Nahmias was born and raised in Santa Barbara, California. “I grew up a bit of a surfer, skater, cruising around town, and that’s pretty much all I did,” he recalls, laughing. “I sucked at school.” He describes his upbringing as “really chill” and remembers that he was in high school when he started to “oddly pay attention” to what people were wearing. There are generally two kinds of fashion designers: those who get into the business with an adoration for garment making and the history of the craft—by way of legendary designers like Cristóbal Balenciaga and Alexander McQueen—and those who find their way into fashion by way of a fascination with style. Nahmias is, self-admittedly, the latter.

“I started to just digest what classmates were wearing, how someone’s oversized T-shirt or their Pro Club double-layered fit, and I would think it was so cool,” Nahmias recalls. He started thinking in the back of his head that it “could be cool to have a brand,” he says, “like any other kid, for the most part.”

With an entrepreneurial spirit, Nahmias graduated high school in 2011 and started to make T-shirts that he’d sell to friends. Aside from streetwear labels, he didn’t know designers or brands, he says, but he liked what he did and had found some momentum. He soon moved to Los Angeles, where he worked as a bartender at the Chateau Marmont and a pool boy at the Four Seasons. “I spent my paychecks, for the first couple years, just learning how to make clothes and work with patterns and sample makers, and started making pieces,” he says. This trial-and-error period led to the designer doing a small capsule with the retailer H. Lorenzo, known for helping launch menswear labels like Nahmias, in 2018. (The independent retailer was also the first in the US to stock menswear favorites A-Cold-Wall, Craig Green, and Namacheko.) He considers this the true genesis point for Nahmias, the brand.

“I still was completely clueless about what I was doing,” he recalls, laughing. “I was supposed to work [at the Four Seasons] the next day…and all my buddies were like, ‘Nah, you’re a designer now, bro. You can’t go to work.’” He’s since been running Nahmias and expanding his business one step at a time, picking up “side hustles” by helping other brands with production and manufacturing. “I hustled my way,” he says. Nahmias is entirely self-taught as a designer.

Nahmias offers the kind of laid-back clothing youngish men have adopted as a uniform over the past decade. There are some jeans with a cool wash applied to them, hoodies in interesting colors or fabrications, fun graphic tees, and some workwear re-creations. “It’s really just been this eight-year learning stretch,” he says, “but I think that’s just part of the process, especially being self-educated and just moving in the dark.” He’s learned that developing a singular language is important. “I think this past year or two, I’ve tried to not take it so seriously and have a lot more fun with it, because I kind of fell out of love for a while,” Nahmias says, speaking about how the economic challenges of running an independent label turned him off from his love of design. He’s now making sure that all he makes feels true to himself and his world.