In 2006, Justin R. Saunders was living aimlessly. He was in his early 20s, working part-time as a security guard and an art teacher, skateboarding and writing graffiti in his downtime. He did not yet know what he would do with his life. As a hobby, he started collecting images he found online, things he liked or found amusing or wished he could afford – classic cars, rare trainers, Calvin and Hobbes comics, brutalist architecture. He was as interested in the style of the ’60s and ’70s as he was in the frequencies of modern fashion and streetwear. Adulthood was looming, but he hadn’t yet let go of the things that defined his youth, and this new pastime gave him a way to arrange his feelings into a visual compendium. It was a little like the mood boards designers create to arrange their references for a new collection. Except Saunders was not yet the influential designer he is today. He was simply creating a mood board for the life he wanted to live.
Saunders’ sensibilities had been informed by an unusually worldly childhood. Born in Montreal, Canada, he spent much of his youth in Germany, where his mother, a school teacher, got a job teaching French. His family spent summers driving across Europe, camping out of their minivan. He saw the entire continent, the museums and the farmlands. It was a crucial experience for the development of his eye. But he was also a teenager, increasingly obsessed with Bart Simpson and Michael Jordan and Foot Locker. These two worlds – highbrow Europe and lowbrow America – clashed spectacularly in his mind. Just before he started high school, his family returned to Montreal, his mother having recognised that her son, who was a little socially awkward, would likely be better off back home. He fell for skateboarding and graffiti. He silk-screened T-shirts. He attempted college but decided it wasn’t for him and dropped out after two years. In his website, finally, he found a purpose.
For the name of his blog, he started with the word found – he found the images across the internet – then replaced the F with his first initial and arbitrarily quadrupled it: JJJJound, a series of images FFFFound by Justin. Saunders chose to present this library of JPEGs without any text, in one vertical scroll, arranged by colour. This was long before Instagram and Pinterest, back when the internet was still mainly the written word, and it felt a little radical. Soon Saunders was filling entire folders on his desktop with images, letting their pixels wash over him. A sensibility emerged. A certain level of taste crystallised.
More and more people began to follow his blog, which Saunders would update frequently but at random intervals, always leaving fans eagerly anticipating the next photo dump. New batches suddenly appeared, creating frenzies not unlike those surrounding a limited edition sneaker drop. Followers checked the blog constantly in hopes of finding the latest images that were, to use a term Kanye West, now Ye, would soon coin, “JJJJound-approved.”
JJJJound was not the place you went to learn about, say, the history of a Le Corbusier lounge chair or the movement of a Rolex Submariner; it was, rather, the place you went to learn that the lounger and the Submariner were the things you should know to want. In fact, JJJJound offered no expertise on anything. The project was simply one person’s attempt at defining a universal version of good taste, a kind of running manifesto. The direct explanation for what he was actually up to is a one-line description provided by Google: “A digital mood board intended to examine the recurring patterns in timeless design.”
By 2010, the Tumblr era was underway, and it seemed like there were hundreds of sites posting similar content. But JJJJound stood out for a growing online community of style-minded creatives, many of whom were beginning to network their way into careers as designers. At the time, Vincent Tsang, cofounder of the Montreal-based skate brand Dime, had a photography blog, On and Beyond, and his pictures were occasionally picked up and posted on JJJJound. “The internet was very communal,” Tsang recalls. “I feel like everyone knew each other and would actually read and absorb everything that was being published. JJJJound was awesome, the curation of images was incredible. You could just tell [Justin] had a better eye than all the other copycats. He would find better and rarer images and curate them in a way that was simply above the rest.”
Through JJJJound, Saunders landed a gig doing seasonal style round-ups for T: The New York Times Style Magazine. And he struck up an email correspondence with others who were gaining influence in the worlds of fashion and design, including Virgil Abloh. In real life, Saunders became friendly with Matt George, who ran a group of trainer and streetwear stores in Canada, and is the current partner of Stüssy’s Canadian chapter. In the mid-2000s, George began working for Ye, overseeing the development of the various brands and creative entities that Ye would launch over the years, from Pastelle to Donda to Yeezy.
Soon Saunders, too, had joined Ye’s orbit, George tells me, then going on to design merchandise for the Yeezus and The Life of Pablo tours. In 2011, Saunders became a key member of Ye’s creative team, and while most of his work for Ye remains undisclosed, he had his first major public-facing moment when he started the DJ collective and streetwear brand Been Trill with his Donda colleagues, Abloh, and the designers Matthew M. Williams and Heron Preston.
Saunders’ peers would go on to have an outsized impact on the fashion world. Abloh, who died from a rare form of cancer in 2021, became the men’s artistic director for Louis Vuitton. Matthew M. Williams is the creative director of Givenchy. But Saunders was always on his own path, both in terms of his sensibility and his ambition. He isn’t a recluse, but he has for the most part maintained a sense of anonymity that has proven rare for designers of his generation. And JJJJound has always been something of a mystery, mostly because of Saunders’ reluctance to explain it: because, guess what, the guy who builds a world from decontextualized JPEGs has never been big on using words to describe what he does. But what he’s managed over the past few years is perhaps the most JJJJound thing he could have possibly done.
Since his time with Ye came to an end, in 2018, Saunders has been in Montreal, slowly and meticulously turning JJJJound into a brand, making a line of elevated basics – T-shirts, sweatshirts, oxfords, chinos, tracksuits, mackintosh coats, baseball caps, water bottles, coffee mugs, candles, notebooks, duvet covers, folding chairs. His ambition, it seems, is to capture the timelessness and sophistication that powers his blog – the right colour palette, the right watch, the right way to wear a scarf – and make it accessible to all of his readers. In other words, he is attempting to democratise good taste.
Plenty of other designers have chosen a different, more distinguished path. But instead of moving to Europe to develop runway collections, he’s hunkered down in Montreal making the perfect pair of £150 chinos. “I’ve been offered those creative director jobs for those institutions and all these brands that you would expect,” Saunders tells me. “I always weigh it up and I just have a duty here. I can’t do both. Some people can. I can’t do it.”
When Saunders greets me on my first visit to the JJJJound studio in the middle of August, he’s dressed in the quintessential outfit of a mid-noughties streetwear art director: slim black jeans, a black crewneck sweatshirt, and a pair of JJJJound Bape Stas sneakers. He is 41, and while he’s got top-tier cool-guy credentials, his demeanour is as polite and affable as any American would presume a Canadian’s to be, with as much neurotic nerdiness as you’d expect from someone who has spent the better part of two decades collecting images online. “That would be my DJ name, right?” he jokes. “DJ JPEG.”
Though Saunders is still most readily associated with the content of his blog, it’s the stuff now being made in the JJJJound studio that has, over the past three years, elevated him to a new level of renown in the fashion world. The very first original product Saunders developed was a tote bag. He bought a roll of canvas and tried out dozens of ideas before arriving at a range of simple bags in a few different sizes. Like everything JJJJound designs, the totes look ordinary, but the material, the shapes, and the size and quality of the handles all make them the platonic ideal of the commonplace canvas bag. “We’re still making the exact same ones,” Saunders tells me. A table is covered with dozens of samples of totes in that same canvas. The brand was preparing to drop more than 40 different styles, including one just large enough to fit a bottle of wine.
Walking down a hallway that runs through the vast redbrick industrial space, each room lit by huge banks of windows and tastefully appointed with plywood furniture and potted plants, we enter the studio where JJJJound’s special projects are made – mostly trainers and other collaborations. Shelves are packed with samples and prototypes of shoes that the brand has developed. Many will never see the light of day. There I find Myles Perkins, the 29-year-old creative lead on partnerships, whose job is to mock up hundreds of iterations of the same shoe, carefully tweaking colour combinations to land on the one that is, as Saunders puts it, “hitting from an emotional standpoint.”
Saunders, who calls Perkins JJJJound’s colour chemist, has worked with him to develop a crucial tool for the brand: a Pantone rule book. Since the very beginning, colour has been JJJJound’s defining characteristic. If Saunders has a superpower, it’s his ability to use a specific shade to create a uniquely compelling aesthetic experience, whether that is on the blog or a pair of trainers. JJJJound’s hues are mostly muted, with a vintage feel – taupe, ecru, dusty blue. These colours are initially chosen based on simple matters of taste – what feels right this season. From there, as Perkins describes it: “We boil it down and synthesise it into a set of parameters for saturation or hue or brightness, lightness, and how to play within those three variables to land on an array of colours that fit well together no matter what hue it is. Our burgundies go well with our navies, our browns go well with our greens, and so on.”
JJJJound’s very existence is premised on the truism that some designs are timeless and good. The in-house edict is to either create such designs, as the brand does with its mainline collection, or to take existing designs by other brands and alter them just enough to make them special, as JJJJound does with sneakers. “We always kind of stay within five degrees of what would be considered generic,” says Perkins of the sneaker collabs. “We always pick models that have never left the production line,” explains Saunders. “Quintessential models,” adds Perkins. These trainer collaborations – with New Balance, Asics, Reebok and Vans – are by far the noisiest thing JJJJound does. They’re what keeps Saunders and the brand connected to the streetwear world that propped him up in his early years. But the “five degrees” design strategy is almost intentionally confounding. “You have to squint,” Saunders says of some shoes they’ve made. “And you’re like, I think they are just dirty.”
For Leo Gamboa, the global head of collaborations for Levi’s (who previously held a similar role at Reebok), Saunders is “a master of detail.” Gamboa started working with JJJJound when they collaborated on the 2019 release of Reebok’s Club C trainer, an iconic ’80s tennis shoe. Earlier this year, Levi’s released a JJJJound collection that includes a pair of washed 501s, as well as a denim utility jacket, shirt, and tote bag. According to Gamboa, JJJJound’s five-degrees off-centre approach is exactly what brands look for when they want to further distinguish a product that is already iconic. “Justin and his simplistic, elevated, iconic way of design made sense for the Club C, one of the most iconic tennis shoes in history,” Gamboa says. “Justin putting his slight elevation of key design points on this shoe with iconic branding – it’s super easy, but super perfect – gets at how to make something perfect better.”
At a table near Perkins’ desk there are six postage-stamp-size Pantone swatches taped into a grid. At first glance, all six appear identical to me. I would call them electric blue. Saunders asks me to choose one; the only context I’m given is that it will accent a black shoe. It’s difficult. Differences in the hues begin to emerge. One is a little hazier. One is really bright, fun, even. One feels kind of classic, like a blue balloon. I pick the one that feels right in the middle, not the brightest nor the dullest. Saunders lights up. I feel like I might have chosen correctly.
“Okay,” he says flatly. He peels the swatch off the table and hands it to Perkins. “Mock this one up for tomorrow.” Colour may be the most important part of the design process at JJJJound, but it’s also the most subjective. Saunders doesn’t like to make unilateral decisions. Everyone gets a say. Even me. “At the office,” he says, “everybody’s a muse. When I was younger I was like, ‘Oh, I’ll design for myself. I like this.’ And as the team grew, I realised, well, this is like an ecosystem. There’s all types of age groups, all types of people.” If good design is universal and timeless, then it can’t also be personal. At least not all the time. Which is one of the reasons for JJJJound’s obsessively interactive approach to designing clothes.
What’s much less peculiar and more straightforward is how JJJJound sells those clothes. Every week on its website, the brand posts new products. There is no physical shop, and there are no wholesale accounts; you can buy these items only online. Some are restocks, some are entirely new, and occasionally they include a new footwear collaboration. One recent release featured a playful collection of Crocs in shades of white and grey, adorned with brass JJJJound button hardware.
Saunders tells me new products are released when they’re finished, not as part of a collection. Things often sell out, but not on purpose: there is no manufactured scarcity. One key factor is that Saunders and his design team often take between 12 to 18 months, and sometimes much longer, to develop a single piece.
The JJJJound mainline collection is designed in a studio next to the special projects room. Here, a team led by 30-year-old designer Elias Mihailides works on a handful of painstakingly crafted basic menswear items. Saunders tells me that every piece they make “has to have a purpose.” We’re not talking about waterproof jackets for the rain or slick trousers for work. Purpose, to Saunders, is a complicated proposition, particularly for a brand that makes five different hoodies in the same colour, and, soon, three versions of a nearly identical tracksuit. “Well,” Saunders says of the latter example, “it’s because one of them is for the retired player. One of them is for the fans in the stands. And one of them is for the player going to and from the game.”
One employee recently questioned the existence of a heavy fleece hoodie, saying, “I don’t know where I’m going to wear this. Where am I going to go? Hunting? In the future? On skis?” To which Saunders said: “Well, I don’t know. But if you catch the bus in winter, and you’re in your 20s, this is legit.”
Earlier this year, a few JJJJound staffers pushed for hoodies in bright primary colours. This was a radical expansion of the JJJJound colour universe, and Saunders was willing to give it a try. So they released sweatshirts in bright blue, yellow, and red. While the blue and yellow found their audience, the red foundered. Saunders admits he never understood who the red might be for: “Maybe a fireman? On vacation?”
Crucial to the design process is wear-testing, which is one big reason why the development of a piece takes so long at JJJJound. A pair of wool trousers that sat in the “Let’s figure this out” pile for three years is finally being sampled and worn by staffers. A pair of nylon trousers and matching jacket should be nearing the end of the development cycle after almost 18 months, but there is still much to be workshopped. “This one’s been with us for a long time,” Mihailides says wearily. “We’ll work it until it’s good,” adds Saunders. “But we’re having fun.”
At its core, JJJJound isn’t just about making a cool pair of nylon trousers. It’s a kind of experiment: how can you come up with an interesting design that is just five degrees away from something ordinary? Such an operation can only succeed with a steadfastly uncompromising individual at the helm. Despite the collaborative nature of JJJJound’s design process, that’s ultimately what Saunders is – a guy in a room with a big idea. Too much compromise, he tells me, leads to “nothing that anybody wants, a hundred per cent.”
His exacting vision puts him in a lineage with such rigorously minimal designers as Margaret Howell and A.P.C.’s Jean Touitou. “Justin brought me back to my 1987 work, the year I started A.P.C.,” Touitou tells me. When A.P.C. and JJJJound did a collaboration in 2019, Touitou said in a conversation with Saunders that he was jealous of the Montreal designer’s process. “The work he does was the work I was doing before this store existed,” he said. “Which was taking a piece of fleece or gabardine and studying it like a mad scientist.”
Vincent Tsang thinks that what makes JJJJound’s work great is “the amount of work they are putting into creating simplicity,” he tells me. “Simplicity is really, really hard to nail. They always find the perfect hues, the best material for their products. And not accepting 90 per cent, but really getting it as close as possible to 99.9 per cent is what makes the difference between JJJJound and the others. The execution is always spot-on.”
But the true brilliance of JJJJound might be something that no one saw coming, not even Saunders. JJJJound was an education for the internet. It was a visual guide to the rules and patterns of good design that Saunders has lately been employing with the products he’s developed. He spent years building a customer base, drawing them into his world with images long before he ever thought about making clothes. And now he sits at another pivotal moment. There are a number of ways he might grow the brand, including expanding JJJJound’s distribution channels in Europe, where demand is high. Physical retail stores might also be on the horizon. “I’ve never got to this level of the video game,” he tells me. The blog worked without words, but the brand now has a story to tell. “With my approach to things, how do we communicate that the product’s good?” he says. “I’m not very forthcoming. I’m kind of a shy individual, more private. But a lot of people want to know more.”
JJJJound is very much a product of the 2008 internet, and Saunders is finally thinking about what that means in 2023. He’ll get there eventually. He won’t disclose any financial details for the brand, other than to say that it has been growing organically throughout the past couple of years. He doesn’t dig into the analytics for the brand too deeply, either, he says, but there are two metrics he’s proud to share: the returning-customer rate is super high, and the customer returns rate is really low. People who buy JJJJound come back again and again, and they like what they buy enough to keep it. For now he’s content to enjoy that success.
“We can have our moment where we’re like, Good job,” he says. “And everybody’s stoked. We all go home and we just chill, do whatever else. And then the next day we’re like, man, we really got to do good on this one. Got to pick the blue perfectly.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the November 2023 issue of GQ with the title “How JJJJound Defined Good Taste for the Internet Era”
