As striking as Galilee By Sea’s roomy tailoring and suave sportswear may be, it hardly tells the young label’s entire story. To truly tug back the curtain is to simply plug in the brand’s playlists.
“Music is really the cornerstone of our practice,” says Marq Rise, Galilee By Sea’s founder. “We bounce between genres like jazz, neo soul, and trip-hop, which score our design process. The music guides us into the vibe of what we're creating.” This love of music is deeply fused into the brand, most tangibly manifesting in the laser-cut aluminum speakers it designed to better propose full aural immersion.
But Rise’s meditative mixes don’t just induce the headspace for the patient practice of Galilee By Sea, the line Rise runs with his wife. These curated playlists also reflect the brand’s exacting nature — this is a label operating by the beat of its own drum.
“The speed of fashion, having Fall/Winter and Spring/Summer seasons, is necessary,” says Rise, a former Louis Vuitton stylist. “But it's almost redundant in our terms. The way we design is a continual conversation, where we want to build and develop from seasons past.”
Every tightly edited Galilee collection is more obviously defined by evolution than newness, with the ballooning forms of Galilee’s jackets and trousers only slightly tweaked each season to better fit the mood of the moment.
Rise laments fashion’s obsession with fantasy — “We don’t have lofty narratives like other brands,” he says — preferring to focus solely on his clothes’ tangible qualities, like their handwoven natural fabrics and the way that one high-necked trench coat cleverly disguises eight handy pockets in its front panel. He also has no interest in printing a logo onto his clothes, lest branding distract from his painstaking details. “My merchandising and marketing friends say that is a mistake,” he chuckles.
“There are so many brands out there. I would much rather build a reputation on quality than try to force another brand down people's throats,” says Rise. “Right now, it's like: ‘Who can scream the loudest?’ But in a room full of people screaming, who's the guy that's not speaking at all? That's the person who's maybe going to make more of an impact. That's our approach.”
Rise has been honing his restrained approach for over a decade, long before “quiet” fashion became a disposable buzzword. In 2014, inspired by a gig in the tailoring department of a high-street chain, he began creating his own suits and posting the results to Instagram. One famously online designer took notice.
Undeterred by Rise’s lack of formal training — the designer left school at 16 to dive straight into a career in retail — Virgil Abloh brought Rise on board as a design consultant for Off-White™ in 2017. Their careers grew in tandem, with Rise following Abloh to Louis Vuitton in 2018. Then, impressed by Rise’s styling work for 2020’s debut NIGO x Louis Vuitton collaboration, NIGO brought him to KENZO.
“It was a snowball effect from one DM from Virgil,” says Rise, who’s hardly the only young person to have ever said something along those lines. “Virgil was the person who put me on, gave me a voice, and made my opinions feel valid.”
The one-off tailored items that caught Abloh's eye were only the preliminary stages of Galilee By Sea. Though skewed formalwear remains core to the brand, so too does contrasting sportswear codes.
“When people talk about this idea of sportswear and tailoring, usually it's a suit with a pair of trainers and a bucket hat. That is not the vibe we're going for,” says Rise. “It's more in the intricacies and the detailing.”
For Spring/Summer 2025, Galilee used crisp linen fabric from a small British mill to create tracksuits consisting of flowing side-striped pants and asymmetrically zipped track tops. One year later, he sourced gingham fabric from another family-run English mill for a relaxed checkered shirt cinched at the waist by an elastic hem in a manner that recalls sporty windbreakers. These kinds of understated quirks have come to define his label’s urbane design. And that’s much more exciting than logos.
“There are certain silhouettes, there's a certain way that we cut our trousers, there are volumes and shapes that we do in our sleeves,” says Rise. “The idea is that people know what the brand is just by the shape of it.”
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