vell

in 2017 we wrote down twenty-four pieces a woman could wear for most of her life, and numbered them. nine were ready that autumn. the rest came when the cloth and the cut were right: the agnes coat in 2019, the ines dress in 2020, when the first good lot of silk arrived, and the lena skirt last, in 2022. the list has not grown since.

twenty-four is what we can keep. every piece has a pattern, a cloth we can buy again and a drawer of thread in the repair room on bredgade. a twenty-fifth would need its own drawer, its own mill and a promise to mend it for as long as someone wears it. we would rather cut the agnes coat a fourth time.

so the number stays. when a piece gets better it keeps its number and its name, and the old cut goes into the archive with its pattern, in case someone posts one back to us for a mend.

a piece made for years needs a cloth we can buy for years, which rules out most of what a fashion house works with.

the wool is respun in prato from old knitwear and offcuts that keep their own colour, so the oat of the edda knit is the oat of the jumpers it came from, and nothing is dyed twice. when a batch comes out a shade lighter, we say so on the label.

the cotton is organic, woven for us at one mill near porto. we visit every march, see next year's cloth on the loom and order it before it is finished.

the silk is the hard part. we buy dead stock in small lots from houses that ordered too much, and a lot makes thirty or forty ines dresses. when it runs out, the dress waits, sometimes for months, until a lot comes in that matches.