Sliding through Slow Fashion October

We’re now well into Slow Fashion October, the annual celebration of slow fashion championed by the Fringe Association’s Karen Templer. 

(If you’re new here, by all means have a gander at our interview with Karen here. And check out her website’s segment on Slow Fashion October.) Here at the House we’re working our way through Karen’s prompts but given the general busy-ness of life, we are taking the “slow” part a bit literally.

One of the many things I admire about Karen is her unrelenting focus on the sustainability of her own wardrobe - she is constantly editing and refining and, most importantly, *considering* what she wears, and in what possible combinations, and what might be needed to fill a gap. She is a skilled sewist and knitter, and has committed to building and maintaining a slow wardrobe. Documenting her practice is key to this.

I admit I’m a serious fan, and that I take great heart by following her journey. My own skills can’t keep pace with my aspirations, but with practice, I’m slowly getting better. This is thanks in no small measure to the seemingly endless fountain of learning and support available both online and from my lovely knitterly (and sewing) pals.

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The opposite of restraint: Pieter Claesz, Still Life with Peacock Pie (plumage, for pity’s sake!!!), 1627, National Gallery of Art.

When it comes to what I’d like to make, though, I have the absolute worst case of buffet eyes. I want to make all the things, and now. A few sweaters, yes - I am short on cardigans and jumpers. I could do with some skirts and dresses, especially in lighter fabrics now that summer is on its way. (Even though summer in Wellington often means the jerseys go over the dresses and atop the skirts, and you nearly always could do with a scarf.) I’m also a natural magpie - so I’m constantly striving to stay focused on the projects I have on deck rather than the next new shiny thing. 

The truth is I have a very busy and often exhausting full-time job, in addition to the joy that Newtown House is as No2 job. And I am not a particularly fast sewist or knitter. It is time, as a great friend of mine would say, to make room in my reality for the reality.

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My Nuuk: Yes, it’s time to snip the ends!

This is where the thoughtful approach that Karen - and other attentive makers like her - takes really comes to the fore. She is unafraid to take her time. To get it right. To go slowly, with purpose. To fix things when they’re not right. To understand fit, and fabric, and drape - and to stop if she’s gotten something wrong, and remedy it. To pursue an idea to its conclusion - which often means acquiring new skills or experimenting along the way. She is fearless about undoing, about ripping back, about making it right. That she documents this so openly is a great help to people like me, struggling along in the weeds silently cursing our efforts. (Or maybe it’s just me? Please don’t answer if I’m alone in this - but if I’m not, comments below please!! I want to hear all about it.)

So the other day, as I cast on for my long-anticipated Nuuk sweater in a buttery browny Beiroa yarn from Rosa Pomar, I felt the familiar feeling of wanting to race through so I could get onto the actual knitting. Instead, I paused. I got out a book. I thought about my cast-on. I took my time. I enjoyed what I was doing. I decided to just slow the heck down, give my brain time to absorb some new skills, and make some notes along the way. 

I may never reach the heights of you multi-craftual, seriously gifted folks in the blogosphere and on Instagram but I’m grateful for what you are showing me: that there’s great pleasure to be had in slowing down, and in learning and then applying new skills one step at a time. 

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Fun with fluff: Tukuwool and Hesperus (silk / mohair) combine into a fabric that’s like knitting a puffy cloud.

So as we march through Slotober and celebrate being deliberate and thoughtful in our making, and in building our wardrobes, I’d like to thank Karen for taking the time to share her journey with us, and for encouraging us to be unafraid to dive in, go slow, and make beautiful things. 

Me? I’ve finished the Nuuk and I’ve barely taken it off for the last three days. Because I am these days a mostly one-WIP kind of gal (which has its perils, as I’ll talk about later), I’m now into the joy of casting on my Ranunculus, which I’m making from a combo of Tukuwool and Hesperus, a lovely silk mohair dyed up by the lovely Nikki at Dark Harbour Yarns. (With a major tip of the hat to the inspiring Melissa at Espace Tricot in Montreal, whose Ranunculus inspired this one.)

The sewing WIPs are yet to be decided. That’s a task for the rest of the (long, Labour) Weekend! 

Our #SummerofBasics, Antipodes style

We’re in the last month of #SummerofBasics - or as I am calling it, #SummerofBasics, Antipodes Style - and I’ve not finished one garment.

If you’re not familiar with the Summer of Basics, it’s a superb online challenge developed by the ever-creative Karen Templer, who we profile here, in which people commit to making three basics over the three North American summer months - June, July and September. “Basics” is defined by the maker - if polka dots are your idea of basic, so be it. I’d be right there with you.

So whilst I haven’t finished a thing, I do have the following underway:

It's gone a lot of places, this Anker's cardigan

My Anker’s Cardigan, knitting up in Garthenor No2, with just one and a half sleeves to go. I opportunistically found some lovely ribbon for the button band the other day, but still need to source buttons. I am thinking this will be a very jolly moment indeed. I’d be stoked to finish by the end of August. This may actually be possible.

The star-crossed plaid Camber dress from Merchant and Mills. I’ve decided it actually needs to be underlined to both give it a bit more body and to ensure it’s not entirely see-through.* This is what happened: Once I’d actually cut into the fabric and studied it carefully, I realised it was far too lightweight (and sheer!) to be worn without a slip or unlined. If ever there was a fabric face-palm moment, that was it. Sheer plaid - who would’ve thought that was a thing? And yet, I am so in love with this pattern that I’m just going to plow on because it will be, if nothing else, great practice at getting all of Carolyn Denham’s clever construction techniques down. Camber dress No1 was not nearly enough.

Another LB pullover from the fab Tara Viggo (@papertheory) in lovely striped merino - just the thing for the last few weeks of winter. It has been cut out and only needs to be sewn up. Getting to the fabric shop for some cotton tape to stabilise the seams took another week of the precious 12 in the SoB, but such is life. Stable seams more important than droopy knits - lesson learnt from my first LB pullover in a heavy woollen knit, where a bit of interfacing would’ve helped firm up the turtleneck. Rookie mistake!

So, not much progress then.

But.

We’ve had a scary challenge on the health front here at the House, which we talked about a bit in our newsletter the other week. The gist is: we are OK, but life is all about doing what’s doable in the moment these days. Sometimes that means just dreaming about all the things that will be done when life gets a bit easier. Sometimes it means half an hour snatched to knit away on the endless sleeves of the cardigan, or stealing some time to trace out a pattern, write a blog post, bake some cookies, go for a run, tend to a sourdough loaf. It’s a stressful time, for sure, and we are so grateful for the kindness of family and friends.

It’s a time full of learnings, some of them even really funny. For example, every knitter knows that if you’re going to be spending time at hospital, you better have your knitting with you. But it’s been interesting for this lifelong book lover to learn that sometimes - when you’re really pretty scared, for example, and you don’t know what’s going to happen next - it is impossible to “get lost in a book”. I’ve learnt that I need to do something with my hands instead, something diverting and attention-taking. Funny to learn something so essential now I’m in my fifth decade.

Plaid Camber dress on the cutting room floor - aka the hallway. Plaid, and virtually sheer. How did I miss that?!

So all in all, so far it’s not really been the wildly creative Summer of Basics we’d anticipated. Instead, I’m dubbing this year’s version the Summer of Getting Back to Basics. To going slow, doing what can be done, and being OK with that. Sometimes it’s very hard to do this, with social media parading an endless array of beautiful distractions produced by people with talent to burn, and seemingly ample time to lovingly document their journeys. I really enjoy looking at what all of you geniuses of the domestic arts do, but that is very much not our reality at the moment.

But I’m committed nonetheless to building a wardrobe of my own, halting though my progress sometimes is, because the rewards are so many and so manifold. They include:

Inspiration: We’re so fortunate to be living in a moment where it’s possible to be on this journey as part of a global community of makers and menders. There is so much creativity on show, and there are so many generous teachers who’ve taken the time to share their knowledge. (As a counterpoint, I don’t have to look too far back to remember me and the old Singer set up in my bedroom in the early 1990s. Just me and a sewing pattern, my fabric of choice and a hell of a lot of uncertainty. No, my mother did not really sew, nor did the significant women or men in my life. There was no help at hand, and there was no Internet. There was the Fabric Store, and there were Books, and there was Mail-Order Fabric. Does anyone else remember those days?)

Being conscious about consumption: There are plenty of garments in the world. We’re awash in them. Like most people I’m not immune to the siren’s call of beautifully made new clothes. But to make your own is one way to say “no” to an industry that would have us just buy more and more and more, with no regard to the impact the fashion industry has on people and the planet. Buying local is another way. As long as I’ve lived in New Zealand I’ve tried to buy close to home - along with our own making, we need local designers and manufacturers, and one way to support that is to vote with your feet, and your dollars.

Beauty: Let’s be honest, from as early as I can remember my eye has been drawn to the fabric, the fibre, the colour, the drape, the shape, the beauty of well-made clothes. That’s why I studied art history, that’s why I love fashion, and that’s one of the reasons I have, over most of my life and to varying degrees of success, tried to make my own clothes. Now I’m older I don’t feel the need to put that practice aside for something more “sensible” - to be able to do this is luxury to me these days.

So I’ve just lengthened out the SoB plans to last me the rest of the year. They include:

A project for Actual Summer

A Willow Tank: This week we wandered down to a jewel of a local fabric store, Stitchbird Fabrics. They stock more than a few lovely bolts of Nani Iro and I was keen to have a look - you know, just in case something might leap out. (Surprise: something did.) So I picked up enough pink gorgeousness to make a Willow Tank, along with the paper pattern, which I’ve been keen to try. It’ll be a great basic for actual summer, and it will be a brightly coloured joy to work on through this winter and spring. Because I will have to make a toile before I’m cutting into that!

A Nuuk jersey: I’ve chosen some of our beautiful Beiroa (No 409, which knits up into the most beautiful beigey, browny, creamy fabric) for this and have started swatching just for fun. I know it’ll feel wonderful on the hands and (bonus!) may come together relatively quickly! And it will be a marvellous basic over lots of things.

A Shakerag top. (The hilarious and talented Kay Gardiner knit one, and here's how she told the tale.) Because I realised I have four skeins of Jade Sapphire Sylph, a cashmere-linen yarn of much loveliness (and in the precise amount the pattern calls for), and this top would be a fantastic addition to the wardrobe. It's destiny.

A Box Pleat Dress from our new supplier, The Assembly Line. I have the perfect navy linen for this. No idea where I will find the time, but some things just need doing.

So who else is with me in turning the #SummerofBasicsAntipodesStyle into a long slide through spring and into our actual summer? I’ll be here working away, slowly, so feel free to join in!

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*Giving the term “windowpane plaid” a whole new meaning! So it can be called The Windowpane Dress.

Tara Viggo wants to help you build a wardrobe

Like a London taxi driver, Tara Viggo has The Knowledge.

And like that driver, her secret ninja power is a subtle but mighty one.

Tara Viggo knows how to translate the language of fashion - cut, fabric, drape - into the paper patterns fashion houses use to make beautiful clothes. She knows how clothes should fit, and what kinds of fabric would work best with a particular construction to make it most flattering. It’s knowledge - and an eye - that she’s spent years developing through sheer hard graft in London’s fashion industry.

Now, she’s turning that knowledge into patterns you can use to make simple, stylish, wearable garments at home. (And there’s not-surprising bonus, given her background: They have a style edge.)

Viggo, 35, is a Cook Islands-born, New Zealand-reared pattern cutter who has lived and worked in the London fashion industry for nearly 11 years. Last year, after a decade spent cutting patterns for designers ranging from the High Street to couture, she launched Paper Theory, where she sells straightforward patterns aimed at home sewers. Her goal? To enable people to build a simple, flattering, eminently wearable AND stylish wardrobe that puts an emphasis on sustainability.

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The Kabuki tee - as modelled by the designer

Paper Theory, which Viggo manages while still holding down a busy schedule of work for fashion houses, was born from a desire to have more ownership over her time, and as a way of getting the patterns in her head out into the world. After she had logged yet another late late night at work, Viggo’s boyfriend urged her to find a way to cut down on her punishing schedule and indulge her own creativity. She found herself thinking back to her childhood - and home sewing. “I remembered when I was quite small my mother would let me pick the patterns and she would make my clothes.”

But immersed as she was in the world of high fashion, and logging long hours, Viggo had virtually no idea of the renaissance of home sewing in recent years, fuelled in large measure by the internet. Blogs, Instagram, independent pattern makers, print-on-demand fabric companies, YouTube videos - it’s all there.

Viggo was staggered by what she saw, and spotted a gap for the kind of patterns she had in mind. The brand represents an extension of the direction she took her career a few years ago - towards sustainability and enduring style and away from fashion with a shelf life best measured in days. “There aren’t many of those pattern brands that have a sustainable edge and that’s something that’s really, really important to me,” she said.
 
Early in her career, after a couple of years working for fast fashion brands, Viggo found herself at a crossroads. She was upset about the high social cost of fast fashion - the well-documented stories about working conditions in some factories, the toll on the environment, the waste. She was ready to quit the industry altogether.

“I was going to leave fashion and I was going to become a landscape architect. And then I thought, actually, I can’t just leave this problem, because if I walk away the problem still exists, and I should do something that encourages this to get better. That was when I decided that sustainable fashion would have to be one of my biggest priorities.”

So she started working only for fashion brands that work with small factories and put an emphasis on ethics and sustainability. Then she took a big step in her personal life: “Last year, for New Year’s Eve, I set myself the challenge of not buying any new clothes.”

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Viggo at work in her home studio in London

It was a great experience, Viggo said - with benefits that included liberating her from thinking about shopping, and worrying about what she might be missing out on in the sales as the fashion seasons turned, for example. “The mind tax of shopping is quite heavy, and I hadn’t really noticed,” Viggo said.

“The biggest surprise was, I thought it would be a year of sacrifice and longing, but in the end I actually gained more than I gave up. I reclaimed a lot of wasted time and I gained a huge amount of freedom. Freedom from thinking about what I wanted or needed or how I could make my life better by acquiring ‘things’. I actually feel liberated from the hamster wheel of consuming, and it’s a perspective that has transformed the way I will think about shopping forever.”

Viggo also wants to use Paper Theory to help people manage the cost of building a sustainable wardrobe - because the retail cost of sustainable, organic fashion is still high.

“Sustainable fashion is great, but in England there’s quite a class problem. It’s expensive. Choice is a luxury, and not many people have the luxury of choice. They’re defined by their income, and to ask them to sort of contribute to making the world a better place when they’re already getting shafted is a big ask,” she said.

“I just wanted there to be an alternative choice. It would be really nice to have really clean, simple basics so you could just pop off and buy a metre of really beautiful organic fabric and put that into your T-shirt. And you could have it be not too hard to make, and build the basics in your wardrobe. You can still buy special pieces from whoever your favourite designer is, but it’s a nicer way to fill the gaps.”

Building a wardrobe of essentials is just one more way to gain some independence from the fashion merry-go-round and to indulge your own creativity.

“The cost of fashion is really high - the social cost, the true cost. The pricetag’s going down but the cost is going up. Even I find it difficult. It’s hard when I’m faced with a three-pound white T-shirt from H&M which looks the same as a white T-shirt from a sustainable brand which would be like 50 pounds. It’s tough.”

Viggo is staunch on the details, and ensuring that time spent sewing with them will be time well spent. She spends a lot of time looking at how clothes fit, both online and in her daily work, and this means she’s well aware of the importance of getting the things right.

“A lot of home sewers won’t see the finer fit problems, but to me they’re quite jarring,” Viggo said. “It’s not like going off to the shop and spending 40 quid on a T-shirt and if you don’t like it, you don’t wear it. You’ve committed an afternoon to fabric shopping and then two days to actually sewing something together and then for it not to look nice, it’s such a tragedy, I think.”

She continues: “I’m really precious about my time - I get really upset about people wasting my time, so I couldn’t ask that of somebody. For a lot of home sewers, their eye isn’t finely tuned enough to notice that the balance is a bit off perhaps, so they won’t see it.”

Viggo earned her stripes in the fashion world through hard work and determination: While studying fashion design at Otago Polytechnic in her hometown of Dunedin on the South Island of New Zealand, she was offered the opportunity to head to Milan for a one-month internship at Marni. It was her first time overseas and opened her eyes to what was possible.

“Growing up in New Zealand you felt like the real fashion world was quite far away,” she said. “I knew that New Zealand had a great fashion industry, and have always been really proud of New Zealand designers, but I did feel like that luxury catwalk thing was very far removed for us in New Zealand. I didn’t know anybody who had gone and worked internationally, and it wasn’t until I spent the time at Marni that I could see that it was definitely possible.”

After graduating she took herself off to Melbourne to start her career. But she couldn’t crack into the industry there, and after a year of working in cafes she decided to pack herself off to London. It was there she found her career - by challenging people’s perceptions and making herself indispensable.

“The people were quite dismissive about having a New Zealand qualification - there are two or three really big schools in London and it’s quite a small club, and unless you’ve come from one of those schools they’re really not interested in you. What does a New Zealander know about design? It was quite hard, and that’s kind of how I ended up becoming a pattern cutter.

“I got into some studios but only as a studio assistant. Nobody would let me do anything real - I was just kind of making tea, sweeping up, doing some cutting. I could see around me that they were really short of pattern cutters, and the quality was terrible. What I had picked up at design school was better than what a lot of the junior pattern cutters in London were doing.”

“The biggest surprise was, I thought it would be a year of sacrifice and longing, but in the end I actually gained more than I gave up. I reclaimed a lot of wasted time and I gained a huge amount of freedom. Freedom from thinking about what I wanted or needed or how I could make my life better by acquiring ‘things’. I actually feel liberated from the hamster wheel of consuming, and it’s a perspective that has transformed the way I will think about shopping forever.”

- Tara Viggo on the year she gave up clothes shopping

So she remade herself into a pattern cutter - a job, she admits, that few understand. “Nobody knows what I do. When I meet somebody in a bar and they ask, what do you do, and I tell them, they can’t even fathom it. I try to describe what I do, and they go oh, I didn’t know that was a job.” She pauses and chuckles. “Yeah, nobody does.”

In her both her day job and her new venture, Viggo’s calling on deep roots - both her mother and her grandmother were home sewers, and skilled enough to make their own wedding dresses.

But it took a while before she drew the connection between the work she’s doing now and the skills her mother and grandmother used over a lifetime. “I wanted to be into fashion. I thought what my mother was doing at home wasn’t real fashion.”

Fuelled by a love of punk rock and punk style, Viggo and her friends would rifle through recycled clothing bins and come out with clothes to take home and transform. She laughs at the memory: “We’d put my skinniest friend in through the slot in the clothing bin, and we’d pull out what we could find, and we’d chop it up and make outfits and stuff. We’d literally hold her feet and she would rummage through.” Out would come men’s corduroy trousers, shirts, anything that could be used to make up punk outfits.

“That’s how I got into it, and when I went to fashion school my sewing was terrible. The sewing teachers gave me a really hard time. I thought, it doesn’t matter, I’m going to be a designer. But as we progressed through the year I realised it didn’t matter how good my ideas were because I couldn’t express them. I would have to learn how to sew and I would have to learn how to pattern cut, so I took it quite seriously and I got sort of obsessive about learning the rules and the technical skills.” She’d learned one of the biggest lessons for almost any creative pursuit: “You can’t break the rules until you know them.”

Viggo found her way into pattern cutting through sheer persistence while working as a studio assistant. “They were looking for a pattern cutter but they refused to give it to me. I said to them, please let me have this job, I can do it. One of the designers took pity on me, and she said you can do some of the work in the evenings. I kept bringing it back, and everything I did was better than all the pattern cutters who were coming in and trying out for the job. Eventually they said, oh fine, have a job.”

“It was just being really persistent. Nobody’s looking to pay somebody who’s never done anything before: You have to have a bit of luck and a lot of persistence, I think.”

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LB pullovers in three versions.

Because Viggo was on a visa, she knew she had to make it work and that the clock was ticking. Her first job paid her less than minimum wage, so she worked in bars at night to cover the gap. Slowly she worked her way up to better and better fashion houses, and now divides her time between J.W. Anderson (challenging designs and a hectic environment) and Erdem (“everybody speaks in hushed voices”).

Listening to Viggo describe a typical day, you realise that she really does have a special skill - she’s able to give three-dimensional life to even the most abstract concepts in a designer’s head. She’ll get briefed by a designer, then return to her desk, some lengths of fabric and a mannequin, and get to work on the silhouette and the proportion. Then she’ll call the designer to have a look and they’ll talk through how things are going so far. “The designers are quite vague, and we sort of have to try and interpret each other. They’re very airy and I’m talking about millimetres.”

She realises that this skill of translation is crucial to her success. She can turn concepts into clothing just by listening, and by interpreting all sorts of clues. “It’s probably one of the biggest skills outside of the cutting that’s involved in my job,” she said. “As a freelancer I move around a lot, so I don’t know all of the designers. Sometimes they’ll give me a brief and I’ve only met them for literally three minutes. And I have to try to understand who they are, what they might want and what their taste is, having never met them, just from a drawing and just from a few words.

“It can be really tricky. I have to try and take from what they’re wearing, what they might feel about clothes. And from their body language, how they’re standing: do they like their clothes to be restrictive or loose? Once I get to know a designer, if I’ve worked with them for a few weeks, then it’s great and it’s really enjoyable.”

One designer, memorably, would bring in photos of ceramics, or waterfalls, and talk Viggo through the vibe of what she was after. Sounds impossible? It wasn’t - but it did take some time. “It was so difficult, but I worked with her for a long time and we managed to understand each other quite well, and some of the work i did with her has been my favourite. But it took a while to understand how to get, from a picture of a landscape, the mood she was trying to get across for the fit of the garment.”

There’s another big difference between Viggo’s fashion work and Paper Theory. When it comes to her own line, the designer has the average woman in mind.

“There’s not really much consideration for anyone who’s not a model size [in fashion],” Viggo said. “I’m using myself for Paper Theory. It’s been such a long time since I’d made clothes for myself that it was quite tough. I’m a 14 and I’ve been making stuff for size 6s. It has to feel nice. I imagine everything feels nice if you’re a size 6.”

She’s got two patterns on offer at the moment. She started with the Kabuki Tee*, a fascinating construction that results in a shirt that’s incredibly easy to wear, versatile and elegant. “I wear mine all the time - it’s such an easy piece.” You can make it using knits or woven fabric. “In linen it’s my favourite. I have a white linen one - I wear it as a T-shirt, and I can wear it to work, too.”

The LB pullover is her second offering, and whilst it’s not yet as popular as the Kabuki Tee, she believes it’s even more versatile - it could be a T-shirt, with short sleeves, long sleeves or no sleeves, or lengthened into a dress.

“The possibilities for that are quite enormous. I almost look at it as a block. I’m going on holiday soon and it would make a really easy shift dress. I could almost make an entire wardrobe of that.”

And that’s what Viggo would like to see: “I want people to have a shape that’s easy for them to make that they can use as building blocks for their own wardrobe.” To help people get the most from her patterns, she recently posted instructions on the Paper Theory website to step people through how to lengthen her shirt patterns into dresses. There's also a video tutorial illustrating exactly how to sew a right angle - a critical skill to execute the Kabuki tee.

Her other hope is that by sewing their clothes at home, people can get garments that really fit their own bodies, rather than being forced into the sizing grades offered up by fashion houses.

“That to me is the biggest plus for sewing,” Viggo said. “I’m really surprised that most sewers are not noticing that that’s the advantage that they have over the rest of the world. They can make something that looks so good on them - and they don’t take the time. A really small adjustment to a pair of trousers is the difference between looking like you’ve got a banging butt and great legs and looking like a frump. It can really make a huge difference.”

This is the value that Viggo’s disciplined, trained eyes can bring: “I scroll through Instagram and I think, 'Oh, if you’d just put an extra centimetre in that bust that top would look really great.' That’s the majority of my job, actually. I’ll make a style for the designer and then spend the rest of the week tweaking and changing. You learn a lot from that, so maybe that’s the knowledge I should share.”

• Update: In 2021 Tara renamed the Kabuki Tee, and it is now known as the Block Tee. She did this because she no longer felt it was right for the tee to bear the name of a garment so important to Japanese culture. As she wrote in an Instagram post announcing the change: “My understanding of cultural appropriation is much deeper now than it was four years ago and I no longer feel the name is appropriate - so I have decided to change it.” There’s more on the change on her blog.

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Helping teens learn fashion and design

For the last five years or so, Viggo has spent more than a few Saturdays giving back by teaching pattern cutting and sewing for a charitable organisation called F.A.D., which helps young people learn the ins and outs of all aspects of the fashion trade. She tells it this way:

“They are such a fantastic charity. They hold lots of workshops for young people. Every year they run a four-month programme which I volunteer at on Saturdays. The students design their own outfits and we help them pattern-cut and sew it from scratch. It helps them develop a portfolio for college, and they have a runway show at London Fashion Week to show their final designs.”

“It’s really the most incredible thing ever. Working with 16- to 18-year-olds is quite challenging, but I get so much back from the students. They have such fresh eyes and perspective - they challenge everything you say, EVERYTHING. It always makes me re-look at my perspective on fashion, my methods of construction and the way I do things, and keeps me creatively on my toes.”

All photos courtesy Tara Viggo

The Block Tee

@rosie_diycouture's Kabuki tee

The LB Pullover

@style_of_constructing's long-sleeve Block Tee