With Phoebe English, The Slow Path Is the Only Way Forward

With Phoebe English, the slow path is the only way forward.

For anyone engaged in fashion, whether as a consumer, creator, professional, or producer, there comes the inevitable period of reckoning. Specifically, a reckoning with the industry’s environmental impact on our planet, as one of the world’s most polluting sectors.

For Phoebe English, the British designer and Central Saint Martins alum mentored by the late Louise Wilson, her turning point came at around 2018, eight years after she launched her namesake brand.

“I think there were lots of things going on at that time, and I think a lot of people had their own climate realizations. I guess for me, it was understanding the vastness of the damage of the worldwide fashion and textile sector, and although we’re very small, we’re still part of that space. There were also lots of things going on politically which felt very panic-inducing or very frightening.”

She sprung into action as swiftly as she could. Overhauling their systems, she describes, felt like controlling a boat. “It definitely wasn’t the vision I had at the beginning,” she says of her brand’s focus on slow fashion. “It’s something I came to, and I had to pivot not only the way I was working but how the studio ran and how we sold our clothes and who we sold them to and how we communicated about them. It’s a lot easier I think to set something up in a particular way, but it is much harder to change something you’ve done. Hopefully we’ve got somewhere a little bit with it along the way,” she laughs. “It’s like trying to turn a boat. We’re quite a small boat, so it’s been a slow case of turning around. But I think if you’re in a huge ship, it’s much harder to do that.”

The Phoebe English brand operates on an unhurried scale, producing just one collection a year, which they showcase at London Fashion Week. Their process occurs in reverse, as informed by the intentions behind their ethos of sustainable design. If fashion students are taught to sketch before procuring fabric, Phoebe and her team first look at the materials available to them before they conceptualize.

“So it’s really a case of exercising this approach to design development, which we term as ‘responsive design,’ responding to the realities of the material rather than the traditional route which is how I was taught to design. It’s not just a case of buying fabric we like,” she emphasizes. “It’s about responding to waste materials that we’ve sourced and foraged ourselves. We’ve worked with foraged materials in many different ways.” They use the word “forage” to refer to the act of gathering, but she makes it clear that their components don’t just come from forests.

She explains, “Receiving the waste or fabric off-cuts takes some time, and then obviously analyzing and organizing and sorting that fabric when it gets to the studio in terms of fiber content or size of fabric waste.” Sometimes they work with tiny swatches, but other times they work with meters of deadstock, leftover, or surplus material.

It’s not always clothing they work with, however. The brand has also partnered with hotel chains who regularly get rid of high quality cotton bedsheets, and sometimes even work with digital print companies who send over silk fabrics which have copyrighted print that needs to be obscured with overdyeing processes. For natural dyes, they’ve collected bushes ripped out of train lines during storms, and even commune with local cafes, who provide the brand with avocado stones that are used as natural dye to achieve a light golden hue.

“There’s lots of really technical things about working in this way that do lead to a longer time frame, so it can be quite slow,” Phoebe admits. “But then we use all the information that we have from our textile waste to help inform the actual garments. So, for example, if we’ve got really small off-cuts, we might be joining them together in an interesting combination of different opacities or different tones, then we might work into that further once we’ve made that patchwork surface by steaming and crunching it and crinkling it, and sort of fundamentally destroying its nice smoothness, which is what we’ve done in this collection we’ve just launched two weeks ago.”

Titled Lost Touch, their latest release is a collection of only 12 cream looks, and is somewhat of a botanical calendar. The designer assigned one look to each month of the year, and a plant or flower to each look. “It was about the passing of time, and also the reassurance and the predictability of knowing that these plants or these flowers are going to appear at particular times, sort of greeting them like old friends. [I was] trying to translate that adrenaline of seeing a particular plant or flower in its full flush of growth at its peak growing time across the year, and how glorious that can feel when you experience it.”

Even when it comes to stockists, the brand prizes a highly bespoke approach. Like their process for individual clients, buyers from boutiques are welcome to select looks from Phoebe’s vast archive. Their model doesn’t allow them to recreate a look to a T, but rather to explore novel touches and slight modifications to their designs. “In the fashion space, everything is for sale and then it goes on sale relatively quickly after it’s delivered in store, which I feel like that kind of fast turnover of ideas is also quite wasteful. So this approach is us thinking about the clothes as intended to be relevant for as long as they can.” The intention with everything they do, she says, “is that they don’t go out of fashion after six months.”

“The pieces are tailor-made for our store, quite literally,” says Jappy Gonzalez, founder and managing director of concept store Univers, who brings Phoebe English to the Philippines for the first time. “There’s a movement in fashion where things need to slow down, and Phoebe English represents that. For example, a pattern she developed in 2017 can still appear in her collections today. The idea is sustainable; it’s not about change but about evolution.”

Brought up in the midlands, Phoebe has always been in touch with nature, despite not growing up with a garden at home. The earth has always been a part of her language, and it’s the same manner she’s raising her children. “This is the age they’re learning speech. So for me, making sure that their early words and their vocabulary include plant-heavy knowledge is really important to me as a parent specifically.” Nature, as she’s observed, is an omnipresent entity, imbued even in spaces where we might not readily see it; in her words, like flowers blooming in the cracks of a pavement.

“I think it’s always present and trying to reach us no matter how hostile an environment we build, and increasingly hostile space that we transform our world into,” she poignantly remarks. “It’s all ever-present and it is part of us, and I think we ignore the connection at our own peril.”

With Lost Touch, plants are a reminder of the interconnected relationship between beings. Phoebe nurtures that affinity through design, yes, but also through the plain insistence on an unaccelerated pace. 

By TICIA ALMAZAN. Photographs by LILY ASHROWAN. Portrait by ASIA WARBEL.