WHY I TRAVEL FOR FABRIC

I've always bought shoes in Italy. It just made sense to me — they're made there, the quality is better, and there's something about buying something where it actually comes from. Fabric works exactly the same way for me now, which probably says something about me.

When I'm somewhere new, I look for fabric shops the same way other people look for restaurants. In Italy it's the silks and linens — the kind of weight and drape you genuinely can't find at home, which is part of why the French couture jacket workshop sent me straight to the fabric shops in Arona. In Japan it was the prints and the hand-dyed textiles. In London it's the specialist shops, the ones that have been there forever and still stock things you didn't even know existed until you're standing in front of them.

Part of it is practical — different countries really do stock completely different things, and once you sew seriously you notice that fast. But honestly most of it is just the wandering. Going in with no project in mind, touching everything, holding things up to the light, finding something you have absolutely no plan for and buying three metres of it anyway because you know eventually you will.

That's genuinely how most of my best projects have started. Not with a pattern or a design, but with a piece of fabric that just needed to become something — you can see some of what came out of those trips in the collection.

This is just a record of those trips — where I went, what I found, and what it was like to actually be in those shops.