On form

A coat begins as a single line. The shoulder seam to the hem, the way the front falls when the body is still. Before any fitting, before any sample, this line is the form we are trying to find. Get it wrong and no fabric, however expensive, will rescue the garment. Get it right and the simplest cloth holds its own.

We think often about the buildings we walked past as students. The unornamented concrete of the South Bank in London, the long horizontal of the Barbican towers, the stripped late-modern apartment blocks in Colombo. None of these buildings announce themselves. They take up their volume quietly and leave the rest of the city alone. That is the brief we keep returning to, translated into wool and cotton.

A garment should occupy its space without insisting on attention. The shoulder should not pad outward beyond what the body suggests. The collar should not rise toward the chin to claim the face. The hem should fall where the body asks it to fall. Form is what is left when the decorative is removed and the structural is left intact.

This is harder to make than it looks. A loud silhouette can hide many errors. A quiet one cannot. The pattern has to be drafted with intention; the canvas has to hold its shape; the seam allowances have to be cut to a discipline. Three generations of pattern-cutters have worked on the line of our overcoat, and we still adjust it each season by a quarter of a centimetre at the back.

The reward, when the form is right, is silence. The wearer notices nothing about the garment, only that they feel held. Onlookers notice nothing in particular, only an outline that reads as composed. The work disappears into the shape. That is the architecture we are after.