We asked forty people one question: what do you change into when you know for certain that nobody is coming over? The answers were more revealing than any fitting we have ever run.
Almost everyone named something old. Not old as in worn out — old as in survived. A jumper from a person who is no longer around. A shirt bought in a city they lived in for eight months at twenty-three. One woman described a cardigan in such detail that we could have drafted it, and she has not been able to wear it since 2019 because the elbows went.
Nobody named the most expensive thing they own.
Nobody. Not one of forty. The expensive things were described as things people wore at other people — good, useful, purposeful, and none of them what you put on at nine at night with the door locked.
Six of the forty let us photograph the garment. Two would not let it leave the room.
The thing we took from it
You cannot design an heirloom. You can only design something that stands a chance of becoming one, which turns out to be a short and unglamorous list: cloth that improves with washing, seams that can be opened and re-sewn, a cut that does not date because it was never quite in fashion, and enough allowance in the elbows.
So that is the standard now. Not "will this sell in March." Will somebody still be wearing this when the room is empty and there is no one to see it.
It is a harder brief and a slower one and it has cost us at least two collections' worth of ideas that did not survive it. Good.
