“If you can dream it, I can make it”

by Gene Fowler 

The landscape of the American West, draped throughout the world in Wild West shows, teevee terrain and the panorama of the silver screen, has stirred the European imagination for 150 years. It certainly did so for Milen Krastev, the mad tailor of Varna, Bulgaria on the Black Sea. 

“We grew up liking American Western movies and wanting to go to the States,” he explains. “My roots are Bulgarian and there is a certain power to the colors and patterns in our textiles, but I like the western influence, the Native American art, the handmade stuff. All of that together as a texture and graphic language really speaks to me.” 

Today, Milen hangs his hats in Whitefish, Montana, where he hand creates cool boots, custom clothes, belts, bags, home goods, wallets, motorcycle seats, nut cups and holy moly, who knows what all. Crazy like a fox, he calls the coast-to-coast, home-based business Mad Leather. “If you can dream it…I can make it.” 

This House of Mad is a family affair. Milen works alongside his American wife, Jenny Krasteva (the “a” appended to the surname is a Bulgarian gender tradition), who he first met at fashion school in San Francisco. Daughter Yoli has modeled Milen’s “mad moto” jacket and their two younger kiddos, Mia and Derek, are future Mad Leather models. The couple breathed rarefied air in the heights of the New York and European high-fashion world for several years before sheltering in Jenny’s native Big Sky Country sometime before COVID roared across the seas in 2020. 

You’ve seen Milen’s leather creations on television shows like Saturday Night Live and The Get Down and in films like Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Magic Mike XXL and Zoolander II. Sting recently took the stage at his Las Vegas residency in one of Milen’s eye-popping, one-of-a-kind Mad Leather outfits. He also makes mad stuff for country singers, Navy Seals, fine art photographers and all kinds of regular folks. 

Milen honed his skills tailoring and constructing garments from a variety of materials back home in Varna, Bulgaria, in the early 1990s. When a friend in the ‘hood wanted expensive Burton snowboarder gear, a Champion vest or a tagged Subwear jacket as seen in a Backstreet Boys video, the Mad man studied freeze frames of VHS tapes to get the styling just right. Complete with bogus logos, the counterfeit fashion items went out the door at 50 bucks a pop. 

Krastev then spent several years earning an engineering degree from the Naval Academy in Varna. Navigating the Black Sea historically, it appears, could be a tricky proposition. The ancient Greeks called it Pontus Axeinus, or the “inhospitable sea,” because it was reportedly difficult to navigate and because hostile tribes lived along its shores. 

When Milen Krastev took to the Black Sea, he was sailing upon the same waters that, legend has it, Jason and the Argonauts traversed in search of the Golden Fleece on the shores of the current Republic of Georgia. Milen’s hometown and birth nation are similarly steeped in romance and lore. While Greece is commonly seen as the birthplace of European civilization, at least one popular source accords that distinction to Varna, with 6,000 years of history and prehistoric culture. Gold found in a local cemetery’s graves, during an archeological excavation that began in 1972, indicated, according to a 2016 Smithsonian article, that the graves are “the first evidence of social hierarchies in the historical record.” 

All of which had to mark Milen Krastev as a remarkable kinda dude when he landed in San Francisco in late 1999 and enrolled in the Academy of Art University, where he received a master’s degree in menswear design in 2003. By the time Jenny arrived from Montana, to enroll in the School of Fashion at the university, Milen had become a mad professor there, teaching students to drape, cut, sew and manipulate the mysteries of flat patterns. The demanding curriculum at AAU, Jenny told a reporter for the Flathead Beacon, whittled her freshmen class of 900 down to 60 at graduation. Her relationship with Professor Krastev blossomed after both had relocated to New York. 

In the Big Apple, where folks sometimes called tall drink o’ water Milen “Woody” (the long-legged cowboy in the movie Toy Story) for his ever-present cowboy hat, boots and vest, he set up his tailoring and custom clothing shop on 38^th Street, in the heart of the garment district. “It’s a 25-square-block area and I was right in the middle of it,” he recalls. “There were so many brands all around that it was like fishing with dynamite. I had plenty of work. Sometimes, I’d even have to lock myself away to get it all done.” 

Jenny was soon working with the kind of heavy-duty fashion icons my wife and I have gawked at while oohing at the TV show Project Runway here in the sticks: Zac Posen, Carolina Herrera, Hervé Pierre, etc. Then one day in 2015, she received a call from a lady headhunter with a German accent. Before they could say “Hohe Mode!” Jenny and Milen found themselves living in a small town near Stuttgart, where she became senior head of creative at Hugo Woman, a branch of the German uber-fashion house Hugo Boss. In 2018, as they began to think about moving back to the USA, she created the spring/summer collection for Hugo Boss, one of several she helped produce after becoming vice president of design at the company. 

In Germany, the mad tailor descended into the basement and bunkered down before the computer screen to delve deeply in the mojo of the hides. Milen’s interest in working with the material had been awakened when he stumbled into a Tandy store in Palo Alto, California, back in 2005. Jazzed by the world he encountered there, the mad professor took up tooling. “I took traditional carving and worked to give it a twist, to make it mine,” he recalls. He was riding motorcycles a lot and started making custom leather seats for bikers. And that’s when his first insanely brilliant handle was born, Mad Tailor. 

A decade later, in subterranean Deutschland, he discovered YouTube tutorials by Oklahoma bootmaker Lisa Sorrell and others. “She sent me my first lasts and I started trying to make boots. My early failures gave me a good sense of what is quality and what is crap. Later, after I met more bootmakers in person, I really began to discover the beauty and functionality of the boots.” 

For the cowperson footwear Milen creates today, he uses a sewing machine only on the uppers. “Everything else is done by hand.” And that includes the unique braided stitch he uses on the welt. “I learned that from New York bootmaker Holly Henry. I think she’s originally from Texas and apprenticed with Jim Brainard at JB Custom Leather in Colorado.” 

If you ask Milen what kind of work he most enjoys doing today, he first says, “Western wear, cowboy boots, things that are tooled and customized to the brim. They’re a personal kind of release for the soul. They’re more visual, creative, artistic.” And who could give a peppier testimonial about a pair of cowboy boots than a Montana-bred Navy Frogman? 

“These kick-ass boots are a lifetime memento!” says Eric “Olly” Oehlerich. “After 14 years of marriage, my wife wanted to get me something to remember the 20-plus years of work I shouldered as a U.S. Navy Frogman. Hailing from the mountains of Montana and being a bit prone to wearing ‘shit kickers,’ a set of cowboy boots was a natural fit. Speaking of a natural fit, Milen was the perfect sculptor. The boots fit like a glove and the hand-crafted Frogman symbols remind me of those long, hard operations in the mountains of Afghanistan and deserts of Yemen.” 

And while his cowboy boots are Montana-Mad, Milen’s zippered ankle boots also make for some sweet feet. Shreveport-based country singer Dan Smalley sports a pair with stitched scorpions, serpents and other animals. “When I met him,” says Milen, “and measured his feet, we discovered that we both have a thing for scorpions.” 

After rhapsodizing about boots as his most enjoyable work project, the Mad Leather man adds, “I probably enjoy making jackets the most. They’re some of my favorite things to create – coats and jackets.” 

I’d imagine that all fine art photographers are people with precise requirements for just about everything in life. The ones I know sure are. “People say my Mad Leather camel wool jacket looks like it was made for me,” says Montana fine art photographer Mandy Mohler. “That’s because it was! And Milen nailed the fit just by looking at me. It literally dresses up anything I’m wearing.” 

Like all makers of custom garments, the leather artist normally likes to measure clients in person, see their faces, hear their stories. That’s often not possible when working with celebrities. In those transactions, he usually collaborates with their stylists and fittings are conducted virtually. That was the case with the yellow lambskin jacket and copper pants made of calf hide and glazed with orange foil that he made for Sting. Milen also made leather corsetry for reality TV star Kourtney Kardashian. I’ll just leave that here. 

Mostly though, the couple has grown philosophical about interacting with those humans who have become so stinkin’ famous that they appear to exist in some parallel universe. “I think celebrities are kind of easy for me now,” says Milen. “I’m beyond being influenced or starstruck. I just do my work and we end up being pretty okay friends at the end of it. They are quick—they want this and that—you work with their stylists most of the time and the pieces are pretty simple, but meticulous. That’s what makes them unique and easy to work with. They know what they want.” 

Milen is adaptable to most any kind of client, but you still wonder if he’s more in his groove when working with an individual that doesn’t have to be so guarded and insulated as a celebrity often does. “People inspire me,” he avows. “Usually, my work starts with the initial idea from the customer or client…and then I just elaborate with my experience and capabilities and that’s when we kind of collaborate into the final details of me making it.” 

I think working with leather centers the Bulgarian madman and keeps him chill and down to earth. “Leather doesn’t repeat itself,” he says. “That’s the beauty of it. I also like it for its resiliency. It’s delicate, but strong at the same time. It has a different texture and feel than fabric and you have to work it a little bit differently, too. Leather produces much better results, I think, than fabric. It’s like it’s just ready and willing to be transformed into something.” 

He sources veg-tanned hides from Hermann Oak in St. Louis. “They’re the best for tooling,” he testifies. Python and other serpentine skins are acquired from Pan American Leathers in New York. Exotics like gator arrive in Whitefish from American Tanning and Leather in Griffin, Georgia. “Alligator, to me,” Milen opines, “is the epiphany of all leather.” 

“Our business today is pretty much word of mouth,” he says when asked about relocating to a small Montana town. “People recommend me and that’s how I get calls. I try to stay connected with a circle of people: designers, costume designers, stylists, people who genuinely purchase custom pieces. I also post my work and process on Instagram, and I get a lot of business from people just messaging me. We also work for some clients remotely from our contacts in New York.” 

On December 11, 2019, Milen wrote online, “Today it’s exactly 20 years since I arrived in America. Since day one, I’ve been introduced to the various forms of art and craft that defines what’s America. Here I’m now making cowboy boots, one of the most artful leather wearable art in my humble opinion. Still a better tailor than a bootmaker, but I’m doing my best.” 

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