Five steps, one garment
Collect, deconstruct, transform, create, design: what actually happens between an old garment and a new piece.
Every piece in the studio follows the same five steps, and none of them is a metaphor. Collect: existing garments come in: offered, found, bought from what already exists. Deconstruct: seams are opened by hand, not cut, because the cloth has to survive its own undoing.
Transform is where the time goes. The photograph above is an afternoon of it: smocking stitched into reclaimed denim, one knot at a time, until flat cloth becomes a surface with depth and stretch and shadow. Nothing about this scales. That is the point.
Create: the transformed material becomes a new textile: woven from strips, fringed, pleated, painted. Only then comes Design, the step most fashion starts with. Here it comes last, because the material has already made most of the decisions.
Design is the last word in our process, not the first. The cloth speaks first; we answer.