We made fewer things this autumn, and made them to last.
This issue began with a coat. Marta, who has cut our outerwear for eleven years, laid a camel wool coat on the cutting table in March and said she wanted to make it for the rest of her life. We spent the spring trying to prove her wrong, and failed.
So this autumn there are fewer pieces than last year: twenty-five in all, arranged in five chapters. Each one is made in Porto or Ubrique in runs of no more than two hundred, from cloth we can trace back to the mill. Every coat and bag comes with free repairs for as long as you own it.
We photographed them the way we wear them: on pavements, in borrowed apartments, on the stairs of the atelier at seven in the evening. We hope you keep them long enough to forget where you bought them.
The long autumn
Eight coats and jackets for the months between the first cold morning and the last. Cut long, mostly unlined, in wool you can trace to a single mill in Biella.
Shop coats and tailoringContents
Five chapters, twenty-five piecesNew this week
See all twenty-five piecesRed, worn in daylight
Red was always for evenings. This season we cut it into a blazer, a slip dress and a plain pump, and wore all three to breakfast. Start with one piece, add a second when you feel brave, and keep the third for the day you decide to be impossible to miss.
“A coat should be able to outlive three owners. I cut every one as if it will.”
- What do you look for first in a cloth?
- Weight, then memory. I crush a corner in my hand. If it remembers the shape of my fist, it is wrong for a coat.
- Why leave so many coats unlined?
- A lining hides bad work. Without one, every seam is on show, so every seam has to be beautiful.
- What should someone ask before buying a coat?
- Whether they would still want it in ten years. If the answer takes longer than a second, keep walking.
- What is on your table right now?
- Next winter's coat. It is grey. That is all I am allowed to say.
The lookbook
How the clothes are made
- In small runs
No piece is made in more than two hundred. When a run sells out it stays sold out, and we move on to the next chapter.
- Repaired for life
Send back any coat or bag, at any age, and our workshop will mend it at no cost. We have repaired coats that are older than the company.
- Traced to the mill
Every cloth is traced from fibre to finishing and listed by mill on its product page, so you know whose hands it passed through.
One letter a month, written like a magazine.
New chapters before anyone else, notes from the atelier and the occasional recipe from Marta. No more than twelve emails a year.
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