H Bar C expands country’s appeal with Sunset Strip pop-up

For 126 years, globally renowned western fashion brand H Bar C has blended high and low culture, premium crafting and timeless rock ‘n’ roll flair for a history that is longer than country music’s.

Thus, it allows the company and its Nashville-based employees and partners, stationed in the nearly 150-year-old Marathon Village, a former auto factory now repurposed as creative and retail space, to have the ideal take on how fashion has helped inspire the surge of country and western culture to the pinnacle of American popular culture.

Regarding that surge, H Bar C recently opened a retail pop-up on Sunset Strip in Los Angeles.

Among the apparel featured is an exclusive collection from renowned Nashville-based chain-stitch embroiderer and custom tailor Sarie “Jukebox Mama” Gessner.

While speaking with The Tennessean, H Bar C’s Nashville-based retail sales managers Stephanie Simon, Gianni Gibson and Jacob Hillenbrand were excited about everything at the current intersection of fashion and music.

“H Bar C’s fashion allows for the wearer to embrace the garment’s original western ranching functionality or love it for its timeless fashion that can expand anywhere from indie rock to honky-tonk country shirting to throwing on a Bolero jacket and pants for a quick trip to the grocery store or a Sunday church visit, too,” jokes former drummer Gibson, who once was a member of the rock quartet Future Thieves.

On a simple level, most of H Bar C’s shirts are made not with the heavier cotton gabardine twill familiar to most western wear but with silky, eucalyptus tree pulp and environmentally friendly Tencel fabric.

In addition, the brand’s desire to err on the side of form in the perpetual work-as-fashion-wear debate between form and function is notable.

Country culture’s fashionable national expansion

Recently, the interplay between Tennessee’s country music and California’s western culture has achieved a cool, potentially lucrative intersection.