lifestyle sustainability
Osborne MAKE Clothing
Carl Marsh speaks to the founder of a Cardiff clothing brand which puts sustainability and environmentalism at the centre of everything it does – and, as well as talking the talk, walks the walk when it comes to matters of fashion and technology.
When it comes to your design creations, is it just everyday life that influences you? I access and do a lot of image searching. I have a library here, but I’m online a lot, and I’m constantly screenshotting images and making files. Pre-COVID-19, I would go to a lot of galleries and look. We went to Paris last year and just spent three days going to fashion shows and into shops – it’s a really enjoyable thing to do and obviously, it influences you.
Does music ever feature when you are designing?
Music plays a massive part. When I’m putting a range together, I’ll tend to bring the music that I’m listening to at the time into the range, and it’s usually not deliberate. I will notice that I’m working in a certain way because I’ve got some type of music playing, and then that will become part of the soundtrack of the range. However, I can’t use that music because it’s licensed – I don’t have the money to be able to pay for a catwalk show with that music! If there was an opportunity for a catwalk show.
Are your ideas put to paper or computer when you are working in the studio? My best ideas, and the ideas that I think make a difference, are all the ideas I’ve experienced when I’m not in that [work] space, but when I’m camping or mountain biking – and I do like a bit of cold water swimming. Just being outdoors.
I think people tend to view the outdoors, especially within the fashion sphere, as being antiquated and prescriptive: “Oh, you go to the outdoors to have your calm time,” or your whatever, especially in terms of mindfulness. But I’m part of a generation that did a lot of these things – like wild swimming before it was called wild swimming, and before mindfulness was even a term! You’d just go wild camping. You’d get your bag and bike and you’d go off.
And that’s the ethos behind what influences the brand, nature – isn’t it? When you’re in those spaces, you’ve got almost infinite influence coming at you from all different areas, be it shape, colour, sound, and you allow yourself to step out of the zone of designer for a while – take those expectations away from yourself. I always get ideas in that space. Other people may go to an art gallery or whatever; I would simply go outside for a while.
What you bring back to your studio and the stuff that you put out may look and be quite angular – or completely synthetic. But nature, and the outdoors, isn’t that prescriptive, proscribed view. There’s any number of different patterns and shapes and really avant-garde stuff out there, which if you allow yourself to be subjected to it all, it all comes out.
Do you think fashion is going in the right direction overall?
I think a lot of couture fashion is just pale imitations of patterns you see on animals or plants or whatever, you know. If you look at deep sea footage – jellyfish combinations that are out there – you’ve never seen anything look so synthetic! It’s only our idea of what the outdoors is that holds us back from kind of seeing it in a much more expansive way.
Info:
make-land.com Sam
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MAKE
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