An Interview with mfpen’s Sigurd Bank

The founder and creative director on striking fabric gold, balancing boring with exciting, and potential expansion plans.

Goddamn do I love mfpen. For me it started with a shirt; a relatively inconspicuous garment with an electric blue track stripe on a crisp white base. That combined with the fit, though, is what got me. Slightly slouchy but never frumpy or comically oversized, the conservative banker-ahh pattern had been re-contextualized with a contemporary shape that slid seamlessly into a closet that was leaning evermore toward a plain-but-weird affinity buttressed by other contemporary Scandinavian, Japanese, and American brands we all know and love.

What I thought was, for a bit, just a shirting brand, kept applying that boring/exciting tension to expanding categories. Grey trousers that drooped perfectly, grungy long-sleeve tees that flowed elegantly, tough outerwear with sexy details, a fuckin’ Western belt made with crocheted recycled cotton that I proclaimed accessory of the year. It didn’t take long for mfpen to become a component of every day’s fit.

To get a deeper appreciation of the big brain work and creative thinking that goes into building up an exceptional brand at such a considered pace, I hit up the homie Sigurd Bank to ask about the sourcing process, obsessing over textile and fit, and how mfpen strikes a balance between boring and exciting.