We’ll be show casing our new AW24 collection, Still Life, at Paris Men’s Fashion Week.
We’ll be in Paris from January 16 - 22.
Please email us to arrange an appointment.
We’ll also be attending Paris Women’s Fashion Week in late February and early March.
Dear friends,
We are happy to announce a pop up event with our good friends at Vertice for the launch of our AW23 collection v : Prickly Things.
Location: Vertice London, 31 Smith’s Court, London, W1D 7DP
Time: 14th October 2023 / 6PM - 9PM
Alongside Vertice’s selection of our AW23 collection we will be bringing our fabric books for customised personal orders. You will be able to create unique made-to-order versions of our garments at the event. This includes the use of unique fabric choices, from making your own patchwork to choosing from a selection of vintage Chinese and Japanese fabrics. Come and get creative with sevetyfive & Vertice to make something truly unique.
To celebrate this event we will be giving away an exclusive Prickly Things brooch to people who make a purchase on the night. The brooch has been designed for this event, and uses fabric from our collections. Each brooch will be unique, and there are a limited number of brooches available.
The event will be themed around a Chinese market, and we will have thematic snacks and drinks. There will be activities such as hair braiding at the event and the seventyfive team will be there to answer questions and have conversations about our work!
Please e-mail conservous@verticelondon.com, DM Vertice or DM seventyfive to RSVP.
Looking forward to seeing you!
Best wishes,
Janny & seventyfive
On the 26th and 27th of August we will be collaborating with our good friend, The Backward Vendor, to host a sample sale at their London studio.
Date: August 26th & 27th
Time: 12:00 - 18:00
Location: 47 Martello Street, Hackney, London, E8 3PE
The sale will include over thirty samples from between 2020 and 2022. The selection includes over twenty different styles of garments, including Petal Skirts, Mandarin Shirts, Drawstring Skirts, Shirt Dresses, Reglan Dresses, and a Student Jacket. The majority of samples will be in S, although there are also T-shirts in L, and woven, One Size hats.
The Backward Vendor will also be presenting a range of samples. The Backward Vendor is an artisan leather worker, and they will have a range of shoes, bags, accessories, clothes, and some larger leather pieces on sale.
This season we decided to experiment with screen printing. Our source of inspiration for Cardinal, the 1930s women’s magazine Linglong, was full of designs, motfis, and illustrations that excited and intrigued us. One of our favourite designs was the cut-out activity which features in the Pomelo zine.
For Cardinal, we decided to use another of our favourite illustrations in Linglong, an illustrated exercise guide. The illustrated exercise guide featured in Linglong Magazine Volume 1, Issue 25, P927-929, in 1931. The pages below are what inspired us, ans they suggest that readers of Linglong exercises that are easy to do with a busy lifestyle. Inspired by these exercise illustarations, we re-drew them for screen printing, working with screen print specialists in North and South London.
For this project we decided to screen print on to corduroy. We use corduroy from a mill in North West England, and the corduroy we use for these garments is a lightweight 190g 16 Wale Corduroy. We choose this style corduroy for Cardinal as it should be wearable in the summer, being much lighter than the corduroys we use for winter garments. The corduroy comes in three styles, offer as an Overshirt, Balloon Trousers, and Notched Neck Blazer. The Balloon Trousers and Notched Neck Blazer are both lined, while the Overshirt is unlined, making it perfect to be worn on its own or as a light jacket.
As the products are worn, the screen printed designs will naturally evolve and fade over time, giving a new look as the garments age. We’re excited to know what these pieces will look like in one, five, or even ten-years, and we can guarantee that no two pieces will be the same.
Collection iv, Cardinal, is now available in our online store. Cardinal is inspired by pictures of everyday female androgyny from the 1930s. Our starting point was the 1930s Chinese women’s magazine, Linglong, and the reader submitted photographs that showed women in mens clothing. While the experience of everyday women in 1930s China is central to this collection, we also found inspiration in the women who inspired them, including Asian-American film director, Esther Eng, and German-American actress, Marlene Dietrich.
Cardinal is also available in a number of stores in both the UK and Japan. So please have a look through the Cardinal lookbook, and watch the video we produced for Cardinal, available on YouTube.
This season we have tried to innovate in two ways with our fabrics. The first, above, is a greater use of vintage and upcycled materials. This season we are using fabrics that we have searched for, salvaged, and brought togther to create garments with their own stories to tell. These fabrics are used on our Short Sleeve Pull-Over Shirt. Every one of these shirts is unique, so please contact us to discuss what colours you would like, as we use a different fabric for each shirt.
Our second innovation this season is with corduroy and screen printing. Along with the screen printers we work with we’ve been developing a number of designs to screen print on to corduroy. This combination of fabric and screen printing produces a visually intriguing and totally unique way of working with corduroy. Adding to this, the screen print we’re using this season is a reintepretation of exercise guides that we found in the 1930s Chinese women’s magazine, Linglong. Our screen printed corduroy is being used for Mid-length Balloon Trousers, Overshirt with Back Pleats, Mid-length Skirt with Side Slits, and Notched Neck Blazer.
Exercise activities found in Linglong, the 1930s Chinese women’s magazine which inspired Cardinal.
The exercises found in Linglong, redrawn, and turned into a design for our screen printed corduroy Overshirt.
We hope you enjoy Cardinal, and if you have any questions please get in touch via email info@seventy-five.co.uk.
seventyfive is pleased to introduce you to our third season, Pomelo. Pomelo is a collection of womenswear and unisex pieces inspired by our archival research on magazine culture in 1930s China. With Pomelo, seventyfive is introducing you to both a collection of clothing and the broader world of Pomelo, a multi-media project integrating fashion, photography, writing and archival research, available online and in print.
Pomelo is inspired by Linglong 玲瓏, a Shanghai based women’s magazine published during the 1930s. Many of the garments that makeup this collection are based on garments, looks and silhouettes found during our research within the Linglong archives. In this blog post we share some information on how the collection was inspired by Linglong.
If you want to understand the design journey we went on for Pomelo you can also explore the five volume self-published magazine we produced for this multimedia project, also called Pomelo. Available for free to view online, and soon to be available for purchase in our , Pomelo is a mixture of photography, interview and graphic design that puts the garments and the people in them alongside content from Linglong. The content that influenced this collection was not just the photography and design found in Linglong, but also the stories we found in the letters section of Linglong.
In the letters section of Linglong readers would send in stories of their lives, photos of themselves and questions to editor and occasional agony aunt, Chen Zhenling. We found the letters that readers of Linglong sent in a fascinating window into how people in 1930s China were dealing with the same questions many of our friends are dealing with today: relationships, wanting to remain unmarried, the pressures of pregnancy, sexuality, gender and gender inequality. Reading the letters section of Linglong, one could be mistaken for thinking these were questions from young people in the 2020s, which is why we interviewed people around us to see their perspective on the issues discussed in Linglong.
Pomelo magazine, with Jane wearing the Long Petal Skirt, in black, and our inspiration image from Linglong.
Our interview and photoshoot with Charlie, wearing the Mid-Length Petal Skirt and Knot Shirt, in white.
The interviews we conducted and photographs we took are in the self-published magazine, Pomelo. The first-half of every issue of Pomelo is editorial content, while the second-half reflects on the archival research we did with Linglong, helping readers understand the inspiration behind the garments in the collection. We hope you enjoy the exploration of 1930s China that we are undertaking with Pomelo, and please tell us what you think. This was an inspiring process for everyone at seventyfive, and we were happy to work with everyone involved in Pomelo, in all its formats.
Pomelo’s look book images are available here. To explore the collection in more detail, use the gallery below or go to our store.
Christmas is getting close and, while we are busy working on holiday orders, we would also like to share some of our holiday spirit. Some little things that make us happy, infuse us with holiday vibes and make the house smell great.
This year at seventyfive we have been making a lot of gingerbread, gingerbread people, gingerbread cats and some other gingerbread things as well. We have been decorating these with friends and snacking on them constantly. In late November we asked a bunch of friends over, put all of our gingerbread creations on the table, and tried to bring them to life through the medium of icing, marshmallows and confectionery. For us, it was a fun way to bring friends together, to consume unhealthy amounts of gingerbread and to get ready for the cold weather. We also drank mulled wine, but that is optional.
While gingerbread is one way of collaborating at Christmas, another Christmas collaboration is our Bento Bag and Soup Dumpling pouches, made in alongside The Backward Vendor. Coated with beeswax, these waxed cotton bags and pouches are food safe. We’ve been using them to store our gingerbread, making it easier to take our creations over to friends.
In this blog post we’ll share the gingerbread recipe and some pictures to you. The recipe we used is easy to make and is one way to get a Christmas aroma all over the home. We borrowed the recipe from delish, but added extra ginger for an additional kick.
180 g softened butter
170 g brown sugar (we used dark muscovado sugar)
190 g treacle
1 large egg
1 tsp. vanilla bean paste
420 g plain flour
2 tbsp. ground ginger
1 tsp. bicarbonate of soda
1 tsp. ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp. ground cloves
1/2 tsp. salt
1/4 tsp. ground nutmeg
egg white of 1 egg
200g icing sugar
1 tsp lemon juice, start by adding a little to adjust the consistancy
rolling pin
cookie cutters
piping bag, or a bag that you can use as a piping bag by cutting a hole in the corner
confectionery for decorating
a healthy appetite and a strong will, because you don’t want to eat everything
(Optional) a stand mixer and the paddle attachment
In a bowl, mix softened butter, sugar and treacle together until fluffy. Add the egg and vanilla bean paste and mix well.
In another bowl, mix flour, all the spices, baking soda, and salt until well combined. Slowly add the dry ingredients to the wet ingredients while mixing at low speed until everything is well mixed.
Divide the dough into two halves and wrap with cling film. Put these in the fridge to chill for 3 hours, or leave them in the fridge over night if you feel like it.
After the dough is thoroughly chilled, take it out from the fridge and place it on a surface dusted with flour and start rolling the dough out. We rolled our gingerbread dough about 4-5mm thick.
Now it’s time to cut them out with your cookie cutter! Pre-heat the oven to 180C and line your baking sheet with parchment paper. After cutting them out and putting them on the tray, we recommend putting the gingerbread in the freezer for about 5 minutes prior to baking, so they stay in shape!
Once everything is ready, bake the small gingerbread creations for 9 minutes, medium creations for 10 minutes. Baking time varies for different ovens so keep an eye on them to find the best baking time. As you near the timer, check your gingerbread in 30 second intervals to avoid burning.
After baking, let the gingerbread chill on the baking sheet for 5 minutes before transferring them to a cooling rack to cool. Once completely cooled, it’s time to decorate with icing!
For the royal icing:
Lightly mix the egg white and then add in icing sugar, mix until completely combined. Slowly add in lemon juice to adjust the consistency. You don’t want the icing to be too runny, but it still needs to be soft enough to pipe out a smooth line. Once you’re happy with the icing consistency, transfer the icing in a piping bag and you are ready to decorate!
If you wish to fill completely, first use a harder icing around the edges and then fill the middle with runnier icing, use a tooth pick to scrape.
Here is a bagful of our creations, I'm sure you'll agree that they are utterly adorable. You’ll be happy to know they were all eaten.
We also made some mince pies (using a Delia Smith recipe for the mince), and our cat was constantly jumping on the table trying to lick the scraps!
We hope you enjoy making your own gingerbread creations with family and friends over December and January. Have a great holiday, and stay safe and healthy!
Shop the collection here:
We’re extremely happy to introduce a new product, the seventyfive Double Hair Tie, which is made with 100% Chinese Cizhu Bamboo Silk and naturally dyed in one of three colours. In this post we’re going to share some key information about the hairband, we’ll discuss why we created the product we did, and, following that, we’ll give you a behind the scenes look at the natural dyeing process of this product.
The hair tie has a scrunchie with two ribbons attached to it, and it can be styled in a number of ways, although we've been wearing it in a bow. For this hair tie, we decided to use bamboo silk because it's a soft material that is kind to the hair. Bamboo silk is often used in pillowcases and bedsheets, as it feels nice to the touch and is hypoallergenic. For hair, this material reduces frizziness as it creates less friction than other materials, such as cotton. Bamboo silk is made from the threads of bamboo, and the bamboo silk we use is ethically sourced from Sichuan, China.
This item is object dyed using natural plant based dye. As you can see below (and in a few other products we’ll be releasing this year), we’ve been experimenting with a lot of different natural dyes recently and we’re trying to move as many of our products to natural dye as is practical. As we’ve said before, natural dye creates unique colours and different tones and shades. It doesn’t completely consume the material, like chemical dyes, so every naturally dyed object has its own character and is unique. Due to this process there might be differences in colour on each hair tie, and, while we control for imperfections, your hair tie’s colour may not look identical to the ones on our website or the ones your friends have.
avocado
pomegranate
indigo
To help you understand the natural dye process and our practice a bit more, here is a short photo diary of the dyeing process.
I. Preperation
We start by preparing the hairband, and after stitching, we scour the hair tie. Scouring is an important part of natural dyeing as it gets rid of the oil or wax that became embedded on the fabric during weaving. After scouring we mordant the fibre. This is the vital next step because mordant is what helps the pigment stay on the fibre.
II. Mordanting
When the fabric is scoured and mordant has been applied we select the ingredients we will use to achieve a specific colour. Here we are using avocado and pomegranate rinds for base colours. This is one of our favorite steps because these ingredients are our food waste, and this process enables us to use the food we buy, from pip to skin.
III. Dye Bath
A dye bath is then made with the selected ingredients, and the hair ties are added to the bath. We can use either time or quantity of dye stuff to affect the hair tie colour, although a number of factors can influence any given colour, including the material used, the hardness of the water, the mordant process, the dye stuff and the time dyed for. After we reach the desired colour we take the material out and they will then be given a second soak to modify the colour. Here we use a tea blend for the avocado’s second dip, and an iron bath for the pomegranate’s.
avocado dye bath
pomegranate dye bath
Once the colour is right we take them out, dry them and find any that do not have the right colour coverage. These may be redyed to achieve the correct colour. Once dry we carefully pack the hair ties in our eco friendly packaging.
avocado and pomegranate dye samples(right) in comparison with chemically dyed original samples(left)
We actually conceived of this product as a chemically dyed one, but we decided to find a way to replace the chemicals with a natural dye. This wasn’t easy, it took quite a lot of experimentation over a long period of time. But, when you look at this comparison between two samples, the chemically dyed samples versus the naturally dyed samples, we think we’ve done a good job in matching the colour. I can tell you, getting it right after many attempts felt GOOD! Furthermore, on reflection, we much prefer the naturally dyed version of the hair tie as there is a greater complexity to the colour and the product.
We hope you were able to learn a bit more about this process and our practice. If you’re interested in this process we have something interesting coming out soon, keep your eyes peeled.
Shop hair ties here:
Continuing our Spring celebration, seventyfive has made some mugwort (aicao) mochi filled with red bean paste; aici. Mugwort mochi are a common snack that’s eaten during Qingming Jie (Tombsweeping Festival). As children, we’d always look forward to eating these sweet, green treats.
Looking for a taste of childhood, we decided to make some this year and share our recipe.
With our recipe you will be able to make 6 aicao mochi:
100g glutinous rice powder
20g wheat starch
8g mugwort powder: fresh mugwort and mugwort powder are hard to get in the UK, you can grind dried mugwort herb and make them into a tea with the water if you like the mugwort(yomogi) taste. They will look slightly brown but still very delicious. Otherwise, you can instead use matcha powder, aojiru powder or even spinach juice to get the green colour.
80g room-temperature water
150g red bean paste: we make our own red bean paste, but they are easily available from asian supermarkets.
Medium team basket
Parchment paper or silicone sheets for steaming
Instructions:
Add the mugwort powder to the water and mix well, let powder soak in water.
Combine the glutinous rice flour with wheat starch, mix well
Add the water to the flour mix and mix into a dough with a spatula
Once all the dried flour is mixed, use your hands to knead the dough until smooth
Measure six 25g of red bean paste for each mochi, form each into balls
Measure six 40g of mochi dough mix and form each into balls
Form each mochi dough into a cup, place the red bean paste in the cup. Holding the cup in one hand and using the area between your thumb and index finger to gently push and squeeze the dough to wrap around the red bean paste. Use the thumb on the other hand to help cupping the red bean paste. Once done, close the the mochi skin, form the shape into a ball and place the closure side down in the steaming basket
Boil water in a stockpot, place the steaming basket on top of the stockpot and steam the mochi on high heat for 10mins
After steaming, remove the steaming basket from the pot and brush each mochi with a thin layer of neutral oil (vegetable oil).
Let the mochi cool down slightly but not completely(otherwise it might get too chewy). Enjoy it with some light brew tea. You can store them in the fridge and re-steam them for 5 mins when you want to have them again.
We have also made an instruction video below! Enjoy your mochi, we did… they didn’t last long.
seventyfive hopes you’re having a nice Spring, whether you’re having a holiday for Easter (4th of April), Qingming Festival (Tombsweeping Festival, also 4th), or another form of Spring break.
To celebrate Easter in North London, we decided to do something that we haven’t done since we were in primary school; make easter eggs.
In the video below we’ll show you how to naturally dye four different colours to make hard-boiled easter eggs (they should still be edible after!). In it we’ve used turmeric, red cabbage, beetroot and onion skins to make four different colours. We also used lemon juice as a binding agent.
To prepare the eggs before dyeing, simply put them in cold water and bring the water to boil. Once the water is boiling, continue cooking the eggs for 6 mins.
Each of the dye instructions are used to dye 2 boiled eggs.
Red cabbage dye:
½ small/medium red cabbage finely chopped
Boil the cabbage with 500ml water for 15 minutes
Strain the liquid into a jar and add baking soda(alkaline) for deeper blue, lemon juice or vinegar(acidic) for magenta. Dip a little bit of tissue paper to check the desired colour.
Place the eggs in the jar, make sure the eggs are fully submerged
Place the jar in the fridge overnight
Turmeric dye:
Add 3 tablespoons of turmeric powder to a jar
Add 500ml hot water to the jar and mix well
Add about 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to the mixture
Place the eggs in the jar, make sure the eggs are fully submerged
Place the jar in the fridge overnight
Beetroot dye:
2 small beetroot finely chopped and add to the jar
Add 500ml warm water in the jar and mix well, you do not need to strain the liquid
Add about 1 teaspoon of lemon juice to the mixture
Place the eggs in the jar, make sure the eggs are fully submerged
Place the jar in the fridge overnight
Onion skin dye:
Take about 2 cups of yellow onion skin, rinse with water
Boil the onion skin with 500ml water for 15 minutes
Strain the liquid into a jar and add 1 teaspoon of lemon juice
Place the eggs in the jar, make sure the eggs are fully submerged
Place the jar in the fridge overnight
Take the dyed eggs out from the jars the next day and dry them with a dark towel as the food colouring might stain a light coloured one.
We added baking soda to our red cabbage dye and they came out dark turquoise! We also drew some patterns with lemon juice using a brush and they turned purple.
Upon further ‘inspection’ at lunch time today, the beetroot and red cabbage made quite interesting colour eggs for further consumption; they’d make quite interesting deviled eggs.
We hope you enjoy making these natural dyed easter eggs! Happy Holidays!
Take a moment and think back to the flavours, tastes and smells of your childhood. Particularly, think about those elusive flavours which are now - because of time, distance or your own evolving palette - hard to comeby. What comes to mind? What elusive fragment of your past is on the tip of your tongue or tickling your sinuses?
I’m transported back to late April in South China, there are grassy-smells and grasshoppers, and my grand-mother’s aicao (艾草) mochi. In Chinese, this Hakka snack is called ai ci (艾糍), in Japanese; kusa mochi (草餅). The sweet, sticky balls of my childhood have a vivid green colour to them and... a whiff of summer. The scent of fields and hedges. The crispness of the scent belies the soft texture of the mochi.
seventyfive’s new collection, Fragments, makes use of the memories of the childhood home through the natural dyes used across the collection. Through these memories, new creations come into being. Fragments are not isolated chunks of the past, they are the potential for a newness that builds on the past. In this collection, natural dye is used to join the fragments of my past - such as aicao mochi - with clothes that are interpretations of the past. These Fragments are close to my heart and reminders of my past; they are what I have built my new home around. For this reason, the images of Fragments you see were shot at my home, in North London.
Fragments makes use of the flavours and colours of my childhood, particularly aicao, which is one of the natural dyes used in the collection. As a child, in late Spring and early Summer my grandmother and I would gather aicao together, led by our noses. Aicao is known for its medicinal properties, and commonly used in traditional Chinese medicine. Thinking back, it sounds too good to be true; eating sweet mochi for the health benefits. The quirks of language mean that - to my ears at least - aicao sounds much less appealing in English; mugwort. The mug refers to marshes, and the wort means root. In English, -wort flowers are known to have medicinal properties, and, luckily for seventyfive, they also make excellent natural dyes.
Fragments builds on the previous collection, Tacet, which was concerned with family memory. Thematically and geographically, Fragments follows in the same footsteps, but the collection is far more intimate. Whilst Tacet was a broader brush stroke through China’s aesthetic traditions, Fragments takes those aesthetics and brings them closer to my own childhood. This childhood intimacy is conveyed through the natural dyeing processes I have developed for Fragments, with the collection dyed using different combinations of aicao, tea leaves and iron.
Fragments uses aicao for the colours and flavours of childhood, including the mochi. Tea leaves are involved in the first natural dyeing process many of us ever do, and the bitter tastes of fresh tea leaves are something once feared but now coveted. Finally, I use iron to recall my maternal home in China’s rust belt; the North East (東北). Aicao was an unmistakably Southern experience for me, a part of my paternal home which was seeped in Hakka traditions. Fragments blends aicao and iron to represent my own fragmented past; two families more than 2,000 miles apart. The iron cuts through the aicao, and the two interact in unexpected ways, resulting in a haunting quality unique to each garment.
I hope you enjoy these Fragments.
It’s summertime, and that means it’s picnic time! To help you in this crucial summer activity - whether it’s in a garden, on a balcony, at the beach or in a park - we’re really happy to announce the Summer Heat ‘小暑’ Picnic Collection. The collection is a collaboration between seventyfive and The Backward Vendor. It brings together seventyfive’s natural dyes and fabric design with The Backward Vendor’s leatherwork and design; both studios work in London.
The collection includes goods that are designed for picnics. In the collection we have a naturally dyed and waxed bento bag, a ‘soup dumpling’ pouch as well as a teacup and leather coaster set.
The Chinese name for the collection is ‘小暑’ (xiaoshu), one of the 24 Chinese ‘solar terms’ which divide the solar year. Xiaoshu takes up most of the month of July and usually starts on the 7th of July. Xiaoshu literally means ‘little heat’, and it is the solar term that falls before the sweltering heat of dashu. We feel that xiaoshu is the best time to get out, enjoy the summer and have an indulgent picnic, before the sweltering heat kills our appetites (a bit, anyway).
The Summer Heat collection is also inspired by Chinese poet Bai Juyi, who lived between 772 and 846, during the Tang Dynasty. We particularly enjoy Bai Juyi’s classic poem, ‘销夏’ (xiaoxiaj. In the poem, Bai Juyi reminds us that, only when the body is calm can the heat go. We hope that the waxed fabrics help you reach this state by reducing your worries of picnic mess. This collection should help to release heat during the sweltering heat of dashu as well!
In this collection we use organic fabrics, food safe colourants and a food grade wax coating for the fabrics. The waxing makes the materials waterproof (just to be safe, from the rain or the wine). The leather flourishes are an additional protective layer, saving your bag from the grassy park, and it also helps to give the collection a durable structure.
A core part of this collection is sustainability and waste reduction, so we’re also upcycling kitchen waste. We’ve used onion skins, avocado skins, avocado seeds and tea for the dyes, by products of the seventyfive kitchen and the kitchens of friends.
Have fun with your picnic, stay safe, and clean up after your waste: maybe even try dying something with it!
summer 2019
seventyfive’s first collection is, Tacet. Tacet is a capsule womenswear collection for the climate of the Summer and the Fall, although it is designed to be wearable all year round. Each piece in Tacet is designed to have its own special details, some will be seen, others felt, they are not ostentatious or for others, they’re for you. This also means that Tacet should be easy to mix and match, within the collection, with other seventyfive garments and, hopefully, outside of the collection too. This is particularly true if you’re pairing Tacet with natural fabrics.
What was the inspiration behind Tacet? Tacet began with a photo.
The photo in the top right is my maternal grandmother, from North East China (Dongbei). It was taken during her adolescence in the 1940s and 50s. It was a time of turmoil and flux. From there, to find further inspiration we looked backwards. On the left is a family portrait of my great grandfather, taken towards the end of the Qing Dynasty. In addition to my family’s own memories, I’ve been using archival imagery from the Qing Dynasty and the Repulican period for inspiration.
I also looked forwards, through my grandmother's journey, exploring how she grew older into the 1980s, as the tight control over culture and aesthetics loosened. My mother follows; she moved from Dongbei to Guangdong, via Xi’an, and then to Canada. As she moved around the world becoming a transnational Chinese, she dealt with converging aesthetic influences; they shine through in these garments.
With this family history in mind, the garments are rounded, with more fluid lines inspired by the late Qing and Republican photographs I found. I make use of jade, in larger stones and for buttons; I’m wearing a jade necklace given to me by my mother as I write this. Jade is a material that is passed down, it is multi-generational and inherited, just as I hope these garments can be.
Wearing jade changes it, the rough edges become smooth, new patterns emerge and the colour changes, this is the natural evolution of the materials around us, and seventyfive garments are meant to evolve too. In keeping with this, the majority of the collection is hand dyed by myself, each hand dyed garment is unique in colour and tone, this will change overtime as well.
These garments do not represent a single moment in time, they represent the passage of time, they will grow and change along with you.
The garments that makeup Tacet have been handmade in North London. They should be comfortable, wearable and durable. The majority of the pieces are hand dyed at number seventyfive, using carefully sourced organic materials, predominantly cotton and raw silk.
The Tacet lookbook is viewable here. To further understand the aesthetic influences behind Tacet, have a look at the Tacet mood-board.
-seventyfive
