Camiel Fortgens has not peaked. Every season, the Dutch designer’s 11-year-old label improves upon its own excellence that much more, always reinventing and refining its wearable but inverted garments. The peak is a ways away. It’s just that, this season, Fortgens hit peak outerwear.

Fortgens and his team did not necessarily set out to outdo themselves. But even in a season lousy with great layering pieces, Fortgens achieved something truly special. Several things, actually.

A full-figured track jacket cut from suiting wool; a retro single-stripe high-necked sweater, hefty and half-zipped; a V-neck cardigan in exaggerated “hair” sporting both zipper and buttons; a British hunting jacket faithful down to the waxed cotton exterior and corduroy collar; technical Pertex coats created with Japanese label Graphpaper upended from the seams out; even the oft-played-out peacoat is redeemed with dramatic width and reigned-in length. And, in typical Fortgens form, all of the above is made to feel special, personal even, through intentionally irregular finishing and “unfinished” raw hems.

It’s all so disparate and yet uniformly cool, classic and contemporary and weird and unlike anything else anyone is doing right now. Except Camiel Fortgens. Camiel Fortgens is always doing stuff like this. He’s simply doing it better.

“We’ve really been working hard to identify our core collection and styles, refining the shapes that already exist but also identifying what styles or fabrics might still be missing,” the designer says. “We’ve always worked around carry-overs: same style, small adjustments every season. But I think we’re landing more and more pieces into their true and 'final' form. No need for change.”

Peak outerwear is not an incidental occurrence. In Fortgens’ case, it was a Darwinian grind, with the strongest subjects muscling their way through subsequent iterations.  

“We spend a lot of time and effort finding the right high-quality materials,” says Fortgens. “We go to the fabric fairs in Milan to source new mills. We visit our fabric manufacturers in Italy, Portugal, Spain, Turkey, Japan, and the UK. Over time, we build relationships with these mills and [develop] our own materials and colours with our suppliers.” But not all fabrics need be upgraded. “The right loopback sweat is the right loopback sweat,” he adds. “you don’t need to find a new one every season.”

As always, it’s the exhaustive process you don’t see that informs the slow progress that you do. Traces of Fortgens’ design legacy remain in new works: the Fall/Winter 2025 peacoat has the bones of his “short mac” coat that cleverly compressed a conventional mackintosh into a wide n’ short jacket. And the new fleece anorak is a gently retooled variation on a theme that Fortgens has explored for years. “It’s just such an easy and convenient style, with enough CF identity and details, an amazing shape, and lovely 100% Italian fleece,” says Fortgens. “Our team, buyers and customers love it! Definitely a core item.”

But just because a garment is core to the collection doesn’t mean that it isn’t given the same scrutiny as a new item. On the contrary — these are the pieces that tend to get the most attention.

“Like with our fabrics, we’ve always spent a lot of time on our shapes. We keep fitting and discussing until it’s perfect. This can go on even when the garment is already due to start production, or even over seasons,” says Fortgens. “That’s also what you see in some styles: The fit is now there, it’s good. It takes trial and error, research, and refinement. We want to make clothes that show our hand, but we also want to make clothes that are functional and for daily wear.”

That means consideration (and reconsideration) of everything from sleeve length to the volume of padding to the layering possibilities. Can this sweater fit under that jacket? Does this sleeve clash with that hem? “This asks for so many details that need to be taken care of, other than just looking cool,” he says.

And yet, it all does look cool. Because, when timeliness is removed from the equation, when trend is eschewed in favor of iterable goodness, you end up with something, well, good. Good clothes, even, all guided by an uncomplicated, well-honed premise. It’s a lot of work. And, yet, not something that ever-temperate Fortgens would boast about. “We're trying,” he says when I tell him how much I love this season’s outerwear. “Good to hear it shows.”

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