What was the design process like for this collection?
It always starts off with looking at our past and learning what styles really work, what styles we loved, washes, textures, fits, proportions. We have that first conversation, "what did we do before? What worked? What didn't work?" We take a lot of that information. "What can stay in the past and never really be seen again? What can be carried over as maybe a concept or a vibe or a code?" And then, "how do you then expand that and evolve that?"
That's really the newness. What's going to make this feel new? I'll take out my phone. I'll start looking at pictures. I take a lot of pictures when I travel or when I'm out in New York of style codes, how people are dressing, materials that I might notice like a fence or a tarp or how a texture or material might have changed over time because it rained, or it snowed, or there was sun, or it was dragging it along the street. I'll take a quick pic, not knowing what I'm really going to do with it. I just like how it looks and I'll compile all those images and I won't even really look at them until I sit down with my team and look at it with fresh eyes and try to interpret or unpack the meaning of these images. That gets translated into a sketch that will inform my team on a material or a wash or a trim, a metal buckle or something.
So, all this research and all this information then turns into these conversations with the teams. “How does that become a trend or some sort of statement in the collection?” So, then you have to creatively problem solve. This is a very fun moment of the process before any of the business-y teams come in and the merchandisers. Before any of that, it's this really creative stage in the process where we're just throwing everything out and then, eventually, moving into sketching the ideas and then reviewing those sketches.