Vondutch/16 inches/LK1st/mark2nd

By DANIEL TAUB

Staff Reporter

You can make them baggier or tighter, darker or lighter, with pockets or with fancy stitching, but it’s hard to improve on the classic American blue jean.

Clothing designer Mike Cassel thinks he knows a way put flames on them.

Cassel, co-owner of Venice-based apparel firm Von Dutch, has designed a line of denims with striking orange and yellow flames sewn onto the cuffs the same sort of flames usually seen on the sides of classic, custom-painted street rods.

The company’s T-shirts feature similarly iconic images of 1950s-era car culture: speeding hot rods, skeletons riding motorcycles and girls in bikinis holding wrenches.

Those designs all can be traced to the company’s branding. “Von Dutch” was the adopted name of Kenneth Howard, a near-mythical figure in L.A.’s notorious hot rod scene of the 1940s and ’50s.

Dutch, who died in 1992, is credited with popularizing pin-striping on automobiles and, more importantly to Cassel, being the first to paint flames on the sides of cars and trucks.

“They call him the father of the flame,” Cassel says.

The designs have struck a chord with a primarily teenaged audience of skateboarders, surfers, snowboarders and club-goers attracted to Von Dutch’s outlaw image.

The company, which has eight employees, generated more than $2 million in sales last year up from $200,000 in 1996, Cassel said. This year he expects the company to have between $3 million and $3.5 million in sales.

The clothes can be found mostly in boutiques, surf and skateboard shops and hip chain stores such as Urban Outfitters.

Leonard Benton, buyer at American Rag Cie. in Hollywood, which started selling Von Dutch clothing earlier this year, said the line is popular among young shoppers.

“It does very well,” Benton said. “It has a relatively low price point compared to our other lines. They’re fun, easy, kind of flashy type of things.”

Benton said the Von Dutch line is relatively affordable, with its most expensive items being flame-cuffed jeans, which sell for $73. Jackets go for $57 and wool caps about $20.

Cassel characterizes his clothing as “garage wear.” The look, which is particularly popular among teenagers, is perennial, Cassel says a fashion that has been in style for more than four decades.

“It’s a very plain, American statement,” Cassel says. “I think it’s here to stay.”

Cassel, a 36-year-old, goateed surfer and skateboarder, lives in Venice near the company’s warehouse and gets a lot of his ideas for clothing in the water or on the street, which he says helps give Von Dutch something all fashion designers crave credibility.

“Corporate business guys will not relate to it, and will not be accepted into it,” he says. “Authenticity sells.”

Part of Von Dutch’s philosophy is to make clothes that have a “bad boy” image not one associated with gangs or drugs, but rather playing off the ’50s rebel look.

“It’s part of that ‘bad-boys-gone-good’ thing we do,” Cassel said.

Cassel is something of a bad-boy-gone-good himself. A decade ago he ran with friends in Venice who were, as he says, on “the other side of the law.”

That lifestyle eventually led to an arrest for marijuana possession, which landed him in prison for two years in the late ’80s.

But Cassel says he has turned his life around since then. He married his prison pen pal, and he has since turned his fascination with outlaw culture into a motif for his clothes, rather than a lifestyle.

Besides his absence from the scene while serving time, Cassel has been toiling in the apparel industry since 1984, mostly in partnership with his brother Donald, who co-owns Von Dutch.

One of Von Dutch’s biggest challenges, according to Cassel, is maintaining its “Made in America” image. Unlike many L.A.-based clothing companies, Von Dutch manufactures all of its clothes at sewing factories in downtown and South Central L.A., rather than in Mexico, where labor is significantly less expensive.

“We’re trying our best to stay with (U.S. manufacturers) and support American-made,” Cassel said. “It’s a real dilemma because this country has (the North American Free Trade Agreement) that make it easier to do things in Mexico now.”

Meanwhile, if putting flames on blue jeans sounds unusual, consider some of Cassel’s other experiments.

This year, he stripped the material off of old couches velvet fabric with paisley designs treated and cleaned it, and made shirts and pants from it.

Cassel also is looking at developing a line of sunglasses, and wants to expand his line of women’s clothes which accounted for 10 percent of Von Dutch’s sales in 1997, but which Cassel hopes will account for more than half of its sales by next year.

Cassel intends to maintain the company’s ties to the original Von Dutch. That, he says, is what sets his company apart from the competition.

“Not a lot of companies have the story behind them the whole message,” he says.