DARTZ Department of Opulence: Royal Coaches to Bulletproof Fashion

“Place where expensive things became priceless.” That is how DARTZ introduces its Department of Opulence, and it has a long history to back the line.

Royal coaches, 1869

DARTZ traces the department to the Russo-Baltic works, founded in Riga in 1869 to build railway carriages, including coaches for Europe’s royal households. Their interiors were made in its own workshops, which grew, DARTZ says, into a separate atelier. It went on to cars, and to uniforms for drivers and pilots.

A uniform for Sikorsky

DARTZ’s proudest story from those years is a bulletproof leather uniform made for Igor Sikorsky, the RBVZ engineer who became the father of the helicopter. DARTZ adds a second name to the story: relatives of Jacob Davis, born Yakov Yufess in Riga and later the co-inventor of jeans in America, worked at the works, on royal train interiors and on that uniform.

Asleep, then revived

After the revolution, DARTZ says, the department lay dormant for decades. Leonard F. Yankelovich revived it with DARTZ, and with it a rule that DARTZ creates its own designs rather than tuning other people’s.

Interiors

Every DARTZ cabin passes through the Department. Its materials are natural only: NaturReal Ⓓ leather, from alligator and stingray to python, real wood, and metal, including gold. Buttons are gold-plated or titanium, not plastic. As its founder told the BBC, in the workshops that once made objects for the tsars, even screws could be engraved with the owner’s name, unseen, but the owner would know.

Bulletproof fashion

The Department also makes clothes that protect. DARTZ produces bullet-protected garments, and says its protected hoodie is both lighter and better protected than Sikorsky’s uniform: the same idea, a century of technology later.

Why it exists

DARTZ’s argument is that “luxury” can be bought in any shopping mall, so it no longer says anything about the owner. The Department’s job is to make what cannot be bought there: things that will not be copied because they are made for one person. Read why DARTZ says opulence.