TEXT BY: Scout Motors PHOTOS: Jeff Stockwell
n 2016, after almost nine years of owning a curated menswear and vintage shop on the chic street of Abbot Kinney in Venice, California, Brian Lee found himself wondering what to do next. A simple truck changed his story.
In the parking lot of a grocery store, Lee stumbled upon an orange International™ Super Scout™ that stopped him dead in his tracks. “I remember taking photos of it and being completely mesmerized, wondering what I was looking at,” Lee says. “It was in such amazing condition, and the lines of its body were so straight, so simple— a beautiful representation of bare-bones functionality that I’d never seen before.”
Right then and there, Lee felt a fluttering in his heart that could not be ignored, and so began a frenzied hunt on Craigslist until he found a 1977 International Scout II that had sat forgotten in a farmer’s field in the Topatopa Mountains. After a few brief exchanges over the phone, Lee arranged to meet the seller in Santa Monica for a test drive. If it wasn’t the feeling of the tattered and spongy bench seat or the sound of the once dormant 304 V8 engine sputtering to life, it was watching the pavement underneath his feet fly by through the rusted-out floor pan that sold Lee. He recalled something refreshingly visceral and thrilling about how the truck meandered down the street at the slightest touch of the steering wheel and how its tired suspension communicated every little imperfection in the road. An hour and $2,800 later, he’d found his Scout truck.
"If you look hard enough, or if you look in the right places, you can still uncover the enduring value of forgotten objects..."
Lee says, “I was blessed and cursed with a limited budget for this project, so I had to do most of the repair work myself, which challenged my lack of knowledge and my threshold for frustration. But honestly, there was something about working on my truck that compelled me to break through that wall, continue learning, and keep going.”
With bruised fingers and busted knuckles, Lee pushed through his self-imposed limitations. Still, when the truck’s engine suddenly “imploded,” he needed help and turned to strangers on social media who shared this incredible infatuation with the vehicle. “There was this one guy Steve aka “Gunner” who I had been following for a while on Instagram. When I reached out and asked him to point me in the right direction, he picked up his phone, called me, and then drove his flatbed across town and towed me back to his place — he essentially had my Scout truck parked in his driveway for the month or so that it took to sort out the engine,” Lee recalls. “The local Scout Community is super gracious with resources, knowledge, and time, which is rare nowadays, especially in a place like Los Angeles.”
With a rebuilt powertrain, Lee began using his Scout truck as a mobile pop-up shop, selling vintage apparel and highly sought-after denim at flea markets and vintage car events across Southern California; the truck brought in almost as much attention as Lee’s handpicked artifacts. “If you look hard enough, or if you look in the right places, you can still uncover the enduring value of forgotten objects,” Lee tells us. “If you’re able to see it, then you can help others to see how a well-worn piece of clothing embodies the stories of a life well lived and how their clothing can do the same.”
One day at the Rose Bowl Flea Market in Pasadena, Lee came across a German tourist named Christoph taking photos of his Scout II and struck up a conversation with the man. Christoph, who had never seen a Scout truck before, wanted to know all about it and asked if Lee knew someone who might be willing to sell their vehicle. Lee knew of one in West L.A. and introduced Christoph to the owner. Three days later, Christoph bought the truck and arranged for overseas transportation. Lee continues to keep in close contact with Christoph and is grateful to have seen a stranger become a dear friend.
The delightfully charming influence of the 1977 International Scout II in Lee’s life cannot be overstated. When he opened a brick-and-mortar vintage and workwear clothing shop in downtown Los Angeles, he lovingly named it “Harvester International.” There are, of course, limited-release screen-printed tees with incredible International Scout truck illustrations sold alongside a fantastically assembled collection of vintage fashion. Lee sees something beautiful in life’s discarded things and cannot help but want to know their stories so he can share them with others. “I want people to see that these vintage pieces aren’t precious artworks but rather wearable artifacts that they can embrace as part of their lives.”
Under the Harvester International name, Lee also designs and produces a handsome line of denim workwear and outerwear which nods to the functional style of the 1950s and ’60s. He says, “I work with a small sewing factory that’s a five-minute drive from my place in Boyle Heights and I use exclusively deadstock fabrics that would otherwise end up in the incinerator. Everything is made in small runs and never produced in excess. The final product is something that I can feel proud of … something that can be worn for 30 years or 40 years and passed down through a family, you know?”
Brian Lee is a deliberate and conscientious soul, deeply aware that he’s merely a traveler in this world. Whether it’s an old Scout truck or a neglected wearable, he finds beauty in the overlooked and discarded, driven by a desire to restore what others have forgotten. What he didn’t realize is just how profoundly these objects would reshape his life — and even the lives of strangers around him — and that the value of things, like people, often lies in the stories they carry.
