After working with the 160 year old Irish mill Magee's linens last season, I wanted to return to the storied woolens they are best known for. This season, that means richly textured Donegal tweeds, herringbones, basket weaves, and blends of wool, alpaca, and cashmere. There is something particularly satisfying about these fabrics: their surfaces can appear rustic and almost rugged, but in the hand they are unexpectedly soft. They are the kind of cloth you want to wrap yourself in when the air turns cold.

Working this way requires patience. These fabrics are custom developed and ordered months in advance, often before I know exactly what the collection will become. In a fashion landscape increasingly organized around speed and optimization, there is something reassuring about waiting for the right cloth, committing to it, and allowing it to determine what comes next. In this way, the fabric is never an afterthought. It is where the clothes truly begin.


From a distance, many of the pieces this season might feel familiar: a navy coat, a herringbone trouser, a striped shirt. But up close, the differences begin to reveal themselves. Tiny flecks of color emerge from a Donegal tweed. A basket weave has a dry, pronounced surface. A brushed herringbone becomes remarkable.

Those details are part of what I find most compelling about clothing. They aren’t always immediately visible, but they change the experience of wearing something.

Construction continues to be an obsession, too. Bluff pockets, organic cotton linings, flat-felled seams, and carefully considered interior finishes are designed for the person who lives in the clothes, rather than simply the person looking at them. I still love the idea that something can be beautifully made on the inside even when no one else will ever see it. There is an intimacy to that, and a sense of care that I hope stays with the wearer.

The palette follows the same instinct. It takes its cues from things already lived with: faded rugs, painted furniture, old textiles. Colors are quietly classic, but rarely flat; they shift within the weave, showing themselves differently depending on the light. 

The silhouettes evolve many of the ideas established over the past two collections, but the change in cloth gives them a different character. The Technician Shirt and Pleated Trousers are reimagined in wool pinstripe suiting. The Emery coat takes on weight and warmth with lining. The Mock Neck Sweater returns in a fresh swathe of colors, and varying weights.

Other styles are new entirely. The Helenus Coat, our labor of love which took years to develop, anchors our offering, while the Smock Jacket tells a story of female emancipation–drawing its cues from a women’s utilitarian garment that was worn while performing household “duties” in the 1930s. The Paul Jacket is as elegant as its namesake, my dear friend Paul Mrozinski, who would have worn it beautifully if he were still here.

There is a feeling I associate with fall that I wanted these clothes to hold: the pleasure of returning. To routines, to familiar places, to the clothes you love to wear. If spring was about lightness and movement, this season is about gathering layers and the trusted pieces we reach for year after year.

These are clothes meant to be worn well and lived in. I hope they bring you a sense of joy and warmth as the season unfolds. 

- Sam

Photography by Kristina Dittmar

Words by Elsa de Berker