The studio
We make a small number of things, and we make them properly
Muse is a clothing studio in east London. We design in natural fibres, produce in small runs with makers we visit, and keep the range deliberately narrow so that every piece has a reason to exist.
A garment should be interesting to wear rather than interesting to look at. That single idea decides most of what we do — the restraint in the colour range, the absence of visible branding, the willingness to remake the same coat for the eighth year running.
Origin
How it started
Muse began in 2016 as a pattern-cutting table in a shared workshop on the wrong side of a railway line. The first thing we made was a coat, because it was the garment we could not find — long enough, unlined, with a collar that stood up without a stand.
We sold forty of them to people we mostly knew. The second run was two hundred, and by then it had become a studio.
We have stayed small on purpose. The whole team can still fit around one table, and every pattern is still cut in the same room as the samples.
Philosophy
What we hold to
- Restraint
- The range stays narrow. If a new piece does not do something the existing pieces cannot, we do not make it.
- Repairability
- Generous seam allowances, stitched facings, shanked buttons. A garment that cannot be opened up cannot be kept.
- Proximity
- We visit every workshop we produce with. Nothing is made somewhere we have not stood.
- Patience
- Cloth rests before it is cut, bias panels hang before they are sewn, and samples are worn for a week before anything is approved.
- Studio founded
- 2016Studio founded
- Pieces in the current range
- 12Pieces in the current range
- Production partners
- 6Production partners
- Collections a year
- 4Collections a year
Craft
Materials and craft
We work almost exclusively in natural fibres — wool, linen, cotton, cashmere, silk and vegetable-tanned leather — because they age in ways we can predict and repair in ways we can teach.
Cloth is bought in small quantities from mills in Italy, Yorkshire, Scotland and Portugal. Where we can, we buy the last of a run rather than commissioning new, which keeps our volumes honest and our waste low.
Offcuts from the cutting table become pocket bags and facings. What is left after that goes to a textile recycler in Kent.
In the studio
Seven people, one cutting table and a kettle that has been repaired more times than any garment we have made.
Visit
Come and see it
The studio is open by appointment on weekday afternoons. We will make coffee and show you the samples that did not work.