Knowing when to stop is a common theme within design, and comes up a lot in teaching. Overthinking can often be as detrimental to a design as under thinking it, and for Tender I fully embrace a slightly sketched-out, happenstance approach to design. In this piece, however, I want to discuss another aspect of stopping at the right moment: in sourcing and materials production.

Early in my career, in a previous job, I visited a large jeans factory in China which sewed and washed jeans for some very big brands. I saw some jeans coming off the sewing line in dark, raw denim, which looked really great- the details were unusual but the deep indigo denim and traditional stitching colors kept them within the bounds of my personal taste, and threw the attention onto the construction. I asked about them, and was shown that they were on the way to being branded and then washed. They got quite loud exterior labeling and a very heavy high-contrast wash with abraded holes, bleached sections, and paint marks. While I respect anyone’s decisions for their own designs, the finished product, which had had loads of work (and money) go into the finishing, was something I didn’t personally like at all. It had never really occurred to me that all pre-washed and distressed garments start out raw, and it struck me how much more interesting to me a lot of these pieces would be if they’d been pulled out of the process a lot earlier.

In the Spring/Summer 2026 collection, the first made in the US with American fabrics, I’ve chosen two cloths which have been taken out of their production early, meaning that the clothes are made from the cloths as they were never intended to be seen. I like to think of the point at which I take a fabric to be an evolutionary fork: rather than becoming a blackout curtain, this piece of fabric is going to become a logwood dyed jacket.

Cotton Blackout is a fairly heavy fabric, woven as a sateen. It should have been heavily shrunk and then coated to make blackout window blinds. By using the unfinished fabric, the full texture of the weaving, intended as the base for further work, really comes into its own. The Scout Jackets and Pleat Pocket Bags made out of it have a lovely drape to them, and a soft, loose texture on the surface, but the thickness of the weaving structure gives them a lovely body.

An unfinished fabric that got away was in 2021, when I was developing that year’s Autumn/Winter collection during covid lockdowns. I used raw cotton velvet for the type 961 Baste Pocket Jacket, from a mill that would normally do very heavy finishing processes to produce the silky, lustrous texture that people expect of velvet. What I discovered at the mill, though, was that velvet is in fact woven as a double cloth- with a flat front and back joined by yarn which is cut as the fabric comes through the loom, leaving a pile on each face. Tantalizingly I could see about a foot of this double fabric, which I can only imagine must have felt robust and flat on both sides with an amazing spongy texture from the invisible double-pile hidden inside. This foot-length of closed fabric ran directly into a splitter, though, which separates the two faces and runs them off onto two separate rolls of fabric. It was a fascinating process to watch, but having the double cloth would have involved taking out the splitters and retooling the entire machines, which wasn’t something the factory was willing to do in the depth of a pandemic for 50m of cloth… In the end, though, the raw cotton velvet made up beautifully, and the cut pile took on ochre dye in a way that I’ve not seen anything else do as well.