully believed it, fully knew how it could happen and everything. This past year and a half has been the first time where I haven't been scrambling for a final line of credit, a loan, or something. It was bumpy in the beginning but in the Fall of 2022, that was when it finally started clicking with people for wholesale. That was the point where it was becoming too big for me to do all of it myself. That was when I realized that if I hire someone to handle all of this for wholesale and they get paid from commission from wholesale, I could actually afford to hire someone. It was then that I was like, ‘Damn, maybe we can make this work.’
Maybe this past year was the first year you felt comfortable with the future of it?
PM: It still feels weird because I have no idea. Things change so fast in this industry for better and for worse. With all the tariffs coming in, it's like things could be three times more expensive next year, but even then we will figure it out. At this point, our customers trust us and trust that we're going to try and do our best and give them the best pricing we possibly can. There's enough momentum behind it where I know it's not going to fall apart tomorrow. Maybe it'll fall apart in six months or a year, but it's not going to be within a week, like it could have previously been.
Is there pretty significant loyalty with your core customer base?
PM: I think so. I haven't looked back at the numbers. Having a store was the first time we've really been able to consistently talk to customers, whereas previously you would only really know something if someone emailed you about it. Usually it’s just, ‘Hey, this is too small. I need to exchange a size,’ or, ‘Hey, I bought this last year and I lost a button. Can I get another button?’ Sometimes we get emails that are like, ‘Hey, the shirt is amazing.’ Part of being a creative and pushing yourself, though, is the negative emails always weigh more heavily than the positive ones.
This may be a bit of a tough question, but what's one thing from your time at Ralph that informs how you run Wythe?
PM: One of the biggest things is that Ralph sticks to his guns a hundred percent of the time, and he has really good reasons for it, too. If anyone asked for clarification or there was a misunderstanding where they thought they needed to go one way, but that wasn't where Ralph wanted to go, Ralph would explain it and Ralph would bring them in and tell them the story. It wasn’t mean, but it was stern: ‘This is what we’re doing.’ I imagine it’s like, ‘Look at these past 50 years, look at what I've been able to build with all of these people. You can trust me on this. Even if this doesn't make sense, you can trust me on it, and even if you don't, we're still going to do it.’ That was really, really cool to see—to see how that played out with how much he just went for it. He knew exactly what he was doing, even if he wasn't able to explain it in words to other people.
How does Wythe take the next step? What sort of growth ideas do you have for the next few years?
PM There is no growth idea [laughs]. The first time I read a five-year plan was the initial email to friends that ended up loaning me money to pay for the first season. I didn't expect to get this far. I didn't expect it to be more than a shirt. We're going to keep doing two seasons a year, and I'll design them and produce them and get them into the store and give them to wholesale accounts.
Why did you feel like you needed to make an Oxford shirt? What was missing in other Oxford shirts that you thought you could do better?
PM: The ethos with all Wythe products is that I want it to feel like you walk into a really good vintage store and see this piece hanging up on the wall and it speaks to you and you know that you need to try it on. Once you do, it's perfectly faded. It feels soft, it feels lived in. You're not the first person to fall in love with this piece. That’s what's super beautiful about buying vintage, but also those pieces are once in a lifetime. The whole ethos of Wythe is ‘Can we produce in different sizes that still speaks to people in this way?’
That was what I saw with the Oxford. I love vintage Oxford shirts. I don't love the fit, but I love the collar, I love the fabric, I love the way it's broken in. From what I learned at Ralph, I knew how to handle the fabric part. I knew how to communicate to a mill. From my time at Faherty I knew how to do a tech pack and do a measurement chart and do these things for the actual shirt components. That was the whole thing. I was like, ‘Man, I can't find this shirt and I really want it.’ If I had it, it would be all I would wear. If I can make 50, then I'll have 30 for the rest of my life and maybe I can sell 20 to friends.
That was the goal. You can go to J. Crew and have a nice soft fabric, but the collar isn't right. You can go to Drake's and the collar's beautiful, but it's really expensive and the fabric is maybe not what you want. You can get it custom made by Mercer & Sons, but you have to break it in and it takes three years. It was trying to get all of these things in the same product.
I imagine those first years when you were getting home from your nine to five and then spending all night on Wythe, you didn't have a ton of time for hobbies.
PM: That was a big eye opener. Year three I was like, ‘I don't do anything except for this.’ I was working until 11:30 at night, midnight, and really enjoying that. But I was also getting really burnt out because the only other thing I did was see friends. That was a big impetus of, ‘Let me get back into these things I used to love.’ I love rock climbing, trying to get outdoors as much as I can. In the winter it’s ice climbing and skiing, those have become the really big ones. If I could spend all the money I had left over on skiing, I would be the happiest man alive.
When you’re climbing, are you bouldering or doing top rope?
PM: I guess sport is the easiest level of entry, but I have gotten into trad. I’, not at the point where I'm leading trad, but I want to learn it. I want to get better at it.
Climbing gyms are the best. Just a great place to hang out.
PM: Yeah, dude, it's so funny. When I started climbing in Austin, ABP [Austin Bouldering Project] hadn't even been built yet, so the only place you could learn to climb was going to the Green Belt. I learned climbing outdoors with a friend, learning to lead, learning top rope outdoors. It was so funny getting back into climbing here and being in the gym and there are people here that come for three, four hours. They're seeing their friends or doing their exercises, they're getting some work done, and then they're just bouldering. It’s great.