{GBF Life + Style} My Road to Fashion Law Part II

Part I is here. 

Fall OCI (on campus interviews) is like speed dating. You submit your resume, get matched with interested law firms, and go on rotating thirty minute interviews at the Radisson across from USC. If they like you, they take you out to dinner at the second interview. If chemistry sparks, they take you back to their place and you promise to spend the summer together. I went through the rounds but didn't get into bed with any law firms. It just didn't feel right.

While walking to the parking lot after my very last OCI, I saw a flyer that caught my eye. The CEO of True Religion Brand Jeans was speaking at the business school that night. Although exhausted, I turned around and walked back to campus as True Religion was one of my favorite denim brands. I had to be there. 

Inside the packed auditorium, the tanned Jeff Lubell was wearing a TR denim jacket, flared and faded TR Joeys, and a silver Chrome Hearts cross around his neck. He looked like a hippie rock star. He was candid and honest about his struggles and path to denim salvation. He was a serial entrepreneur and had opened and shut down over ten different denim companies and was nearly broke when he started TR. At the time, the premium denim market was fledgling as stores balked at the $200 price tag. But Jeff believed in his product and found innovative ways to pique interest. His grassroots marketing involved giving away jeans to attractive girls and celebrities at random places like gas stations and pushing tirelessly to get TR into celeb frequented boutiques like Fred Segal. He knew if celebrities wear the jeans, everyone else will. His vision, persistence, and passion paid off as within a year, TR became one of the most coveted and expensive denim brands on the market.

Inspired and moved by his story, I went up him afterwards and told him I was a law student obsessed with fashion and wanted to work for him that summer. He looked at me, smiled, and told me to drop off my resume with his VP of Operations. I was hired a week later to head up the intellectual property and anti-counterfeiting department. While the rest of my class spent their summer suited up inside their top floor downtown offices, I was in a grittier part of town conducting raids with the LAPD and knocking down the doors of denim counterfeiters. 

It felt so right. 

photos by Tommy Pham

 top {Kardashian Kollection c/o}

skirt {tibi | affordable version}
leather jacket {True Religion c/o}
heels {Kelsi Dagger}
clutch {aryn k c/o}
necklace {capwell c/o}
earrings {Swarovski c/o}

{live fabulously}