The Conkers website isn’t what you might expect from a burgeoning menswear brand. Front and center is an image of a quintessential English village: a couple of local stores, the pointed steeple of a small church, and a corner pub. The buildings sit on the edge of a village green, complete with a Maypole and dancers.
The site is a glimpse into the Conkers world — a way of showcasing what the brand cares about. The village green in particular represents the brand’s mission, embodying life in the British countryside. “We’re all looking for a slightly slower pace,” says Oliver Warner, Conkers’ founder and creative director, who was born in Manchester but grew up in the countryside of Worcestershire and the West Midlands. “That’s what it’s all about: community, smallness, shopping local, knowing your neighbor.”
Warner established Conkers in 2021 after designing for brands such as Studio Nicholson, Our Legacy, and C.P. Company. While the experiences taught him a lot, they also left him craving something more. “I like going to the factory, having a cup of tea with the owners, and having these long chats over the sound of humming sewing machines,” he says.
Conkers celebrates rural communities in all their idiosyncrasies. “It’s an honest approach; it’s not posh men on horseback going foxhunting,” Warner explains. “The real people are grandparents pottering about in the garden wearing clogs and an old jacket with holes in. It’s making clothes that are an extension of the environment around us. We’re not trying to be anything that we aren’t. It’s just genuine clothes from genuine people.”
Those influences are clear in Conkers’ collections, which include shirting inspired by millers and farmers and relaxed suiting based on gardeners’ clothing. “We took a lot of inspiration from the old sartorial world of the UK: old silhouettes, old cuts and old pocketing,” Warner says. Equally important as the silhouettes is the material. Cotton is blended with ramie, a fabric made from stinging nettles, and previous collections have included details dyed with Earl Grey tea and finished with buttons found by mudlarks. Other buttons are made using casein, a byproduct of the dairy industry that’s cured and hardened.
Warner and his small team are open about their suppliers, keen to introduce others to the network of factories, mills and workshops that still exists across the country. “Industries are dying in the UK all the time, factories are closing all the time,” Warner says. “People are struggling. We’re losing this heritage, these skills that don’t get passed on.” He highlights some of the companies that work with Conkers, including Moygashel, a linen mill in Northern Ireland that can be traced back more than 200 years; Brisbane Moss, a historic corduroy producer from Yorkshire; and Discovery Knitting, one of the few jersey mills left in the UK.
Many of these details are findable on Conkers’ website, which includes a “public library,” or a collection of “inspirational text and photography” that the team has collected, studied, and learned from over the years. It’s all part of their push to be as open-source as possible, happy to reveal the inner workings of their fabrics and inspirations.
For the upcoming Spring/Summer 2026 collection, that inspiration comes from the world of rambling, a movement that emerged in the 1900s in protest to the enclosure of the British countryside. As more and more land owners banned access to their land, a ragtag group began to campaign for more access through mass trespassing and peaceful walking protests. “People went in their droves and began walking the hills, protesting to regain their spaces,” Warner says.
The collection draws on how people dressed for these walks, showcasing a postwar time in which military materials and fabrics sat alongside the more formal, buttoned-up civilian world. “People hadn’t worn cargo shorts or field shirts before,” Warner says. “They were mixing military uniforms with civilian tweeds and waxed cotton jackets. For the first time in their life, they were bringing utilitarian elements to everyday wear.”
Despite appearances, Conkers isn’t a nostalgia trip for a forgotten England. Instead, it’s very much a response to our modern landscape. While it feels like the world is spinning faster than ever, and trends come and go in the blink of an eye, it’s a call to slow down, speak to your neighbors, and to care about how things are made. “The main thing we wanted with Conkers,” Warner says, “was real human experience.”
