Your attention please. Platinum Dirt makes extraordinarily gorgeous leather jackets out of vintage luxury car seats. It gets better. They include the actual VIN plate from the car and use the hood ornament as the zipper pull. I’ll give you a moment. You’re probably going to want to sit.

Each jacket has the actual VIN plate from the car sewn in!

Extraordinary times call for extraordinary measures. This would be such a time, and the extraordinary measure I’m going to take is to call myself an expert. I know sustainable and I know fashion, and I know how hard it is to get the best of both worlds. It is as rare as finding platinum dirt to chance upon a designer that is truly sustainable but also achieves that ineffable coolness quotient that makes the fashion world lose their icy composure and start hyperventilating. Which is why Platinum Dirt is very appropriately named.

In my humble, I mean expert, opinion, Platinum Dirt is the rare bird that will become a leader and a shaper of sustainable fashion, starting with showing the world that “green” fashion can not only be cool, it can be so seductive and covetable that sleeping becomes difficult. But there’s more. Platinum Dirt’s duo is brimming with innovative ideas about how to get the entire world excited about sustainability starting with the fascinating concept of extending the reach of the label by producing a variety TV show!!!!! So who are the geniuses behind Platinum Dirt?

Dustin and Aaron with Jamie Foxx//A panel from one of the VIN jackets

When I meet with Dustin Page and Aaron Parrish, all I know is I’ve never wanted a jacket more. But when Dustin tells me he crafts all the jackets himself, without a single sewing lesson under his belt (ok, fine, he met with someone a few times, but didn’t get much out of it so he discontinued the lessons) I know that I am speaking with someone very special. Dustin is wearing a jacket he made himself, and its impeccable cut and stitching attest to the fact that Dustin is a bonafide visionary with crazy serious talent.

We sit down in a park on a lovely day with a trumpet player nearby to chat. Dustin’s gregarious and equally talented partner, Aaron, joins us by phone. To passersby we must look comical since my phone and Dustin’s are positioned in a configuration designed to optimally record Aaron who is barely audible on speakerphone. Both the trumpet player (any other day I would’ve really enjoyed your music sir, I apologize for the dirty looks) and the nearby generator force me to awkwardly hunch over our phones, which, in their unnatural proximity, look two kids forced to make friends by their moms, so I can hear Aaron’s voice.

GbD: I’m so curious about the process that goes into making these jackets. How long does it take you to strip the cars in the junkyard?

D: The first one I ever did took me 5 hours but I actually split all the seams in the junk yard right there, but now we’ve got it figured out. Now we go in and we cut and pull the seats out and the seat covers off, and leave all the foam, so anywhere from 20 to 40 minutes per car. The newer the car the quicker it is because ever since Velcro came around all of the not so important seams are just velcro’d.

So you notice a difference in the quality of the car depending on the year.

D: Yeah, in the 70s they had metal rails going through everything!

But is it worth it? Is the leather nicer?

D: Yeah, the older the leather the better – as long as I can’t tear it with my hands then I’ll use it. In fact, we just pulled out a ‘71 Cartier Edition Lincoln town car! Cartier designed the interiors for the town car in the 70s so it’s a Cartier Lincoln jacket- that’s pretty cool! There’s a lot of really cool stuff out there but it’s dirty and you look at it and you think, this is crap, but you get it home, clean it up, get rid of the stuff you can’t use and it’s kind of like gold mining.

So all told, making a jacket from start to finish is about how many hours of labor?

D: Once we get it out of the car I’ve been giving it to my dad. He’s retired. He splits all the seams and pulls the rest of the foam off, but for each car, it’s about 5 hours to rip the seams and pull the rest of the foam out depending on the type of seat and how it was put in – some of them have all these ribs, so it gets kind of tricky.

Making the jacket- it’s about 12 hours – it’s a very involved process, it’s like you’re putting together a puzzle. What I generally do once I get all the leather from the car is I lay it all out. There’s always those stand out pieces that are just gnarly and just look like they have a certain sheen to them so that’s my starting point. There’s pieces where I think – that’s gotta be in the jacket. I’m going to put that in the front – and so I put my panel pieces there.

Aside from the Cartier town car what other amazing cars have you found?

D: A lot of the Cadillacs… the cool colors, the way they’re worn in and sun-aged, the quality of the leather, I would have to say Cadillac is my number one choice in the junkyard. Some of the older Mercedes Benz are pretty cool – it’s very distinctive – people know what it is, they know where it came from, but not a lot of Mercedes have leather – a lot of their seats are vinyl. Vinyl just doesn’t hold up.

A Mens Cadillac jacket//A Womens BMW jacket

You call the line “unprecedented,” which is a really specific and I think accurate word to use. What are some ways you would say its unprecedented?

D: Well, I think the fact that the jackets embody our culture. It’s a piece of our culture; it’s a piece of our history. When people see the jackets – the crest from the Cadillac – they’re like, how did you put that there, and I tell them, well, these are the actual seats of the car and their jaw just drops when they realize it. It’s something they can relate to – we’re a car culture. I had one girl buy a clutch because it was the same leather that was in the Cadillac of her grandma’s car. There’s a lot of sentimental value there for people. People love history. A lot of the clothing now with this whole distressed thing is like pre-worn but there’s nothing to it.

It’s not really pre-worn.

D: It’s superficial. These jackets are real, each one is one of a kind. There will never be two of the same. You can’t just call up China and be like, alright, I’m sending you some material: make 500 of these. It just will never happen because it’s way too involved.

What is your background? You seem like you have this incredibly creative streak in you…

D: I actually went to school to be a mechanical engineer …which kind of helps. It kind of translates to fashion in the sense that you’re working with a blueprint essentially – for a jacket or pants or whatever. It’s pieces you put together. I’ve always been kind of hands-on and mechanical thinking but still very creative but I never went to art school. I almost did but my parents talked me out of it.

Well, you know, parents are watching out for you…

D: Yeah, but at least by now I would’ve had a degree in something – at least art. I should’ve just followed my heart and said I’m just going to art school and but I didn’t and then I dropped out and just started working. About 5 years ago I started designing t-shirts, I was silk-screening shirts in my basement and I was selling them around town or to friends and everyone loved them. But I wasn’t really making any money – just more or less breaking even and then I realized that everybody and their mother are making t-shirts, you know? And there’s a lot of really cool t-shirts out there, how do you stand out?

So that’s how I came up with the jacket idea. I was thinking I need something to put me on the map as a designer and have people take notice of what I’m doing and know I’m serious about this! And I’m going to do this regardless of famous or rich – this is my passion.

So I read on your bio you don’t see yourself as a trend watcher, but I think that’s serving you well. You’re nailing the direction stuff is going without even realizing it.

D: You know, even when I play guitar I never play anything the same way twice. I get bored easily. If it’s not new I’m not excited about it. That drives me when I’m designing. I come up with crazy ideas. I don’t really have an end product in mind. I work with what I have and I let it dictate what it’s going to become.

Like the way I designed the shark bag: basically it was a flat bag when I designed it and in the course of taking it apart and reassembling it I accidentally switched one of the seams. Two parallel seams became perpendicular so now it stands up and it became triangular so it looks like a shark fin. It’s a unique shape so some people don’t really know what to make of it but I think it’s catching on.

The Shark bag//A Fleetwood Cadillac clutch

Aaron, how did you and Dustin meet?

A: I subscribe to Urban Daddy emails -it’s all cool guy stuff – one of the emails I got from them was about Dustin and his VIN jackets [Ed. Note. Each jacket has the actual VIN plate of the car sewn in] and I thought it was about the coolest thing I’d ever heard of! I used to collect old Cadillacs and so I initially contacted him because I wanted to buy one but the more I read the article the more I thought it’d be cool to get involved if he needed help with the marketing and promotion side of things.

So we corresponded a couple times by email and he said, I’d like to talk to you more about this, and sent me his number and it just so happened it was a 510 number! So I asked him, where are you? He said he was in Oakland, and I thought, DAMN! I’m on the other side of the hill from you! I felt like it was meant to happen, you know what I mean? He could’ve been in New Jersey for all I know. So I came to Oakland to meet him at his studio and it felt like we had known each other for 20 years.

D: Aaron is good at everything that I’m not. I like to lock myself in the basement and work on stuff and Aaron’s very social and gets us into the mix and is making things happen.

So how did you get Jamie Foxx in your jacket?

D: Aaron’s other business is called Manifest which is kind of a motto for us – when he saw that white jacket for the first time he  said, “We gotta give this to Jamie Foxx! This is Jamie Foxx’s jacket!” We had no connection there at all – it was a pipe dream. And then two months later Aaron calls me and says, “You’re not going to believe this but Jamie is playing a show at Temple Nightclub,” -  a club that Aaron helped start so he had a complete in! We basically bum-rushed Jamie in the green room!

After the show we go up there to give Jamie the white jacket. But he liked my jacket – which was a burgundy jacket – and I said, “Well, I can’t give you my jacket cause it’s the first one I made, but I’ll make you one.” So three weeks goes by I have the jacket done – it’s probably the best one I’ve made so far and it was another four months before they were back in town and we were able to give him the jacket.

We went backstage at his Concord concert to give him the jacket. When he saw us coming up to him, with Aaron holding out the jacket – “Here it is,” Aaron says – you could tell he loved it. He threw one arm in before taking off the jacket he had on. We couldn’t have been more excited as he took every picture after ours wearing his VIN jacket. It all started with us believing in something, we didn’t know how it was going to happen but we knew it was going to happen! So that’s kind of a cool story.

A. I live my life by where there’s a will there’s a way. I thought, oh, here we go again with all the planets and stars aligning – this is supposed to happen! It seems like we’ve had about a dozen of those things happen over the course of a year and half.

Jamie Foxx's jacket

Are there other celebrities you want to see wearing your jackets?

A:Yes, so far we have Jamie Foxx, Adrian Grenier & Jeremy Piven, and Darren Moore. Now we have a list of who wants our jackets, we just have to get to making them – Carlos Santana, Fergie & Josh Duhamel, and for our first supermodel, Josie Maran. I mean we want everyone who’s doing good and who we respect and admire to have a VIN jacket. It has to be someone who could actually rock a VIN jacket, some people don’t have the image or the chops to wear one.

D:Yeah, we have a saying: wear your VIN jacket, don’t let it wear you.

You gotta be able to tame that beast. I think the thing that is most impressive about your jackets is the longevity associated with them, they’ll hold the interest of the wearer forever! That’s something that’s going to get handed down in people’s wills. Any beloved items in your wardrobe like that?

D: My VIN jacket! I didn’t give it to Jamie Foxx – that night I could’ve given it to him right off of my back but I couldn’t. This is the first one I ever made.

A: It was funny because for the rest of the night we were talking about it, did we just say no to Jamie Foxx?! Was that the right move? What did we just do?

So what are other sustainable things you do as a fashion company?

D: As far as clothing when the clothing comes…I’ve been concepting a really cool approach that no one is doing. I can’t leak that one yet.

So you’re doing clothes too?

A: Definitely, we see it as something where maybe less than a year from now we could be traveling through the airport and we’ll be wearing Platinum Dirt boots, jeans, belt, shirt, jacket, hat, laptop bag…

D: And we want to do luggage as well.

With the jackets we do one jacket per car and then we use the scraps to make the bags. I’m not even throwing out the trimming left over from that cause one day I’m going to make something out of it. We just want to be responsible about everything we do.

A: Down the road we want to start using other parts of the car too. We toy with the saying that we’re “auto afterlife” product guys.

D: And we’re also developing a TV show and the whole theme of it is our journey to becoming responsible and the process of how we make the jackets. Each show we’ll gift a jacket to someone notable who is being responsible or who’s got a great idea for a new way of being green or recycling that is an easy and efficient way that other people can adopt. It’s not just a reality show…

A: It’s going to be a comedy/variety show with reality thrown in. It’s part Project Runway cause you get to see the design process but it’s part Dirty Jobs cause we’re out in the junk yard, and then it’s comedy because when we’re together it’s always comedy. There are so many crazy things that happen with us and around us…

One of the ideas is to see what’s currently being thrown away and disposed of that can be made into a viable product or even a business model or industry, like what we’re doing.

We’ve got an Oscar winner and a platinum recording artist wearing something we made from the junk yard. Something that was literally at the graveyard, on its way to being crushed and gone forever and we rescued it, polished it up and Dustin designed a gorgeous jacket out of it.

If somebody on that level is wearing and loving something we made from the junk yard, there isn’t anybody we can’t reach with what it is we’re doing.

So we’re excited – the TV show is an offshoot thing that wasn’t our primary goal but it’s taken on a life of its own. We’re shooting everything we do. Dustin, where’s your camera? Are you recording this right now?

D: Uh, yeah, right now. We just realized that everyone gets so excited about what we’re doing and they love the story behind it. We thought we should put a show together and take it to the people!

We want to show our process of becoming responsible and bring everybody with us. Cause we are in a time of change, people are wanting to change but a lot of people don’t know how. We want to try to bring everybody’s ideas together and share them in TVland.

That’s something else that no one has ever done. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a label branch out into a TV show. You are building this brand in a really unique way. To include the community like that is remarkable.

A: Our mission at Platinum Dirt is to present bold designs that are functional, beautiful, exude character and history and which inspire and intrigue today’s consumer. We started thinking about what’s the biggest impact we can make with the brand, and we thought all along it’d be a cool TV show.

Platinum Dirt Clutches

Now I’m curious about these junkyard characters you meet.

D: There are all kinds of crews in the junkyard, from all walks of life. Most of the characters we come across wonder what the hell we’re up to. We were out there one day skinning cars, we got it down now and we roll through 3 cars. We rip up one car in ten minutes, the next car we’re in and out in 15 and then the next. There’s these two guys watching this and one of them says to the other, “What are those guys doing?!” And the other one says, “I don’t know, but they just tore up three Cadillacs in the last half hour.”

And when we check out we got a wheelbarrow full of leather seats. They’re wondering, What are you going to do with that?!??! We started telling them it’s a burning man project.

If only they knew they’re talking to the vanguard of fashion. Thanks so much, Dustin and Aaron! Good luck as you take the fashion world by storm!