Working, Not Workwear
With a name like Working, you may very well think that this is a workwear label. And though that affect is present in Working's debut collection of rough-wearin' clothes, the beauty of the brand lies in both its brawn anand its brain.
"I don’t think we really consider Working to be a workwear brand in the sense that that’s usually understood — that’s kind of the joke in the name," says William Kroll, Working co-founder and the man behind Tender Co. "If workwear usually means clothes inspired by those used to perform physical labor, Working is more a product of the act of design work."
Kroll is working on Working with Middle Distance designer Robert Newman, whom Kroll tutored at University of Westminster. They're a well-matched pair in that, while Kroll's Tender Co. has long epitomized an artful alternative to the business of selling retro-indebted blue jeans, Newman's intellectual imprint is as much about the process as the finished product .
Working is somewhere in between, a Burroughs cut-up of clothing conventions thoughtfully rearranged. And notice the present-continuous tense in the brand's name: Working is a perpetual work in progress, for which collections are less seasonal offerings than markers of moments in time. (It's worth noting, though, that these temporal collections will be available at some of the world's finest retailers, including C'H'C'M', Neighbour, and The Bureau Belfast)
"Without a total ‘buy our shit’ hard sell, we wanted to see what happened if we took [our] two contrasting but parallel backgrounds and designed a wardrobe together," says Newman. "What we’ve ended up with is a sort of Moebius strip, something never quite finished, evolving, reinterpreting and growing — a genuine dialogue."
Also part of that dialogue is Edwin, the historic Japanese denim giant best known for jeans so classic that they're an ongoing reference point for slow-fashion saint Margaret Howell. But akin to how ol' reliable Levi's somehow dreamed up the evocative Levi's RED, Edwin has its own avant tendencies. This most recently manifested by way of SKEWed, a standalone imprint of warped non-workwear that transforms railroad classics with rumpled denim intentionally twisted in the fabrication process to create a three-three-dimensional shape. SKEWed, and thus Edwin, are behind Working's far-reaching and rock-solid fabrication.
"Edwin have been very open to doing whatever we want to try, really," Kroll says. "Edwin owns all its own manufacturing, from weaving to washing, all in Japan, which is quite unusual," allowing for an extreme level of hands-on detail impossible for most ordinary makers.
Example A: Working's special "loft" fabrication that is, as Newman explains, a triple-layered textile that garment-dyes sandwiched fabrics of disparate weights to create a moldable material that's literally bespoke inside and out. Here, it's cut into voluminous "jeans" and anoraks, recognizable shapes given new purpose through considered, controlled craft.
"We’re both interested in how people dress," Newsom says. "Inspiration only ever exists to kick off process, and that can be anything: The crew of [Alien's] Nostromo, [Korn's] Jonathan Davis in the '90s, the textile archive at the University of Wisconsin, kid’s furniture design. It’s never intended to be eccentric but that’s often where we end up."
This is Working transcending labels like "workwear." On the surface, its "wear" appears not so dissimilar from clothes of the "work" variety but these shirts, pants, and jackets are utterly rebirthed from fabric to seams, which've all been sublimated, shifted, or even eliminated to achieve garments that lie somewhere between anatomical and anarchistic.
Far from being unapproachable avant, though, Working has the uniform appeal inherent to useful clothing intended for daily wear. That still doesn't make it workwear, mind you.
"We’re both fans of clothes and objects made to perform a function, so there are references to more traditionally understood workwear, and to military uniforms," adds Kroll, "But we’re enjoying the freedom to move tangentially from reference to conversation to something completely different. "
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