FEATURE: GARBSTORE X SAGE NATION
In Notting Hill Couverture & The Garbstore has settled itself as a destination that champions emerging, independent designers. And in a first for the store’s eponymous men’s line Garbstore, they’ve given full creative freedom to an outside party to redesign the label’s archive pieces from past seasons. Garbstore’s designer Ian Paley is known for reworking heritage designs by, say, taking cues from military and industrial era attire and adapting the shapes, fabrics, colour palette etc to the current market. Now, he’s passing the torch to an up-and-coming talent that, in turn, went on to rework his own body of work. Sage Toda-Nation was the chosen one /
This all may sound at odds with Ian’s career-long focus on the construction of his garments, but he assures us that he’s learned lots from this collaborative work and that the end result is something he couldn’t have done alone. “With Garbstore our bit is to achieve the ‘make’ and to then have this deconstructed and repurposed was the interesting part for us as it is part of the story that surpasses our endpoint,” Ian shares. He thinks that his brand was in good hands with Sage in charge. “We have known of Sage and his work for a while and really admired his intelligent designs. This is the first time we have let someone reimagine some of our pieces and are really happy with how it has worked out,” he says.
When Sage released his first collection he was still at uni and his work already had an inherent sense of aesthetic, one that is devoted to the purposeful pursuit of good, simple designs. In fact, his design mantra, he says, has been “purpose, perspective, and balance.” He goes on, “When I started I found that it was very difficult to cut the noise out and really focus on what it was I was trying to do. There’s a lot of distraction within the creative industry and I’m somebody who needs precision and focus to work.”
This structural mindset has helped him sort out what matters and what doesn’t. The fits tend to be roomy and so look one way when standing still and another way when moving, running around. An example of this is the box pleat trousers which are baggy enough they only come in two sizes. That same mindset restrained him from overdoing things by adding too many extra features, like unnecessary pockets or the most high-performance fabric (cough Gore-Tex cough) on garments that wouldn’t do the textile justice. It also stopped him from releasing some samples altogether — namely, a bag that turned into a vest, which he deems as “unlikely to become a real need throughout the day.”
For the collaboration with Garbstore the young designer faced an even more definitive framework, working from actual clothes and so being limited in the things he could accomplish. Asked how his approach differed from how he usually goes about designing, Sage says, “It was trial and error because I couldn’t design pieces from scratch, with no limitations. A lot of thought has gone into it and yet, at the same time, my approach was more visceral somehow. Overall it was fun and it sort of brought me back to my DIY roots.”
The capsule collection comprises of 32 one-offs that, for the most part, once were an entirely different garment: lightweight, breathable Garbstore polka dot shirts have been turned into Sage’s signature trousers mentioned above, Cordura jackets were flipped inside-out as the lining seemed more appealing to the designer, a woolen duffle coat was deconstructed and reconstructed into carrying bags. “At first sight it’s quite subtle, but when you look closely at some of these pieces you can tell that they were initially another garment altogether. The challenge was for the whole thing not to look gimmicky,” he says. In order to make each of the reworked pieces fit together in a way that looked like a whole, Sage explains: “I first was trying to keep the tones muted, so I settled on pieces that worked well together in terms of colour palette. I also attach a great deal of importance to fabrics so inevitably that has informed the sorting process, too.”
Luckily for him, Garbstore’s collections are rooted in getting things right. “The construction of Garbstore clothes has got a heritage to it. The designs are well thought out, not noisy,” Sage says about what he looked up to in Ian’s work. “As a young designer it’s been nice to look into an established brand’s body of work, learn from it, and get to bring my own take on it.”
All in all this project permitted Sage to do something he wouldn’t have necessarily done under his label in terms of clothing, but also imagery. Shot by Olivia Jankowski and creatively directed by him, the editorial captures a Londoner, obviously running late and missing the bus. “I wanted the shoot to look a bit more playful from what I’d normally do. Yet there’s a connection to the whole fluid aesthetic I’m drawn to,” he says. “What the model goes through is a feeling that everyone can relate to, me included.”
If anything, that model can be sure of one thing: at the least his clothes won’t get in the way. The way they’ve been thought through, they’ll move in harmony in his rush to who knows where.
The collection is available exclusively at Garbstore from tomorrow, May 26