by What happens when women lead fashion brands?
Smart, resourceful, community-led design. While it’s true that female creative directors are still very thin on the ground at luxury houses, here in London there are a number of resourceful independent female designers making the most of a hyper-local creative process and reaping the sustainable benefits too.
Phoebe English
For a small-scale brand that makes clothes from scrap materials, it never made sense for Phoebe English not to work locally. ‘I started what we are doing with handmade textiles,’ she says. ‘We specialize in using materials that others can’t use with our alternative fabric sourcing network.’
Together with independent seamstresses and sampling units, English uses waste from digital printing companies, bridal studios and other designers to create the label’s designs in Deptford. The team uses everything from scraps and surplus to faulty fabrics, all in very different quantities and sizes. ‘We describe it as a responsive design process; we are responding to the waste we collect. Make use of what is actually there rather than buying new material or resources to do so. Because there’s already so much,’ she continues, adding that the team will design to accommodate whatever they have, whether that’s 500m of fabric or small triangles that need to be reworked into a patchwork. ‘As a small and agile studio, it is within our skills to work like that.’
Until the garments leave the studio for their new home, they can be tracked. ‘We can’t really control how far away our customer might be, but we can try to have some influence on how far things travel before that stage .’
£180 – £600, phoebeenglish.com
Club Kipper
Former Instagram-influenced fashion editor Sarah Corbett-Winder launched her suit brand Kipper Club in October and already has a collaboration with cult fashion brand Aligne under her whip-smart belt. The label, whose moniker is fishy from the name given to female tailors on Savile Row because they always worked in pairs, deals exclusively in suits, something Corbett-Winder never considered doing anywhere but London.
‘I wanted to support local people but it was also a great idea to do it abroad,’ she says. ‘The next morning I packed the lunches and jumped in the car, went to the factory, and was back at my desk at 10am.’ In addition to the convenience, she loves the intimacy that local work provides. ‘I am a people person; I need a little more than a flight more than once a year. It didn’t really make up my mind to do it overseas to be honest. It becomes a bit like a family’.
Local manufacturing also allows Corbett-Winder to be more reactive, bringing out two main collections a year and adding seasonal additions when the ideas come to her, like a red corduroy suit for Christmas. ‘I’m so impatient that I like to be able to go and do it now. If he was abroad he would struggle, I would have to relocate.’
£130 – £380, cypress.club
Eideline Lee
Despite working and studying in several favorite fashion cities, Canadian-British Edeline Lee chose London as the location to start her eponymous brand. ‘I would get a job in New York, I would work for a while, I would miss it, and I would come back,’ she says. ‘As a young independent designer, London is one of the most welcoming cities. The market is smaller here, so you can grow a little slower and that can help a young designer; it allows you to make mistakes and learn what you are doing with the craft.’
Lee has her own production unit in Limehouse, east London, which she originally set up after the factory she was using closed. ‘I was able to hire that team and start my own. I love to touch everything and explore it myself before it goes out’. This level of detail also means that it is the only one of the top four brands approved by Good On You to show on schedule at London Fashion Week. ‘You can control everything, watch everything, not waste anything. Paying our size and UK wages is a big part of running a business ethically.’
Many staff walk to the studio, which meant they were close enough during the pandemic to safely collect their work and work on it alone at home. ‘My job would be a lot less rich if I didn’t know everyone who worked on it,’ continues Lee. ‘I think the clothes would lose meaning in a sense, as well. We can tell who’s sewn to what by looking at things – even if it’s split we can see which parts belong to whom.’
£100 – £3,240, edelinelee.com
O Pioneers
Founded by friends Clara Francis and Tania Hindmarch, O Pioneers came about organically after the two started making clothes for themselves that they couldn’t find anywhere else. ‘We buy a lot of vintage but there was always something wrong with it. So we thought, why don’t we make a perfect dress,’ says Clara. ‘Every time I wore the sample people would chase me down the street and ask where it was’.
They use Liberty print fabrics for their signature dresses, skirts, trousers and even reversible coats. ‘Everything is made in London except the knits, which depends on where the knitters are,’ explains Tania, whose mother is one of the team following vintage patterns and sharing tips in a dedicated O Pioneers WhatsApp group. ‘We have a mix of seamstresses based in London who work independently from home doing smaller runs for us, and four or five manufacturers spread around north and east London.’
Made in London is all part of the label’s fashion ethos, which enables him to work with a local pattern cutter and visit the manufacturers in person with rolls of Liberty fabric dead stock in the boot of their car. ‘It’s a great way of working because we know them all,’ says Tania. ‘It seems inconceivable not to work like that.’
£25 – £495, opioneers.co.uk
Label Fanfare
As a former buyer for a high street fashion brand, Esther Knight of Fanfare Label knows the dangers of a faster way of production. ‘You are responsible for everything; negotiating prices, picking the fabrics and dealing with all the suppliers,’ she explains. ‘When things weren’t done right I saw bad behavior and unethical processes.’ She moved to Vivienne Westwood where she learned about fashion’s environmental impact from the best, before starting her own sustainable label five years ago.
Using materials saved from landfill through UK-based recycling factories and charity shop warehouses, the brand focuses on upcycled garments, which would not be possible without working locally to its east London base. ‘Not only do we save on CO2 emissions by doing everything close to the studio, it also allows us to work with local self-employed artisans, makers and founders. The circular business model is much easier to manage when it’s on your doorstep.’ The Fanfare Label sources recycled wool from Scotland, as well as organic fabrics from Europe.
It’s denim that Knight is particularly passionate about, though. A Dear Your Own Jeans service has been launched in Saoirse, where customers bring in a pair of their old jeans and have a 20-minute design consultation before sending their denim to a local supplier to be reworked with embroidery or patchwork. ‘So much goes into a pair of jeans that we don’t want to end up in landfill.’
£55 – £235, fanfarelabel.com
Stay Swimming Wild
Their brand may be about celebrating wild swimming and marine conservation, but Natalie Glaze and Zanna Van Dijk run their sustainable, inclusive swimwear brand from London. ‘We have had discussions with a number of other factories in Portugal and Bali,’ says Glaze. ‘But we wanted it to be a sustainable brand, so it was very important to make it so close to home in a small factory.’ Neither comes from a manufacturing background, either, so proximity made logistical sense. ‘Factory lingo is almost like another language. It’s over. It was much easier to be able to talk to people face to face and show them to us physically.’
As a sustainable brand (Stay Wild also has B-Corp status), it was not necessary to order the capital without ordering large amounts. ‘With the other factories we spoke to, the minimum order size was huge and we didn’t want to make hundreds of thousands of pieces.’ And its customers are now well known as a London brand, thanks to social media. ‘With some other brands, you don’t see the nitty gritty, every step and behind the scenes. People tell us they love it when we film a fitting day, or something on the cutting machine. It really wouldn’t have been possible to film the process if the factory was far away.’
£28 – £180, shoptaywildswim.com
