New PF26, Maidens Seed Bomber, Kids Knits, What if Natural Fibres Don't Biodegrade?, High Effort Knitwear, Their Spelling Mistake, The London Space.

As I begin writing this it’s the 26th of March - I am extremely late getting this together. Months seem to melt at the moment. I’m determined to post before the month ends - let’s see what happens. Unfortunately this is a slightly shorter (or, fortunately?)

New PF26!
I know these things, “AW26”, “PF26” etc mean nothing to 99% of you. I will be honest, they mean very little to me too. Whenever someone in the company (who all have perfect recall and command of these) says a season name I always have to ask what they mean. That said “PF26”, aka ‘pre fall 26’ (if you’re British, I’m sorry), is the season we are ‘in’ now and all that stuff is releasing now and over the next few weeks. Some highlights below!

Maiden’s Bomber (Seed Bomber)
We have this gorgeous jacket we made with Maidens shop in Japan - five or six years in the making. If you follow us on socials you’ll hear all about it and I don’t want to bore you with all the same stuff but it’s very intense to make and a little trophy of a friendship. I’m personally not a fan of brand x shop products in general, it kind of seems weird as a customer to want to wear something like that, so we always make sure the thing we make is independently beautiful and quietly shares our world. This is a good example of that - we wouldn’t make this the way we made it without them wanting it and it’s better for it.

Kids Knits
This is entirely Katy’s project. I love that we have done it and people ask me ALL THE TIME about them, and they’re coming into our studio shortly. The best thing? WE HAVE MATCHING ADULT SIZES OF THEM.

What if Natural Fibres Don’t Biodegrade?
Saw this piece in Vogue this week and it’s been rattling around in my head since. The gist is that a new study found that natural fibres like cotton aren’t actually biodegrading the way we’ve always assumed. They pulled sediment from a lake in Staffordshire fed by textile mills for 150 years and found cotton fibres basically just... still there. Which is uncomfortable reading for anyone who’s been leaning on natural materials as the clean answer to the microplastics problem.

These studies need to happen. They’re important and I’m glad they exist. But I’ll be honest, my first thought was about who’s going to use this. And I’m almost certain that within a few months I’ll have someone from the synthetic side of the industry sliding this into a conversation as a reason to keep doing what they’re doing. That’s not what it’s saying. That’s not even close to what it’s saying.

The more important point, the one that often gets lost, is that end of life has always mattered. Throwing your old t-shirt in the bin has never been the right thing to do. We’ve always known this. The problem isn’t the fibre, it’s what we do with the garment and where it ends up.

What I think is really worth underlining though is something the article touches on but deserves more attention: a raw natural fibre that’s been coated in synthetic chemical dyes, finishing agents and treatments isn’t really a natural fibre in any meaningful sense anymore. It behaves differently. It breaks down differently. It can actually be worse than a straightforward synthetic. This is why what we put on our cotton matters as much as the cotton itself. The only things that touch ours are natural dyes, organic dyes, and occasionally waxes and similar. That’s it. We’re not perfect at everything but we’re very deliberate about this.

Also, worth reminding yourself that just because something says it’s 100% cotton, that may be true legally, but we don’t have to tell you the dyes, coatings and what the thread is made of.

Worth a read - its behind a paywall, unfortunately. Unfortunately, there are ways around those on most sites :’( .

High Effort Knitwear
I hate talking about margins. It’s boring, and frankly a little humiliating to be at once accused of ‘charging too much’ and barely actually making ends meet. Sometimes the cost of things and the taxes involved make things we want to make impossible. Double-impossible if we want to let stores buy it from us, as they need to add their own margin.

About a year ago, maybe more, we started taking things out of the collection we couldn’t wholesale and making them just for us, on our website. The site is now (I think) more than half our turnover which is really cool given we didn’t really transact on it much pre-covid. We’ve come a long way.

We’re now able to buy for our own site more, so things like the R.T.S. line can be real, and we can also make these knits that would be prohibitively expensive to wholesale. They’re still expensive, and we still have terrible margin, but they’re about 40% less than we’d have to charge selling not-direct.

Why? BECAUSE THERE’S SO MUCH HAND WORK. And expensive elements, and they’re small batch. All the things that make coffee, alcohol, precious metal more $$$£££ are the same here. On our calendar we always called this and similar drops ‘High Effort Knitwear’ and we never came up with a better name for the capsules but it’s too poor of one to share.

Their Spelling Mistake
If there was any doubt we are human designers, you can put that away. Another spelling mistake has made it into production, and it’s out in the world. This one we actually caught before production, and fixed, but the factory didn’t implement the fix.

What would another brand do? They’d recall them and destroy them. There’s no doubt in my mind I’ve seen it countless times. But that goes against everything we believe.

The fateful thing is an ORIGINAL INSPO of another tee we drew from had a spelling mistake on it, which we LOVED, but me and Katy years ago thought it would just seem like a mistake if we paid homage. Years later here we are. Maybe in 40 years another couple will find it and take on whatever curse we have.

Also, the tee features a bunch of animals and it does make me smile to think that they would probably spell that word wrong too. Inglish mayks no sens.

The London Space
It’s coming together! We plan to be open for visitors from end of April, I think!