Spreadsheets

I feel guilty as I haven't been able to offer you any images of clothes. This is because for the past three months I haven't been doing any designing, instead I have been applying for loans, calculating tax and working out stock levels. This means spreadsheets and I am not a natural, so I have drawn you a picture of me VS the spreadsheet.

Merry Chaumos!

Apologies for the lack of posts over the last three months. I have been busy with financing the company and pushing through an order from the factory, so very little interesting to report!

I thought instead I would give a little update about what is happening among the Kalasha who live in Chitral, the region where our cloth is from.

The Kalasha follow a unique and ancient faith. They celebrate seasonal festivals linked to the solstices, much like our pre-Christian ancestors did (that is for those of us who live in Europe).

In the Kalash Valleys a few days ago the Chaumos celebrations drew to a close. The most important festival of the Kalasha calendar, Chaumos celebrates the winter solstice and prepares the Kalasha for the year to come.

Below is a drawing I made during Chaumos in 2008, it is of a young Kalasha friend who has a cold. He is tucked up in bed, with the traditional remedy of burnt goat horn applied to his face.

Here is a clip of some film which I shot on the same trip. It records the special dough flocks and their shepherd that are made in one of the many rituals carried out during Chaumos.

This clip records the grinding of walnuts which make up the filing for a special bread baked during Chaumos. Traditionally the walnuts are processed in a pestle and mortar, but the family I stayed with were experimenting with a newly bough mechanical grinder from the market.

This last clip records another Chaumos ritual, the drawing of stylised markhor on the Gestakhan temple. Markhor are a magnificent variety of mountain goat with spectacular corkscrew horns. In the Kalasha cosmology markhor are amongst the purist of creatures, shepherded by the pure spirits of the high mountains. 

The Arrival of the Donegalistan


Here it is, only hours out of the tailors, modeled -for expediency's sake- by yours truly:

The cut is more generous than previous jackets, but still elegant. I could fit a thin jumper underneath, but little more. There is space around the chest though, so a thick sleeveless cardigan would probably feel fine, or even -for the more traditional gent- a waistcoat.

The collar and piping is of super-soft Donegal tweed and the lining is a heavy twill. There is a thin layer of fleece in there too, between the cloth and the twill, so the jacket feels heavy and robust... It feels like it could stop a saber slash.

Costellos of Illford

Costellos is a tailors which has been going since 1970. They sepcialise in uniforms and costume for the stage. When I visited today I was shown the full dress uniform of the ambulence service as well as evening dress for a plethora of different regiments in a wonderful mix of colours and cuts. Most interesting of all was a set of bight scarlet breeches and coat, the uniform of London's watermen, unchanged in cut since the seventeenth century (unfortunately I didn't get a photo, but have a look at the generic image blow to get an idea).

Costellos have been working on Hindu Kush's next coat -The Donegalistan... and they have done a great job. I picked it up today, so pictures to follow in the next post!

Sharia Finance

I have been a bit silent of late, this is because I have been looking into finance schemes to help Hindu Kush in the next 5 years. After a lot of research I am applying to a sharia compliant fund which is part of the government's Start Up Loans scheme.

I have gone for a sharia compliant scheme partly because it reflects the values of the people who make cloth and clothes for Hindu Kush and partly because it is the only finance scheme for business that I could find which explicitly states social justice as part of its remit.

The Koran lays down certain guidelines with regards to banking, significantly it prohibits the charging of interest. According to sharia finance there are other ways for investors to realise profit, but these relate to a share of gains rather than fixed interest on a loan. Other elements of sharia finance as stated on the financing sharia enterprise are, "[A] requirement on those who make a profit through business to contribute towards those less well off, and the need to strive for a more equitable distribution of income and wealth and increase equity participation in the economy".

A bit more Pre-Raphaelite / psychedelic

On Friday I went to the Tate Britain with my friend Johanna Zetterstrom-Sharp. There amongst other things we saw an exhibition about that great arbitrator of the aesthetic, Kenneth Clark. There was a lot of Pre-Raphaelite work in the show and some pretty far-out visionary stuff too.

I thought, "My designs are way too tame".

So inspired by the day-glow pallets of artists like William Holman Hunt I have been working up the old leopard and markhor design (it's still very much work in progress).

Holman Hunt's The Scapegoat

Heavy on the saturation 

The Shoreditchabad


Following on in the theme of the Pakistan-isation (or more strictly Persian-isation) of jacket names, I have come up with The Shoreditchabad.

The idea is to produce a tight fitting, narrow shouldered unstructured jacket of the type which is currently popular in Shoreditch and equivalent places in other cities. It will also give me the opportunity to produce a very zingy lining.

The theme I have chosen for this lining is an image of the sort of person who I hope might wear The Shoreditchabad doing battle with a snow leopard in the deep snows and high winds of the Hindu Kush.

Image for buggy back

The Shoreditchabad man

Blue with red snow polka dot for piping