Phoebe English (Q8893)
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Phoebe English is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Phoebe English |
Phoebe English is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
“It felt really right to do something fundamentally about love and strength,” said Phoebe English. “And the sort of sanctuary we can find when things are very dark and externally frightening.” In her last collection, the heart motif cropped up in the form of an almost-Victorian chocolate-boxy padded tie-on breastplate. This time, it multiplied all over; with tiers of hearts, latticed and suspended on tapes, forming whole garments. A romantic touch which is readable in more than one way.On the emotional front, her outpouring of hearts is connected to the fact that she had a baby daughter this summer—her second. On the technical one: Much of the collection is refashioned from leftover silks which English takes off the hands of local bridal businesses in London. Every last scrap, no matter how small, is put to use by English as part of her zero-waste practice. And anyway, Phoebe English is quietly building up her own wedding business. “Yes, we’ve made some people’s wedding dresses, and we’d like to do more,” she smiled.Treating existing textiles as precious resources is only one aspect of English’s holistic non-planet-extractive methodology. Transforming “waste” into beautiful things is often down to inventive techniques, like the garments she constructs mathematically from rectangles. The result is half-collaged and almost origami-like, with seams left breezily half-open. You might be surprised to learn that they’re made from hotel bed linens. The minimal stitching, meanwhile, is an aesthetic derived from figuring out how to use the least amount of thread possible, and therefore also the least amount of sewing machine electricity.Those who go to Phoebe English clearly follow her enlightening and excellently-communicated ways of converting troublesome things into uplifting solutions. That goes for the soft yellow-to-gold shades in this collection—which were dyed from Ragwort. “It’s a weed that grows on the margins of fields. It’s just removed or sprayed by farmers because it’s toxic to horses and livestock; but it’s a really good dye plant.” Instead, English worked with a farm in Warwickshire which hand-pulled trucks of the stuff, which she then processed into a vat of dye. Her spectrum of color—intense to pale—came from dunking the fabrics in the vat, down to the last diluted drop.Nothing in her lovingly hand-crafted world goes to waste.
23 September 2024
Among the thought leaders of London fashion, Phoebe English stands out as a force where radical activism on sustainability and poetics meet. Her comeback presentation showcased what’s been happening with her since the difficult pandemic years—she became a mother.She symbolized the emotion of the life-changing advent of her baby daughter in the large, soft, heart-shaped accessories gently ribbon-tied to the front of some looks. “It’s about the power I get from maternal love, parental love,” she said. “Sometimes it feels like a really strong shield that can help you withstand what we need to change in the world, when the bar for that is so high.”English began sounding the alarm about global warming and the fashion industry’s culpability in causing it five years ago. “We are the problem, and we are the solution,” she wrote at the time. “Designers are problem-solvers. We can do this together.” She converted her practice to zero-waste pattern cutting and minimal use of thread, instituted a “war on plastic” in her studio, and began thoroughly investigating all the environmental and ethical industrial impacts—from the soil up—that are involved in the production of cloth and the making, shipping, and disposal of garments.Evolving better ways of doing things takes time, honesty, and relationship building with like-minded people. Armed with her eloquence, commitment, and quiet magnetism, English has been doing just that, while always using her platform to share knowledge and learn more. In this, her latest work, the results of two of her long-term projects were on show. One: the surprisingly bright and rich colors she’s achieving with plant dyes, including the almost fluorescent yellow of a weld-dyed streamer dress, “like electric sunshine!” she exclaimed. Two: her collaboration with Lavenham, the British horse-blanket manufacturer and country coat maker in Suffolk. “I guess what we’re trying to do is introduce some of our practice [to Lavenham], to see how that translates to their product,” said English. “We’ve been working with them for three years, using their leftover rolls and trying to replace some of their synthetic components with products that are traceable and British. So it’s all very technical,” she concluded, looking—as ever—energized by overcoming the challenges she sets for herself, step-by-step.
17 September 2023
Phoebe English held her presentation in a long-shuttered polythene bag factory in Bermondsey, which seemed perfectly apt. Her Damascene pivot towards localism and sustainable practice in fashion design continued and evolved in a collection that was shown statically, on six groups, or “pods,” of friends pitching in as models.She said: “I guess the idea is that we’ve tried to radically change our materials process and our working process while retaining the same aesthetic.” Examples of that included the outerwear, made in collaboration with Lavenham, that was wadded with naturally shed wool sourced from flocks local to the firm’s Suffolk factory and worn against bags made from scraps generated by the development process.Generously cut, “cloud” shirting and pants with gently curving hems and more conventionally boxy chore jackets and workwear pants were amongst the pieces colored via entirely non-synthetic dyes including Warwickshire-foraged mugwort (green), rose madder, and Guernsey-grown coreopsis (gold). Many of the all-upcycled fabrics were un-purchased and out of-copyright surplus digital prints. Others were literal scraps, rescued from disposal and lovingly assembled into handsome striped pieces.English said she has no ambition to reach any particular destination with her brand, but is instead engaged in an ongoing process to “discover our ecosystem.” As some of her retailers have dropped away, others have been drawn to her slow and conscious approach. “When I first started it was very much a case of, ’Is anyone gonna care, or be interested?’” The queue outside that defunct plastic bag factory—while nothing like as long as the queue just down the road that stretched all the way to Westminster —acted as physical testament that certain people do care very much about this new kind of English establishment.
18 September 2022
“What I suppose the last few months have highlighted is love,” said Phoebe English. “Love of family, love of our work family.” English’s whole motivation as a designer and as a woman is acting on what matters. For months during the height of the pandemic she played a heroic part in saving lives by forming the Emergency Designer Network to make and deliver PPE with her sister designers Bethany Williams and Holly Fulton. A community machine, the network was created overnight as the U.K. government failed to protect frontline health workers, and as it rolled into action, English and co. were joined by dozens of volunteering designers and their teams, with logistics, including Net-a-Porter drivers, organized by show producer Cozette McCreery. That was a massive act of public-spirited love, if ever there was one.But when the time came to switch back from sewing scrubs to sewing a collection, how was English able to pull her mind around to fashion? “Part of our role as fashion designers is always to be forward-looking, to sense out what people are going to be interested in. Well,” she raised her eyebrows, “in this prospective future, we all might be having to stay inside more. So I pulled that feeling down to a sense of homeyness.”We were talking—through masks—during a break amid the shooting of her collection in a gallery a few steps from her studio in Deptford. In front of the camera, representing Phoebe English family love was her mother Wendy English, a painter, poet, and former punk feminist performer. Troy Fearn, the casting director who’s been producing English’s shows, was there to stand for her work family. One woman, one man. Soft fabrics, drawstring pants, cool and easy dresses projected into a domestic scenario for next spring.And eight looks only. While every designer in the world has been forced by circumstances to think hard about distilling their seasonal statements to the essential, it’s a practice that Phoebe English had already been living by since she decided the climate emergency demanded that she radically reduce the environmental impacts of her business. Her last show, completely made from unused fabrics bought from or donated by designer brands in London, was aptly called “Nothing New.” “So this,” she said, “is ‘Nothing New, Part Two.’”
22 September 2020
“We just thought we’d take this extreme step,” said Phoebe English, “and make a collection out of what is already here in London.”Speaking with Phoebe English about her self-interrogation around sustainability is the kind of conversation that nails you to the floor. Her thorough, dynamic, collaborative, and gently articulate ways of taking action on decarbonizing the business of clothes-making and selling have made her a leader among peers. And recently, it hit her that buying “sustainable” fabrics still has a travel impact that she might be able to dodge—if others across the city would join her.“We were working with all these sustainable fabrics, but having to ship them really far,” she explained at her presentation, “and feeling that it sometimes defeated the point of using them in the first place.” So English resolved to ask designers in London if they’d contribute leftover fabrics they already had in their studios so that no virgin resources would be used. Ten of them stepped up to contribute to the making of her monochrome collection.“So you see that padded jacket? That’s Katharine Hamnett’s cotton, stuffed with off-cut tulle we’ve saved from other seasons,” she said as models walked out. “And the one the guy’s wearing at the end is Preen by Thornton Bregazzi on the front and Martine Rose on the back.”She said she was aiming for an outcome that was “imperceptibly extreme” through the effort to act locally. “Nothing New, Everything From Here” declared her program. It came attached to a map of the designers’ studios her team had collected from—“in one round trip, so we could cut road travel.”English’s point is that the sharing out of existing fabrics doesn’t mean that everyone’s clothes risk looking the same: “I guess the show is a patchwork of the individual choices they made in their spaces. Which I quite like!”Her aesthetics are built from zero-waste cutting and minimal use of thread. The 3D petaled effects in skirts and jackets she described in her program as “wobbly, worried lines that slot together.”The urgency of this experimentation in this time of climate emergency is ever-present in English’s consciousness. The lessons she teaches by practical example and her brilliant way of communicating are causing a quietly impactful ripple effect, which she’s now extending through the sum of the parts of the show itself. “This place where we’re showing is a community space that operates a big homeless food project.
So when we hire somewhere, we can make sure the money we spend is invested in the community.”“Conscious” fashion—well, Phoebe English is one of the designers who is showing what that means with every careful step she makes toward trying to do better. “We’re all learning from each other, building a community that is all working toward the same thing. And maybe people in other places could consider what they have and do the same thing. It would be nice to think it could be the beginning of one of the new systems.”
19 February 2020
How many designers have ever put a statement of mea culpa at the heart of their show? None, right. Phoebe English is the first. In a presentation in a basement, from which so many futures of British designers have traditionally sprung in dark days, she put forward a transparent coat visibly patchworked with the reams of 100-percent polyester and dry-clean-only content and care labels she is renouncing. “I’ve called it ‘In Memoriam,’” she said, “a time capsule for garments we will no longer make.”As presentations go, this was also a different way of doing things. In place of the usual inspiration boards, she had pinned up displays of the provenance of her fabrics, buttons (which are made of milk products, not plastic), clear explanations of certification standards, and printed contacts of sustainable manufacturers for guests to tear off and take away.Her designs, for men and women, have a deceptive simplicity which belies the thoughtfulness that goes into the zero-waste pattern cutting, upcycled scraps pieced together from earlier collections, and the overdyeing with organic indigo she does to freshen the look of what went before.English doesn’t paint herself as a perfect prophet or as a policer of her peers. “Attempts at Solutions” is what she called it; but the room was crowded with people who had come to learn from her. “We Are the Problem and We Are the Solution” read her press release. Standing and chatting to friends and press—many of whom have joined her information-sharing WhatsApp group, Fashion on Earth—she sounded a positive note: “Designers are problem solvers. We can do this together. After all, that’s what we’re trained to do.”
17 September 2019
Phoebe English has done a couple of things since we last saw her: amalgamated her men’s and women’s collections and gone hell-for-vegetable-dyed leather for sustainability. As gently spoken as she is, English is as integrity-driven and thorough as they come among the rising young designers concerned about the damage the fashion industry causes. “I wanted to fill this collection with lots of different solutions to the way the industry can be quite wasteful,” she said. “I’ve been trying to choose raw materials that are mindful of the environment.”The results of her self-revolution are embedded in this collection. She sourced buttons made from milk protein, rather than plastic or animal products. She now asks her factories to return the offcuts of the fabric she supplies them; they’ve been recombined into patchworked jackets, apron dresses, and a collaged collarless man’s shirt here. And to reduce her carbon footprint, she used fabrics “that don’t have to travel so far” from around Britain, including “lovely traditional Welsh flannel, waxed cotton from Ireland, and beautiful English cotton shirting, which is being made in England again for the first time in 150 years, after the reopening of a textile mill in Manchester.” The shoes she found meet her standards because they are made by Tricker’s, the great British cobblers, “with dyes [that] come from the waste products of olive farming.”The point in all this, of course, is to continue to design garments whose look and feel moves people to want to buy. An example for Fall is a delicate origami-latticed white blouse. It’s very much a continuation of the modern handcrafted techniques English began as a student at Central Saint Martins, but even it has been developed through her commitment to zero-waste practices. “They’re geometric pieces, you see. Because when you’re cutting out curves in fabric, there’s so much left over that it becomes a problem.” That’s why she also constructed pleated trousers and some of the gathered-neck blouses and full skirts using the full widths of fabric. “So there’s nothing wasted.”English isn’t shouting about what went into the collection. “You’ve got to make sure that you’re not just using it as a marketing tool,” she cautioned. The road to perfect, uncriticizable clothing production is a long one, as she’s well aware. “This is the best I’ve been able to do, so far,” she said.
“But I’ve certainly noticed that whereas people used not to be interested in hearing about sustainability, everyone’s suddenly more engaged in that conversation.” Then, she laughed. “But it’s so hard to do, you know! There’s probably triple the work in this collection than any other I’ve made.”
13 February 2019
Phoebe English has done a couple of things since we last saw her: amalgamated her men’s and women’s collections and gone hell-for-vegetable-dyed leather for sustainability. As gently spoken as she is, English is as integrity-driven and thorough as they come among the rising young designers concerned about the damage the fashion industry causes. “I wanted to fill this collection with lots of different solutions to the way the industry can be quite wasteful,” she said. “I’ve been trying to choose raw materials that are mindful of the environment.”The results of her self-revolution are embedded in this collection. She sourced buttons made from milk protein, rather than plastic or animal products. She now asks her factories to return the offcuts of the fabric she supplies them; they’ve been recombined into patchworked jackets, apron dresses, and a collaged collarless man’s shirt here. And to reduce her carbon footprint, she used fabrics “that don’t have to travel so far” from around Britain, including “lovely traditional Welsh flannel, waxed cotton from Ireland, and beautiful English cotton shirting, which is being made in England again for the first time in 150 years, after the reopening of a textile mill in Manchester.” The shoes she found meet her standards because they are made by Tricker’s, the great British cobblers, “with dyes [that] come from the waste products of olive farming.”The point in all this, of course, is to continue to design garments whose look and feel moves people to want to buy. An example for Fall is a delicate origami-latticed white blouse. It’s very much a continuation of the modern handcrafted techniques English began as a student at Central Saint Martins, but even it has been developed through her commitment to zero-waste practices. “They’re geometric pieces, you see. Because when you’re cutting out curves in fabric, there’s so much left over that it becomes a problem.” That’s why she also constructed pleated trousers and some of the gathered-neck blouses and full skirts using the full widths of fabric. “So there’s nothing wasted.”English isn’t shouting about what went into the collection. “You’ve got to make sure that you’re not just using it as a marketing tool,” she cautioned. The road to perfect, uncriticizable clothing production is a long one, as she’s well aware. “This is the best I’ve been able to do, so far,” she said.
“But I’ve certainly noticed that whereas people used not to be interested in hearing about sustainability, everyone’s suddenly more engaged in that conversation.” Then, she laughed. “But it’s so hard to do, you know! There’s probably triple the work in this collection than any other I’ve made.”
8 January 2019
Phoebe English mentioned in passing that she pre-tests all her menswear by getting her friends to try things on and asking for their feedback. These may be gender-fluid days—and English has amalgamated her men’s and women’s collections under a single label this season—but the point of respecting each other’s realities is surely checking in with what people actually say about themselves. “Because I can’t know how a man thinks! They’re like a science experiment for me,” the designer exclaimed.Right away, we were deep in one of those eye-opening conversations that always evolve with this soft-spoken, inquisitive designer. English’s methods might be typified as conscious, both in the care she takes with sourcing fabric and being a stickler about waste and in considering the nature of the people she wants to dress. But go on! What did she learn when she listened in to the sartorial preferences of her friends-and-family, all-male focus group? “They’re a nightmare! They’re very, very specific about button size. Asymmetry freaks them out. They get really upset if something looks too recognizable as something else, like if it’s too chef-y or builder-y, that’s a no. There was a lot of discussion about the right cuff length—that can go for on a very long time. They’ve got to touch fabric, because they won’t wear anything uncomfortable or scratchy. Actually,” she concluded, with a touch of compassion and a pair of extremely raised eyebrows, “they’re really fearful. It’s very illuminating.”The young men in English’s orbit are all in creative jobs, but their geeky specificity about fabric; shape; connotations; and shared, unspoken, self-policed dress codes happens to be every bit as detailed as a bunch of businessmen’s. One big difference, however: While no corporate man would ever be caught wearing orange, a particular shade of tangerine holds no terror for the Phoebe English man. “I have a WhatsApp chat group on color,” she revealed. “And this orange was a big yes! So I’ve used it for Irish linen shirts and this British-made waxed cotton that I found before. People really like it; it’s light and not greasy, and it crinkles nicely, so it looks a bit worn. But you can also steam it out again if you want a flat, smarter finish.”More points that scored high in the English ratings were big pockets in shirt and jacket fronts, and wider and looser pants than they’d have gone for a couple of years ago.
Result? More of the effortlessly casual-looking yet fanatically applied care and attention to product development that has won English the appreciation of Japanese menswear buyers, who have respect for such calibrations of detail.
14 June 2018
Phoebe English mentioned in passing that she pretests all her menswear by getting her friends to try things on and asking for their feedback. These may be gender-fluid days—and English has amalgamated her men’s and women’s collections under a single label this season—but the point of respecting each other’s realities is surely checking in with what people actually say about themselves. “Because I can’t know how a man thinks! They’re like a science experiment for me,” she exclaimed.Right away, we were deep in one of those eye-opening conversations that always evolve with this soft-spoken, inquisitive designer. English’s methods might be typified as conscious, both in the care she takes with sourcing fabric and being a stickler about waste and in considering the nature of the people she wants to dress. But go on! What did she learn when she listened in to the sartorial preferences of her friends-and-family, all-male focus group? “They’re a nightmare! They’re very, very specific about button size. Asymmetry freaks them out. They get really upset if something looks too recognizable as something else, like if it’s too chef-y or builder-y, that’s a no. There was a lot of discussion about the right cuff length—that can go on for a very long time. They’ve got to touch fabric, because they won’t wear anything uncomfortable or scratchy. Actually,” she concluded, with a touch of compassion and a pair of extremely raised eyebrows, “they’re really fearful. It’s very illuminating.”The young men in English’s orbit are all in creative jobs, but their geeky specificity about fabric; shape; connotations; and shared, unspoken, self-policed dress codes happens to be every bit as detailed as a bunch of businessmen’s. One big difference, however: While no corporate man would ever be caught wearing orange, a particular shade of tangerine holds no terror for the Phoebe English man. “I have a WhatsApp chat group on color,” she revealed. “And this orange was a big yes! So I’ve used it for Irish linen shirts and this British-made waxed cotton that I found before. People really like it; it’s light and not greasy, and it crinkles nicely, so it looks a bit worn. But you can also steam it out again if you want a flat, smarter finish.”More points that scored high in the English ratings were big pockets in shirt and jacket fronts, and wider and looser pants than they’d have gone for a couple of years ago.
Result? More of the effortlessly casual-looking yet fanatically applied care and attention to product development that has won English the appreciation of Japanese menswear buyers, who have respect for such calibrations of detail.
14 June 2018