Bilgehan ‘Han’ Ates has an unusual approach to anyone attempting to buy more than one of his products. He does everything he can to persuade them not to.

“We try to make them understand that they don’t need it,” he says. “I didn’t open this place to produce more and more stuff. I opened it to make a difference.”

Sell less stuff. It’s not your standard business model. But it is one that sums up the ethos of Ates and his company Blackhorse Lane Ateliers, rather well.

Blackhorse Lane Ateliers is on a mission to make the best handcrafted denim in the world. Geographically speaking, you may already be familiar with denim and its position on the world map.

Most people know that jeans were invented in America. Others know that, these days, the really good stuff comes from Japan. 

Blackhorse Lane Ateliers, on the other hand is based in Walthamstow, the penultimate stop on London’s northbound Victoria underground line, in a grey and industrial part of the east the city that has so far proved impervious to the gentrification and the hipster rebranding of its neighbouring postcodes.

“The two ways we can compete against Japan and America are artistically, in design, and also in quality,” Ates explains one morning in BLA’s tastefully renovated 1920s factory building, packed with clacking sewing machines and the murmurs of his workforce busying themselves with scissors and rolls of fabric.

Ates bought this building in 1996 – initially as a general tailors. It rebranded as Blackhorse Lane Ateliers in 2016 with a focus on premium denim. Ever since it has tried to keep everything it does in-house. Every single pair of BLA jeans are made here, on-site from this single workshop.

The company concentrates on improving the finishing and functionality of jeans in every way possible, rather than relying on the templates of established styles of the brands we’re all familiar with. 

Though BLA’s collection currently runs to 19 different styles of men’s jeans, and 9 for women, there are a few design characteristics they tend to share.

BLA focuses on ready-to-wear selvedge and organic raw denim. Their jeans tend come with a ‘heritage-style’ waistband construction, lined back pockets, copper buttons and rivets, and are constructed using a one-piece button fly, an uncommon detail.

The way Blackhorse Lane jeans are cut is important too, hitting the sweet spot between slim and tapered, while also prioritising comfort. The denim they produce is simultaneously substantial and soft, with the idea it will maintain its silhouette for years to come.

BLA’s denim is sourced from Italy and Japan and weighs between 13oz and 16.25oz and comes in raw, indigo selvedge, or cone ecru (denim’s natural colour.)

The happiness of Ates’ staff is important, with fair wages and an emphasis on good working conditions. (An in-house chef, operating from an on-site kitchen, ensures the team eats together every Friday.)

Blackhorse Lane Ateliers functions as a factory, an HQ, a studio and a shop all at once. People aren’t just welcome to wander in from outside – they’re actively encouraged to do so.

At a time when sweatshops are hidden away and operate as a red flag to the global media for their lack of transparency and horrible working conditions, BLA is the opposite – you can literally wander around the workstations and have a chat with the staff. If you’re a customer, it means you can experience for yourself how your jeans are cut, sewn and stitched together. 

Expanding on the brand’s community concept, on Friday and Saturday evenings – and all-day Sunday – anyone is invited to make a reservation at SlowBurn, BLA’s pop-up restaurant, where Michelin-starred chefs serve menus that have included whole Cornish sole with capers and parsley beurre noisette and braised pork belly finished in a sticky aromatic glaze with pak choi. You dine among the cutting machines.

There is also a neighbouring indigo garden where it is possible to grow your own indigo plants from seeds. “And six or seven months later you can dye your own indigo jeans or t-shirts, from the plants,” grins the boss.

Ates’ mission is to eliminate the barrier between the factory floor and the consumer sides of the business. He wants as many locals – and non-locals – to come by as possible, to witness what he’s achieved with BLA, to admire his skilled machinists and to take his workforce as inspiration for what’s possible in other industries. (And what was once typical of industry in Walthamstow generally.) 

“We opened this factory 27 years ago,” Ates says. “When we first opened it was a double-glazing factory, it was all metals and welding – it was a very dark, gloomy place. When we took over, we created this open space, we painted everything white and we set up the machinery. Within three weeks, we employed 85 people. This was in 1996.”

Manufacturing was thriving in the area. 

“We had so much expertise in Walthamstow. I think we had over 5,000 small-to-medium sized garment factories in north-east London. Fast-forward to around 2000-2001, eastern Europe was becoming popular, China was opening and the high streets started to say, ‘Look, outside the UK there is cheaper labour. We want cheaper.’” 

Ates was in his early 20s and he had built a decent reputation as a tailor, producing suits for premium high-street tailors. But the shift in attitudes pushed him abroad – first to Turkey and then to China, as demand for the highest margins and the cheapest labour increased exponentially with globalisation. 

“By the time I ended up in Hong Kong we were producing about 40,000 garments a week. Huge, huge production. But my family was here in the UK, so there was this sense of disconnectivity. I was miserable. I missed my kids. So I came back.”

After a year of travelling the world with his children (he took them out of school to do so), he set up a restaurant in London’s Stoke Newington. There he realised what a sense of community a venture like that could bring him.

“When people live in London, mostly they don’t even know the names of their own neighbours, right? But within a year of opening that restaurant – within a year! – I started to get to know every single neighbour, their grandfathers, their grandchildren, their uncles… because they were all coming to the restaurant to celebrate birthdays, anniversaries, you know? By opening that restaurant I felt rooted in that community.”

Ates realised that with community comes accountability. So he returned to the factory he’d abandoned two decades ago, and resolved to focus his efforts on a specialism – premium denim. And this time everything he did would be totally transparent. Blackhorse Lane Ateliers was born.

There was just one problem: the ready-made workforce he’d so easily recruited in 1996 no longer existed.

“We started putting adverts out – machinists, pressers, managers… within about six months we were only able to employ six people. So within 20 years, all that know-how disappeared, the industry disappeared… what a change.”

It’s taken a few years to build it all back up again.

But Blackhorse Lane Ateliers has done such a good job of doing so, it has literally put London on the global map for denim. (‘Jeans, Made in the… UK?’ boggled The New York Times recently, in mock coals-to-Newcastle outrage. ‘The British are coming for the United States denim market.’)

Now Ates and his team say that BLA stands for three distinct things.

Quality: using a mix of tailoring innovation and heritage construction to create what they believe to be the best jeans in the world – certainly the only jeans made in London for at least 50 years.

Community: in their attempts to grow the maker community in Walthamstow, they offer shared ownership in the business to each employee. Plus, of course, the pop-up restaurant and the indigo garden serve as great outreach projects to spread the word.

And finally, eco-consciousness. With their lifetime repair policy, BLA hope to discourage fast fashion and reduce environmental impact. The reverse of the pile-them-high, sell-them-cheap high street business model.

But all this would only get Ates so far, were the product he makes not world class.

To prove his point, he fetches a book down from the shelf.

'Jeans of the Old West: A History’ by Michael Harris. Featuring many black and white photos of 19th century denim literally dug up from the Old West frontier areas of California, it focuses on antique snapshots of original ‘Miners’ denim’, worn in communities around Nevada and San Francisco.

But Ates isn’t some oddball denim hunter obsessed with finding the provenance of the world’s oldest and most eBay-able pairs of jeans. It’s the construction of these things he’s interested in.

“Look,” he says, pointing to a decomposing pair of trousers. “This patented single-piece fly was created in 1874. Incredible! And look inside [the jeans]. None of the edges are unfinished. And these are things no one ever saw, because they were on the inside. I was trained as a tailor. When I buy jeans by [name of famous brand], I can’t wear them. Because when you are a tailor, they teach you to produce garments without raw edges. I always hated my jeans! And when I saw this… people were producing this quality in 1874. So something has gone wrong along the way.”

“What we are making here,” he says. “These garments are how jeans used to be made.”

Turn a pair of Blackhorse Lane jeans inside out and there’s not a messy stitch in sight. All the edges are neatly tucked in, using well-earned tailoring techniques you’re more likely to find inside a pair of Savile Row trousers.

This winter, Ates and the Blackhorse Lane team will be dedicating two or three days a month to work with fashion students.

“Why is that important?” he asks, rhetorically. “For many reasons. We have one of the biggest and most successful reputations for fashion students in the world. But fashion designers… they don’t know anything about denim. They don’t understand denim! They don’t understand how denim works and reacts. So we are going to try and teach them what has been forgotten.”

“It’s up to us to help make London the talk of the world,” he says. “At least when it comes to denim.”