When Pete Drago and David Boger came to Denver from Montana in 2002, they found a city of people that shared their same passions. Outdoor adventurers, beer obsessives, mogul mavens and concert junkies all were here and often were the same person.
But there was one passion that their fellow Denver man didn’t share: fashion. Utilitarian flannel and blue jeans have long been the average Denver dude uniform, a vestige of the cowboy West that Boger and Drago wanted to reinterpret, if not upend.
“They’ll go blow $50 on craft beer a night but wear the same REI T-shirt they have for eight years,” Boger, 38, said. “But that’s one of the reasons I liked Denver, too. It wasn’t pretentious.”
Seeing a fallow field and a challenge, they dreamed up Jiberish the following year, a men’s lifestyle/athleisure brand that catering to Denver’s young city-to-mountain set. They bought 12 T-shirts and 12 hoodies for $481, branded them with their logo and handed them out. (The company switched to cut-and-sew clothes soon after.)
Denver may still have a ways to go before becoming a regular in Esquire, but Jiberish has single-handedly made strides boosting the city’s stature in the streetwear/athleisure niche. From a bootstrapped operation run out of Boger’s living room, the company moved into a chic new RiNo flagship store last summer and is now distributed to brick-and-mortar retail stores in 10 countries.
On Monday, Jiberish unveiled its highest-profile move yet: a 10-piece “capsule” collection for the Colorado Rapids. It’s the league’s fifth capsule so far, a collaboration that pairs a boutique clothing outlet to design a custom line of gear for its local MLS team.
The collaboration came together over a drink at a wedding Drago attended in Mexico last year. He struck up a conversation with his wife’s friend about streetwear and music. The friend turned out to be the vice president of the legal department for Major League Soccer. He asked Drago if he’d be interested in teaming up with the Rapids for the MLS’s latest capsule.
“I thought this was bar talk,” Drago, 39, said, “like when you’re talking about vacations to Belize. Stuff that never happens.”
To his surprise, it did happen. The league followed up with Jiberish — which Rapids players like Shkëlzen Gashi and Tim Howard had already had on their fashion radar — and the brand’s latest line was born.
Contrasting the clean, modern approaches that Portland’s Reigning Champion and Only NY took in their capsules, Jiberish slants retro for its re-imagining of the Rapids. A half-zip hoodie pays homage to the team’s roots in the mid-90s, for example, while a checkered rugby shirt harks back to the infancy of the sport itself.
The pieces are available at noon local time May 3 on Jiberish’s website and on May 5 at Dick’s Sporting Goods Stadium, when the Rapids take on the Vancouver Whitecaps.
The crossover with the Rapids is only the latest field the brand has welcomed under its umbrella. Thanks to a boots-on-the-powder presence on the slopes and a popular series of snowboard videos online, the company is first and foremost associated with winter sports. (Drago sold Jiberish’s first tee to a snowboarder out of his truck in a parking lot in Breckenridge. “Our marketing strategy has changed considerably since then,” he said.)
“We would just go to Breckenridge, hang out at these big contests and wear our stuff,” Boger said. “People started asking about it, and we were OK at skiing and snowboarding, so we didn’t look totally out of place.”
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From there, Jiberish branched out into music, a long-time passion for both cofounders. Denver producer Pretty Lights, an early adopter of the brand, partnered with Jiberish on a line of New Era hats which have sold for hundreds of dollars on eBay, according to Drago. Since then, the company has fully integrated electronic and hip-hop into its brand, debuting stadium-toppling duo ODESZA’s first mixtape and proving a hot spot for hall-of-fame rappers like Raekwon and Method Man, who’ve been spotted at the shop in years past.
With the Rapids in tow, Jiberish has further realized the much bigger brand alignment that Boger and Drago began when they first moved here from Montana.
“I firmly believe Denver is responsible for our success. (Jiberish) wouldn’t exist without it,” Drago said. “New York, Chicago, L.A. … We give them a part of the world they vacation in or dream about as a lifestyle. There’s a cool factor.”