Edward Cuming makes clothes to be lived in, not looked after. In fact, he'd prefer that you look after his clothes as little as possible.
Unlike most clothes at comparable price points, his slashed, overwashed, and artfully warped wearables are designed to be worn to bits. Cuming even recommends tossing his garments in your washing machine for best results, no hand washing or dry cleaning.
“We even put a disclaimer in some items that says ‘Please Machine Wash’ because then they’ll just keep fraying, and that's ideal,” Edward Cuming, the 33-year-old eponymous designer, tells me on a video call from his Madrid studio. “I want that to happen, and you should want that to happen. You're going to see a lot of pieces evolve over time.”
Evolving means the increasingly inconsistent colors and loose strands that dot Cuming's washed-out fabrics become more extreme. Not all of Cuming’s designs are distressed, though everything is intended to get shabbier with time. Wear these clothes until they fall apart and, then, keep wearing them.
This approach has guided Cuming's oeuvre since his Central Saint Martins graduate collection, rich with unfinished hems, crinkled muslins, and dangling threads destined to "worsen" with wear. Legendary now-shuttered boutique Opening Ceremony immediately placed an order.
However, Cuming never planned to sell his graduate collection, let alone allow "Edward Cuming" to become the name of a brand. “I was putting my name in some clothes and doing that on the side with other jobs for a year or two until it really clicked that customers were coming back,” says Cuming
As demand has grown, so have the collections.
Now twelve seasonal collections deep, the Edward Cuming repertoire is anchored by the extremely well-named CUM jeans range, which is less risqué than it sounds. Simply, each pair of CUM jeans sports ripped-open panels exposing a second layer of fabric.
Cuming even dabbles with footwear, handmade and dyed by relatively reclusive Reggio Emilia-based shoemaker and dancer Adam Signature. They're intentionally man-handled to match Cuming's lived in gear. “There are a lot of beautiful kinds of imperfections with the shoes, they really feel handled,” says Cuming. “I don't feel like you're worried about wearing them every day and getting them scuffed up. They get better the more you scuff them up.” The same could be said of Cuming's wearables.
Speaking of growth, Cuming has only continued to attract highly regarded boutiques as stockists. There are now over 40, from The Broken Arm in Paris to DPTO in Los Angeles and ESSX in New York.
But for all his increasing visibility and success, Cuming has been unable to shake off the “under the radar” label. He's not an “if you know, you know” designer: Edward Cuming has been here for over half a decade. It must be frustrating, I suggest, but the designer is actually quite unfazed.
“It can sound a little bit gatekeep-y but I like the idea of people discovering the brand and [finding out] it's a full collection, that it's been around for longer than they think,” he says. “It's kind of like uncovering a little treasure trove.”
Those now opening Cuming’s treasure trove will be faced with his Fall/Winter 2025 offering, "Grow Up." “It feels mature in the context of the brand,” he says, hence the title.
The season begins with a dress. Relatively ordinary in silhouette, ending halfway down the shin, the dress' caramel brown inner is exposed through slits cut from its darker brown exterior. It appears incidentally shredded but the garment, like most of Cuming's work, is actually astutely constructed. It’s a personal favorite of the designer.
“It feels like we arrived at something realized and elegant with that scrappy energy that we love,” Cuming says. “It feels like a convincing proposition for an elegant and expensive looking dress that still has this tattered, eaten away at, decayed kind of feeling.”
This is as much a mission statement for Cuming's brand as anything. Because much of the distinct charm imbued in an Edward Cuming garment comes from its soft form, shaped through a series of washes and plenty of hands-on reshaping.
“There's a patina, a feeling of clothing developed over a computer and then launched at a factory a million miles away. It’s clinical, it's sanitized, there's something so impersonal about it, even if it's an amazing product,” says Cuming. Having briefly worked at Zara as a designer after graduating, Cuming wants his brand to defy any notion of impersonal, mass-made product.
Distressing and wash treatments are still done by hand in Cuming's studio (and if not, at specially selected factories). It’s a way of working that limits how much product he can produce, but it’s something necessary to the entire Cuming project.
“We're not a couture house. That’s not where my skills or interests lie, but there's something to be said for buying a shirt that has been touched by the team that designed it and the irregularities that come with that,” he says. “I think in today's climate, that's one of the most luxurious things you can have.”
