INTERVIEW: Ben Pruess on UAS and What It Means for Millennials

After Under Armour’s debut at NYFW with its UAS Collection 01 I got to speak briefly with Ben Pruess, President of Sport Fashion for Under Armour. He was formerly the Global Vice President at adidas Originals for seven years and is partially responsible for the enormous success that brand has seen. Before entering the industry, Pruess became a mountain-shredding professional snowboarder at the age of 16.

Enjoy the interview and let’s discuss what UAS is doing in the comments below.

Noah Goldowitz for WearTesters.com: The UAS collection will, seemingly, change everything about fashion-athleisure now because it’s not what NikeLab has done, it’s not what other sportswear brands have done. Instead, Under Armour has chosen a real designer to create a fully fleshed out collection — footwear, apparel, everything. How do you see it as different from the other athleisure stuff out there?

Ben Pruess: First, I appreciate that you recognize that it is different. That was really important to us. If you know where I’ve been and what I’ve done I have a lot of respect for my history, but it was very clear that I wanted to do something new and different. When we talk about why this is the evolution of that — we’re not all twenty year old, sneaker-driven, streetwear hoodie logo consumers anymore. So this idea of beyond ambitious, the idea of modern American sportswear — when I talked to Tim about it, “Hey you know there’s this great legacy of American sportswear brands that haven’t had a real challenger in the last forty years that are edgier and cooler but still represent” — I mean everything I’m wearing —

Noah Goldowitz: Dressing like an adult.

Ben Pruess: Yeah! We don’t then want to then be an adult because we’re not going to give up our skateboard roots, we’re not going to give up where we came from, we came up with street culture. But we’re also okay that we’re not eighteen anymore — that’s okay, that’s growing up. I look at the kids, they’ve got crazy style and I love it! But eighteen is eighteen. We talk about this being for the ambitious millennial, twenty-five to thirty-five, they don’t need the pop culture guy or girl to tell them it’s cool, or the blogs to tell them it’s cool.

Noah Goldowitz: You’re letting them choose.

Ben Pruess: Yes. We want them to feel empowered. We’ve got as authentic of a designer as it gets. The guy cut his chops at the best fashion school in the world.

Noah Goldowitz: And his collections have been very successful.

Ben Pruess: And that’s because he really is walking that line. Like what happens afterwards? Streetwear isn’t going anywhere. But not everybody is part of that community because we grow up. I was talking to VICE earlier — that’s now mainstream media! Because it talks to that new generation.

Noah Goldowitz: Everything that is subculture — punk, for example — eventually becomes mass culture. Adorno and Horkheimer wrote about that in “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception” during World War II.

Ben Pruess: It’s a reflection of the generational changes. We’ve got a lot of respect for those American legacy sportswear brands but we wanted one that reflected our generation — the one that grew up with street culture, sneaker culture, fashion culture. The one that grew up skateboarding, the one that grew up seeing athletes as celebrities.

Noah Goldowitz: The price point, it’s from about $200 to $500, correct?

Ben Pruess: $200 is too high. The Chinos are $129, and we have a whole Prime collection that’s $49, $59, $69. Obviously, Under Armour made a compression shirt and we wanted to make sure that we had performance sportswear.

Noah Goldowitz: But in the original presser for this collection it was explicitly said that this was not for the gym. So if it’s not for the gym, it’s to dress like an adult in the clothes you feel comfortable in?

Ben Pruess: Yes.

Noah Goldowitz: It seems like this may be just the jump off point of you [Under Armour Sportswear] changing the entire high-fashion industry because this is high-fashion, produced by a large sportswear company, for a certain price. How does that affect the rest of what Under Armour will be doing?

Ben Pruess: We have opportunity to elevate the Under Armour brand and to extend its reach, not just from the performance world — we make the best cleats on the planet, Cam Newton’s a beast, we all know what Steph has done, we know what Jordan has done — but the fact is we also have to cross over into fashion, cross over into culture. That’s what a lot of this [UAS] helps to start to do.

Noah Goldowitz: When you say “moving into the fashion world,” where do you see this going for Under Armour? Is Under Armour going to become a huge part of the fashion world? Will it eventually eclipse the fashion world?

Ben Pruess: Well first we focus on being an “and brand,” we’re not an “or brand.” The consumer today doesn’t want great looks or comfort — high fashion or innovation. They want both. The fact that we can come in and have the authenticity of innovation, of technology — not just taping something on to it and calling it tech — but really having a whole company dedicated to finding innovative fabric, interesting construction techniques, and blend that with the authenticity.

Noah Goldowitz: So which technologies from the actual tech lines have come into the UAS line? The RLS Boot, for instance, is actually the Fat Tire redesigned.

Ben Pruess: If you look at the whole quilted program we did with the transition program — all of that glued and fused down quilting — which you can’t do traditionally. Traditionally, down quilting is you put a down bag in and you stitch it and that makes some pretty consistent constraints about how you can do down patterns. The fact that we went to super innovative fabrics, super innovative construction, where all of a sudden you can get this unique look — does all the things down does, so it keeps you warm, it’s light, it’s compressible — but it’s a fused down jacket and nobody else is doing it. Then it’s put together in the aesthetics of a blazer, a coat, a vest, that’s very similar to what we’ve done with the Fat Tire.

Noah Goldowitz: What about the knit materials that Under Armour has been using across the footwear line, are those eventually going to come to the UAS side of things?

Ben Pruess: It absolutely will but it’s also up to Tim —

Noah Goldowitz: His creative vision.

Ben Pruess: His creative vision, and him having this bigger toolkit! He’s got this toolkit of amazing, innovative, authentic fabrics that he gets to draft out of. He’s using them where it makes sense. The good thing is he knows where they go. If you want to talk about how to construct a garment or how to use an innovative knit, he knows them because he’s actually worked on the performance side. He’s not just like, “Oh this looks nice,” he knows the properties.

Noah Goldowitz: Thank you for your time Ben.