One evening in September, after everyone had gone home, the owner and I stayed behind on the factory floor.
We were meant to be talking about next season. Dates, quantities, which styles could go on the cutting table first. Somewhere between the schedule and the samples, the conversation drifted. He told me it gets harder every year to run a factory in Britain. Fewer orders, rising costs, fewer young people coming in to learn. He is the second generation to run it, and he did not describe keeping it open as a business decision so much as something he felt responsible for, and proud of. Many of the people working beside him have been there for years.
I kept thinking about it on the way home. In a world that keeps asking for things to be faster, cheaper and more efficient, here was a room that had kept working in much the same way for two generations, with many of the same hands. Fields of Necessity is a small brand, and I do not pretend it can carry much weight. But I would like it to be part of what keeps a place like this going.
In a way, that is what the brand is about. Keeping a pace and a set of values of our own, even in small ways. Paying attention to the things we tend not to notice while they are here, and only go looking for once they are gone.
It has always interested me how quickly people connect where something is made with how good it is. Made in Britain, made in Italy, and the assumption follows: it must be good. Made somewhere else, and the opposite. I do not think that holds any more.
Some places do have a long history of people making things with care, and higher labour costs can buy a little more time on each piece. But most garment factories now work to a similar standard, and the ones in countries built for scale are often the most advanced of all. Last year I visited a factory in Portugal, and I still remember how different it was from anything I had seen before. The newest machines, a whole setup built around getting the quality right. If you want to try something new in how clothes are made, that is usually where you will find it.
Britain, sadly, finished deindustrialising some time ago. Making here comes with constraints, and very little of it is efficient. If what you want is to make good clothes cheaply and quickly, it is not an easy choice.
But I run this brand in London. Each piece goes through dozens of attempts in the studio before it is ready, and when it moves to the factory I want it to arrive there as intact as possible. For that I need to be able to walk in whenever I have to. I want to know who is making it, and I would like the work to begin from a relationship where they know these are clothes I designed, and I know whose hands they pass through.
To make something near you is to stay responsible for it. I believe that makes a difference to the result. Not one I can easily explain, but one I can see.
Lately I have come to feel that this may be one of the last chances we have to hold on to something human. What that means will be different for everyone. I understand that the world moves forward by becoming more efficient, and I do not argue with that. But I started this brand partly because I missed what gets lost at that speed.
Efficiency is the thing we have prized above almost everything else, and it may soon be the one thing we can no longer win at. If so, what is left to us might be what optimisation cannot find on its own. An imagination that does not begin with the fastest route. And the will, and the ease, to stop for a while, for as long as we like, even in the middle of it all.
“The things that hold everything together are rarely the ones we see, until they come undone.”
So for now, this is where we make. Close enough to walk in on an evening in September, and stay behind to talk about next season.
