Constant Practice Is Uncovering the Most Influential Brands You’ve Never Heard of

There are a lot of ideas contained within the name “Constant Practice,” some obvious, others not so much. There’s a reference to the exhaustive amount of research the curatorial platform undergoes day after day. There’s a nod to all disciplines requiring consistency to reach some kind of creative breakthrough. There’s even a reading where the two words hew close to Nike’s maxim of there being “no finish line,” that nothing can truly be mastered or perfected. Each of these interpretations is correct.

Founded by Zeke Hemme as a Grailed account in 2016 (under the username soft_ee), Constant Practice has gone on to define an influential corner of the menswear universe. Beginning with European designers like Raf Simons and Helmut Lang before shifting to the work of Junya Watanabe, UNDERCOVER, Yohji Yamamoto and other Japanese pioneers, today Constant Practice exists as something between an archive and library for avant-garde clothing with an emphasis on experimental functionality.

Pieces otherwise thought lost to time are resurfaced in 30-second Reels that occasionally border on the absurd. A nonfunctional bathroom unironically serves as the perfect backdrop for $3,000 jackets. A droning voiceover reads out the product details while Hemme or his colleague Jonah Franke-Fuller demonstrate the item’s utility. All these concepts taken together have helped turn Constant Practice into the foremost authority on a very specific design language that seems to grow in cultural importance year after year.

It’s no surprise then that brands routinely reach out to the Virginia-based duo to get their hands on Issey Miyake vests that transform into trench coats and to pick their brains on pre-internet menswear breakthroughs. To learn more about Constant Practice’s nearly 10-year journey, we caught up with the duo over Google Meets for an hour of conversation and ’fits.