Requiem took nine months, which is roughly eight months longer than it should have. This is what happened.
Where it started
The collection began with a funeral, which is an uncomfortable but honest place to start. A family member’s, in winter, in a small church with bad heating and a very good organ.
What stayed afterwards was not grief exactly. It was the strangeness of how beautiful the whole thing had been — the music written specifically for this purpose over centuries, the language, the deliberate slowness of it. An entire aesthetic tradition exists solely to carry people through the worst day of their lives, and it is extraordinarily good at it.
The question that turned into a collection was: what would it look like to wear some of that?
The first sketches were wrong
The initial direction was much more literal. Sheet music as a print. Latin text across the chest. A lot of crosses.
It was terrible. Not badly drawn, just obvious — the kind of design that explains itself completely in the first two seconds and then has nothing left. Devotional apparel falls into this trap constantly. The reference is so legible that the garment becomes a label rather than an object.
Those sketches sat in a drawer for about six weeks while we worked on other things.
What changed it
The unlock was a detail from the funeral we had not consciously registered: the way the organ’s sound arrived slightly late in a stone building. You hear a note, and then you hear the room hearing it. The reverb is not decoration — it is most of the emotional weight.
Translating that into a visual meant giving up on illustrating the subject and instead illustrating the delay. Marks that echo. Forms that repeat at decreasing opacity. Lettering with a ghost of itself sitting just behind it. Once we had that idea the collection more or less designed itself over about three weeks.
Getting the black right
Most of the remaining time went into a problem that sounds trivial and is not: which black.
Garment black is not one colour. A cotton fleece in “black” from one mill reads slightly brown; from another it reads slightly blue. Under studio light they look identical. Under daylight, side by side, they are obviously different garments — and a collection that is almost entirely black cannot survive that.
We sampled eleven base garments across four suppliers. Two of them were near-perfect and we could not get consistent stock of either. What we settled on is a heavyweight cotton-rich fleece with a very slight blue undertone, which sits well against the bone-white ink and does not go grey after washing.
The ink itself took another five rounds. Bone white on black is a legibility problem: too opaque and the print looks like a sticker sitting on the fabric, too sheer and the echo effect vanishes into the garment. The final answer was a two-hit print — a soft base pass, then a lighter second pass slightly offset, which produces the delay we were after physically rather than as an illustration of it.
The piece that did not make it
There was a seventh design. It carried a name and a set of dates.
It was, by some distance, the best thing in the collection, and we did not print it. Once you put a real person’s name on a garment you are selling, you have made someone’s grief into a product for strangers, and no amount of care in the execution fixes that.
The original still exists. It is the only piece from Requiem that will never be printed, and that feels correct.
What we learned
- The literal version is almost never the finished version. If a design explains itself instantly, it is usually a first draft.
- Sample the blank before you fall in love with the print. The garment is half the object, and inconsistent stock will end a collection.
- Two-hit printing solves problems a single pass cannot. It costs more and takes longer. It is frequently worth it.
- Some things should not be sold. Knowing which ones is part of the job.
Requiem is still the collection we are most protective of. If you want to know when the next one lands, the mailing list is where we announce them first — and if you are working on something of your own with this kind of weight behind it, tell us about it.