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17.09.26 — Notes
Is There Anybody Out There?
There is a particular kind of clothing that keeps pulling me back.
Not necessarily runway pieces, or the obvious icons of fashion history, but things found elsewhere: an old military garment, a piece of workwear, an overlooked archive piece, a strange construction, an unusual material, a detail that was designed for a very specific reason.
Things that were made to do something and ended up becoming interesting because of how they did it.
Field Journal started from an interest in those things, but not from a desire to reproduce them.
As a designer, the expectation is always to make something new. But novelty for its own sake has never been particularly interesting to me. I’m more interested in what happens when you take something that already has a language and try to understand it, edit it, and move it somewhere else.
How much should remain?
How much should change?
At what point does a reference become its own object?
A lot of the design work happens in those decisions.
I like things that are technically simple but considered. Streamlined without becoming generic. Efficient to make, but not designed only around efficiency. The construction, material and proportion should have a reason to be there, rather than being added simply to make something look designed.
Ideally, the finished object communicates some of those decisions back to you.
This is also why I keep coming back to archive clothing.
An archive piece can be a runway look, but it can just as easily be a military jacket, a work garment, a bag, a piece of equipment or something that was never intended to be fashionable at all.
The reference is only the starting point.
The question is what you can take from it without simply repeating it.
And then comes the harder question:
Who is it for?
When you make something this specific, it is easy to construct an ideal customer in your head. Someone who understands the references, notices the materials and proportions, appreciates the construction, and is looking for something that sits somewhere between the familiar and the new.
But an imagined customer is not a market.
At some point, that person has to exist.
Maybe Field Journal is partly about finding out whether they do.
I’m interested in the people who already have this kind of curiosity and in the possibility of introducing it to people who don’t yet know they have it.
That’s an ambitious thing for a small label to try to do.
But perhaps that’s the point of starting one.
To make the things you believe should exist, put them somewhere real, and see who finds them.
Is there anybody out there?