Daniel Friedman’s bespoke tailoring company is a long, long way from the high-power, traditional boys club of Savile Row. In fact, the Bindle & Keep founder and owner is still doing fittings in his Park Slope living room, gradually moving his all-inclusive operation to a sunny new studio in Clinton Hill. So just how did Daniel find himself the subject of an HBO documentary produced by Lena Dunham? It started with his worst nightmare.
Near the end of his second Master of Architecture program at Columbia University, Daniel was writing a paper and suddenly couldn’t see or understand the words on the page. He saw doctors and specialists, but no medical professional could figure out why he’d suddenly lost fundamental writing and reading comprehension skills. “Two master’s degrees and I couldn’t get a job because I couldn’t read,” he explained. “Creativity comes from learning different aspects and being able to recompose them or rearrange them in different ways, but I suddenly found myself unable to acquire any information,” he explained. Unemployed and facing financial ruin, Daniel tried to develop his visual and tactile abilities to make ends meet: “I thought that I can at least hone these skills and try to make this work,” he said.
“Making it work” meant crashing on a friend’s Upper West Side couch while working on freelance design projects to get seed money to start a tailoring company. With some luck, Daniel’s suits ended up on a few high powered clients and Bindle & Keep began to grow. Although he didn’t have the funds to pay employees, Rachel Tutera, an enthusiastic and knowledgeable style blogger behind the LGBTQ-focused Handsome Butch, was eager to join him as an intern. Rachel started blogging about the work she and Daniel were doing, and it began to draw more people from the queer community. “We created or provided or found or fell into this untapped demand in our culture for communities that often feel alienated or uncomfortable in the market,” Daniel explained.
Whether those people are Orange is the New Black executive producer Neri Tannenbaum or “kids from the Bronx who give a $100 deposit on a suit hoping that they’ll make the money later,” Bindle & Keep’s inclusive philosophy began to draw clients and build relationships across all spectrums. “We don’t go with any preconceived notions; everyone has a different way of expressing their gender identity,” Daniel said. “Before we do a fitting, we interview people for about 30 minutes to get a sense of who they are, what their aesthetic is, and what their triggers might be so we can relate and make the experience the most positive,” he explained.
Daniel has received countless hand-written thank you notes, gifts, even wedding invitations from clients who feel he’s made an incredible difference in their lives: “It blows me away. I have to stop and think, ‘Wait, what I’m doing actually matters.’ It’s not about fashion anymore, it’s about identity and feeling great. There’s no preconceived notion or ideal of how women or men should look. Everyone should just look the way they want to feel. It’s power,” Daniel said.
After a client connected with The New York Times got Bindle & Keep’s story published, Jason Benjamin, a boom operator for Orange is the New Black and Girls, came knocking with a documentary proposition. While Daniel and Rachel were wary at first, news that Lena Dunham and Girls executive producer Jenni Konner were on board to produce the project made the decision a little easier. As Three Suits moved forward with production, HBO’s President of Documentary films, Sheila Nevins, also put support behind the project: “I think the producers and director are looking to capture what this really important shift in our culture towards embracing self expression and identity means to people. This company is the device, the medium to find out all these people’s amazing stories,” Daniel said.
“Today, there are so many obstacles and so many ways that our culture makes us feel badly about ourselves, so anything that we can do to buffer that is extremely important. But there’s also an amazing paradigm shift in terms of how culture is looking at the LGBT community today. Clothing is just one aspect of accepting yourself or feeling accepted by others. And I think that’s why we’ve found success as a company, and why everyone involved in this documentary is going in full force with their resources and support,” Daniel explained.
But even with the increase in high profile clients and the documentary under way, Daniel was getting more and more sick. During one fitting, he was sharing his story with a client, who rightly suspected it was undiagnosed Lyme’s disease. “I was infested,” Daniel said. “I had lesions in my brain from it, I was literally dying. The doctors told me were it not for that client, I’d have had five more years to live,” he added.
“It’s funny: this company was started as a workaround to my own personal challenge, but it ended up solving a different personal challenge for so many people. I struggled for three years giving everything I had to my clients. Finally, the company gave back to me. I never would have found out if I didn’t start this company. It saved my life,” Daniel said. “And now when this documentary comes out, it’s going to help so many more people. With HBO’s platforms and Lena Dunham’s alignment, I think millions of people are going to see this documentary. This was a gift for everybody.”
Credits
Text Emily Manning
Photography Kathy Lo