NIGHT/DAY
Un-cuffing season
NIGHT/DAY - Spring/Summer 2024
It started with a Netflix show and a thought that wouldn't let go. World's Toughest Prisons is, on the surface, exactly what it sounds like. But watch it long enough and it becomes something else entirely, a portrait of the societies that built these institutions. The way a nation treats its prisoners tells you everything about the nation itself.
What fascinated me as a designer was a more specific tension. Prison is a place where self-expression is suppressed by design. Identity flattened. Individuality a luxury the system does not permit. For a designer whose entire practice is rooted in the idea that clothes are how we tell the world who we are, that felt like the most charged starting point imaginable.
So I did what I always do. I built characters. The incarcerated and the employed, the powerful and the powerless, each role within the prison ecosystem rendered as a distinct personality with a look entirely their own. Colour and pattern pushed to their most expressive extremes. Everything the institution would deny, given back in cloth.
Style End
NIGHT/DAY - Autumn/Winter 2022
Some collections are planned. This one was lived. Night/Day was born out of lockdown, conceived in Mile End, the beating heart of the East End, within earshot of Bow Bells, which as every good Londoner knows is the only true measure of a Cockney.
When the world contracted to a single street and a permitted hour of exercise, something quietly extraordinary happened. Getting dressed became an occasion. The pavement became a catwalk nobody had organised and everybody attended. Older residents in their Sunday best, a gesture of dignity and defiance in equal measure. The younger generation in sportswear and loungewear, comfortable and unbothered. The trendies in denim. All of them out on the same pavement at the same time, a brilliant and unrepeatable collision of personalities, cultures and attitudes.
I found it genuinely uplifting. And I wanted to bottle it. This collection is my attempt to do exactly that, a happy melting pot of everything I saw out on those streets, thrown together and made to work with end of roll fabrics labelled as waste, to show that off cuts and leftovers does not mean the end of line.