Lovingly crafted handmade knitwear in acid brights is not a combination seen often, perhaps explaining the success of the Katie Jones brand. Colour and craft are the values at the heart of the business, creating the blueprint from which the garments are based upon. Eye Mag explores the story behind the brand and the future to follow...

 

Standing out from the (very overcrowded) market of fashion designers pushing sustainability is Central Saint Martin’s graduate Katie Jones, a luxury knitwear designer promoting a ‘waste not, want not’ approach to design without compromising on the quality of her garments. While this may sound an old-fashioned approach, with the world of 3D-printing and textile technology offering new and exciting opportunities for fashion, this is a brand that is heading back to basics in terms of a traditional making process - but updating this for 2017 with a contemporary direction in terms of colour and patterns.

 

Firmly establishing themselves within the brightly-coloured, in-your-face part of the fashion industry - alongside the likes of Henry Holland and Ashish - the garments provide a much needed injection of colour (and essentially, fun), something to be thankful for in a world of ‘minimal’, monochromatic and, frankly, dull design houses. The juxtaposition of the summery colours and patterns of the clothing alongside the knitted texture is a unique angle, one only lifted by the kitsch knitted bralettes and pom pom-adorned earrings and accessories.

 

Each and every item produced and sold as part of the Katie Jones brand is handmade by a small creative team (including Mum Annie) in their London studio, “consciously crafted” as they like to put it themselves. The main selling point the brand is pushing to make them stand out is their sustainability, getting involved with a newly popular trend in fashion: brand activism. Customers are more and more concerned about where their money is heading, and tend to pick brands who have an ethical production process over cheap, fast fashion. In line with this, Katie has branded her garments as “playful aesthetics with serious ethics!” - the brand has an old-fashioned but important approach, reflected in them only using surplus fabric from other British design houses, textile waste and factory seconds. This instantly reduces the huge amount of fabric waste every year, in addition to the amount of fabric that needs to be imported into the UK. Statistics have shown that the average person in the UK will produce a huge amount of seventy kilograms of textile waste each year; the brand’s mission is to steer clear of adding to the items that will be disposed of within a few months of purchase, and instead create individual, one-off pieces using what is already available to them.

 

First looking at the fabric available to her, the design of the garments are based around this and considered as a secondary aspect, reversing the traditional fashion design process. Katie describes this approach as her “Granny vision”, the vision being to make something wearable and beautiful out of nothing (or very little surplus fabric, that is). Giving a voice to issues such as over-consumerism and landfill, subjects often seen as uninteresting, the serious ethics behind the clothing is perfectly juxtaposed against the wacky brights and luminous textures produced, adding a touch of sparkle to the big issues. Shunning the traditional biannual collections, one for spring/summer and another for autumn/winter, Katie’s ethos is, more-or-less, to stick to her guns and not make clothes for the sake of it, a move many large designers have taken to recently. She chooses core ideas for clothes she truly wants to make, and won’t steer away from these.

 

This focus on the craft of her pieces, and switching to the concept of ‘slow fashion’ compared to the norm, is one that stemmed from her childhood when she learnt the handmade craft behind clothing, later honing her skills at Central Saint Martins when studying an MA in Fashion Knitwear. The brand makes one-off pieces, thanks to the traditional processes they use that result in a unique new design every time: processes such as dying fabric by hand, and deconstructing and unravelling garments. While upping the time each garment takes to make, it in turn increases the individuality of the clothing, with a different colour, pattern and size every time.

 

Although giving the impression of a small-time business, the list of stockists for Katie Jones Knitwear is impressive, with their items available in Selfridges in London, Little Thing in Shenzhen, China and Visit For in Osaka, Japan. Also available are online orders and made-to-order garments, as well as bespoke custom one-off pieces. On top of this, the brand has been featured in magazines such as Dazed and Confused and AnOther, and online on Vice, The Guardian and Vogue.com, clearly making their mark in the creative industry.