“We haven’t used it in a while, but there’s always been this phrase we’ve returned to: ‘We’re dressing her for 11 o’clock on a Tuesday.’ And why can’t that be just as special as dressing for a wedding, or any other special event?” So said Palmer Harding’s Matthew Harding. Indeed, this sensibility—the notion of tweaking and lifting the quotidian material contexts of our lives—lies at the heart of the label’s pre-spring collection. In times when the everyday can feel so damn burdensome, it’s certainly a compelling conceptual premise. But just how does one make a striped poplin shirt feel like more than just a striped poplin shirt? A white slip of a skirt feel like more than a white skirt?
Harding and Levi Palmer—partners in work and life—are dab hands at doing just that, with this collection serving as a solid testament. Riffing on dualities—“masculine and feminine; structured and soft; precise and relaxed,” Harding lists—this is a collection predicated on the simultaneous conjuring of the familiar, and its precise, elevating displacement. The brand’s signature shirt dresses, constructed in reassuring hefty cotton poplins, are constructed with a precise, laser-cut pleating technique just below the bust, creating the illusion of a cinch without compromising on the ease of the fit. Denims are washed in a hue of blue that registers within the visual remit of your everyday jeans, but is so richly saturated that it feels like you’re seeing it in 4K.
Elsewhere, seemingly simple skirts and tees are constructed from swirled scrims of fabric, joined with a single seam—the complexity of their make hinted at by the subtle undoing of their spiral pattern at the hem—while outré cropped trench coats with overhanging wings of sleeves are constructed from “simple” squares of hefty double-faced fabric, artfully transformed through sculptural drape.
“This collection was really about going back to the core of our DNA, too,” Palmer said. “They’re pieces for every day that, when you wear them, make you feel really special—unordinary pieces for ordinary moments.” Every day needn’t feel so everyday, after all.