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"  Three sixteen West Pico Boulevard, just off the Santa Monica Freeway, is a former cigar factory turned loft with large grated windows, imposing brick walls, an outdoor wooden deck with patio furniture, and a honey-colored roaming pit bull mix named Louie. Inside, 18 or so employees sit at desks that line the 5,400-square-foot space, facing the center of the room. If you listen closely, you can hear the quiet, steady hum of music coming from a dozen headphones. &amp;quot;The big, open space was important to me,&amp;quot; says Rosella Giuliani, the creative director of 1969, Gap&amp;#039;s two-year-old denim sub-brand, which moved into the studio last year. &amp;quot;I didn&amp;#039;t want to create offices where if you work at a certain level, you have this-size office. I want it to feel like we&amp;#039;re all in this together; we all succeed, or we all fail\u2014and hopefully we won&amp;#039;t fail.&amp;quot; When it was launched in 1969, The Gap spoke to younger customers, its name referring to the generation gap between those who considered jeans sensible everyday wear and those who did not. But those young people turned into young professionals who turned into parents who dressed their children in Gap jeans for the first day of school\u2014and those children, perhaps in rebellion, grew up to spend upward of $500 on designer denim. With 1969, as its name suggests, the company is getting back to the very things that earned it the youth vote in the first place: a well-made product at an honest price point ($60\u2013$80), no longer strictly classic blue jeans, but modern cuts and refined fabrications set to challenge the premium denim that has been dominating the market. On a recent Monday afternoon, Giuliani, a former VP of merchandising and design at 7 for All Mankind who joined the brand last year, is wearing gray cheetah-print Gap 1969 skinny jeans with a V-neck tee. A slim, attractive brunette in her forties with a flirtatious voice eerily similar to that of Susan Sarandon, Giuliani is reviewing styles from the holiday collection, massaging each fabric with the precious manner of someone handling fine cashmere: skinny jeans in a snakeskin print; stretchy jewel-tone cords; drop-crotch boyfriends; high-rise trousers; and the Audrey (Hepburn, of course), a slim, dark indigo cropped pant that&amp;#039;s already selling well in the two 1969 standalone stores, in New York and L.A. (The line is also sold at Gap stores.) Basing the design studio in L.A., far from Gap&amp;#039;s San Francisco corporate infrastructure, meant being, as Giuliani explains, &amp;quot;at the heart of the denim industry\u2014to live and breathe it.&amp;quot; Each day she dispatches in-house wash specialists to the nearby laundries (also used by premium denim brands such as 7 for All Mankind and Hudson) to return with new patterns and washes. To complement the denim, there are shearling-lined leather jackets ($445\u2013$1,200) and casual knits (around $60). &amp;quot;We&amp;#039;re always thinking, Where else can 1969 take you?&amp;quot; Giuliani says. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s a denim lifestyle, so I doubt you&amp;#039;ll ever see chiffon dresses.&amp;quot; She&amp;#039;s interrupted by Louie the mutt, who, in an appeal for attention, nudges her leg with a slobbery toy. Nearby, his owner, men&amp;#039;s design director Jason Ferro, is sorting through fabric samples with women&amp;#039;s design director Nicole King-Burroughs. &amp;quot;For me, this felt more like a start-up, because we can really revamp the 1969 look,&amp;quot; says Ferro, 38, the founder of an L.A. denim brand called Bread. Ferro is tall and tattooed with combed-back light brown hair; he plays in a local rock band, Whitley Heights. &amp;quot;As you can see, it&amp;#039;s not just about indigo anymore,&amp;quot; says King-Burroughs, 41, reciting what should be a slogan. Giuliani&amp;#039;s love affair with denim began early on. She recalls being a little girl returning to Italy for the first time with her parents\u2014her family is from the seaside city of Rimini, but she was raised in San Francisco\u2014and buying head-to-toe Wrangler outfits for the plane ride. &amp;quot;My dad had on jeans and a red checked shirt, and my mom wore a denim dress,&amp;quot; she says. &amp;quot;To get on an airplane in the &amp;#039;70s was a big deal, so you would buy an outfit and not just wear sweatpants like now.&amp;quot; She wants to bring denim back to that time, when it was a garment of cool rather than of convenience. &amp;quot;It&amp;#039;s about looking at it as no longer something you&amp;#039;re only going to wear on the weekends.&amp;quot; In L.A., people don&amp;#039;t wear jeans just on weekends. They wear them to dinner. They wear them to the beach. They wear them to meetings, evening events, and, sometimes, weddings. For Giuliani and her team, that often means leaving the office and driving around L.A.\u2014King-Burroughs wielding her iPhone camera\u2014to see what people are wearing and how they&amp;#039;re wearing it. &amp;quot;If Rosella ever feels like we&amp;#039;re all sitting behind our desks, she&amp;#039;ll be like, `All right, turn the music on,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; King-Burroughs says. &amp;quot;Or, `Let&amp;#039;s get out of the office,&amp;#039;\u2009&amp;quot; says Ferro. In search of inspiration, they hit the beach, vintage shops in West Hollywood, and speciality boutiques such as Heist in Venice. &amp;quot;You go to Hollywood, and you see girls dressing up to go out at night with their heels and their skinny jeans,&amp;quot; says Giuliani. &amp;quot;You take that same jean and put it on a girl in Silver Lake, and she has her checks on and a guy&amp;#039;s ripped tee. Then you go to the beach in Venice, and it&amp;#039;s something completely different yet again.&amp;quot; Her team doesn&amp;#039;t object to the group excursions. &amp;quot;I don&amp;#039;t think I could work here if it was a corporate environment,&amp;quot; Ferro says. King-Burroughs, who spent eight years in Gap&amp;#039;s New York office, looks over at him, inquisitive\u2014Did he forget this is the Gap?\u2014but lets it go. &amp;quot;My God! Jason in an office?&amp;quot; "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/fashion/a11809/gap-bridges-the-gapagain-609711/>