On Collaborating

Collaboration is a term thrown around a lot, especially within menswear. At its least inspiring this can mean an extra logo on a standard product (although this can be fun, and I love seeing retailer labels or signatures on vintage clothing), but at its best can bring a new perspective to a brand or product, especially when those involved have specific, singular, identities. Of course in a very important sense every Tender product is a collaboration between all the people involved in its production, sale, and use, even if they never meet, but for the purposes of this piece I’m treating the term to mean a collaboration between me and another named designer or artist, rather than maker, artisan, retailer, or owner.

Here are some examples of Tender collaborations and how they came about:

Cesca Dvorak is an artist, printmaker, and stylist from Stroud. We met at the playground when our kids were little, and she’s been tangentially involved for several years. Cesca styled PopPunch in 2019, and Rory Cole’s negative print shoot for Spring/Summer 2024. For the current Autumn/Winter 2024 production we made printed shirts and bandanas together. Actually the original idea was to just make a printed bandana, but it was such a nice design that I thought it would be interesting to put it, unchanged, onto the front of a shirt as well. Cesca’s work references folk art and children’s art, and she composes her prints by collaging different drawn and cutout elements. I had asked her to use the Tender booted elephant somehow, so she drew several versions of it which she then photocopied and arranged around the border. She sometimes uses a mosquito-like insect (mayfly? gnat? midge?) in her designs, and I asked her to add this in at the inner corners. Cesca suggested some foliage, and drew alder leaves (her favourite tree, which you see along the canal in Stroud) and a sprig of indigo at the middle, for me. I’d really been imagining something more painterly when I asked if Cesca was interested, but through the process of working together we came up with something that has a visual reference to traditional block printing, some Eastern European folk art warmth, and a naive composition that reminds me of workwear advertising. When screen printed onto the uneven textures of a finished shirt front the whole becomes even more than the sum of its parts.

Rory Cole has been a constant in Tender’s visual identity for exactly a decade. From Autumn/Winter 2015 to Spring/Summer 2025 he’s shot every line book except Autumn/Winter 2021 (photographed at home during a covid lockdown). Rory got in touch for a project when he was a photography student at London College of Fashion, and I was really impressed with his work. In the years since we’ve met up every six months and the stylistic and technical experimentation has been really fun. Rory collects and works with all kinds of esoteric equipment, and over the years he’s made images with everything from a 1960s half-frame Olympus Pen, to a large format Hasselblad. We’ve experimented with pinhole photography, cyanotypes, hand colouring, trichome, Soviet-era stereograph, infrared, light painting, 8mm, and Polaroid. Tender photoshoots are a bit unusual in that as well as being the designer (and usually stylist) I’m also the model. This consistency across seasons is a strength, I think, and it also allows for a particularly intimate and intuitive set of photos. As with any good collaboration I think it’s fair to say that we’ve grown to understand each others viewpoints and I’ve always completely trusted Rory’s eye. Putting this working relationship on pause with Tender’s move to the US is a real loss, but seeing the past ten years in retrospective is a reminder of all the great work we’ve done together.

James Bailey of Workshop Coffee, emailed me last year asking if I was interested in experimenting with the spoiled coffee beans that would otherwise be wasted during their exacting roasting process. I worked with my dyer over several months to try to work something out, and James and his team provided various different options, at different finenesses, as very concentrated liquids, and at different darknesses, until we got to a workable combination. This has been a lovely collaboration, as I’m a big fan of coffee but know little about the roasting process, and I believe it’s fair to say that James is vice versa a lover of clothes but had little knowledge about dyeing processes. By working together with an openness to what might come out at the end of it we built a truly rewarding collaboration starting with a pair of socks but leading to a full dye lot of clothing.

Lastly, for this piece, and a slight look forward to next year, an ongoing collaboration that I’m enjoying immensely is with my friend Robert Newman, of Middle Distance. I was Robert’s tutor for a jeans project when I was a visiting lecturer at University of Westminster in 2010 or so, and following that he helped out when I was working in London, and modelled the first Sleeper collection. Fast forward quite a few years and an impressive list of employers, Robert now runs his own consultancy and clothing brand from Glasgow. We first collaborated on a set of bag designs with overlapping elephant ears holding a protective outer wrapper around a visible inner liner. It was a more technical approach to design than I would have done by myself, but more informed by Tender construction and materials than Robert’s own work, and we were both really happy with the results. Arriving in the Spring is our new full brand collaboration, Working. More of this to come, but the opportunity to bring our experience and outlooks together with few preconceptions and our combined production resources has been really exciting.