I was listening to a podcast on my run this morning about the modern ailment of distraction, about how we are constantly ‘foraging’ for nuggets of information. We flit between social media platforms, browser tabs, apps, TV channels, Spotify playlists in the (generally subconscious) hope of a dopamine hit. Consequently, our brains can’t sit still and therefore they aren’t working quite as well as they should. I literally just did it, taking that full stop as an opportunity to look at something else – an email offering advice on how not to be the ‘Karen’ of your office. I mean, I desperately want to know, but I should at least finish this paragraph before I find out.
We think multitasking is good, but doing more than one thing at once means that each of those tasks receives less of your brain capacity than it would if you handled each separately. In fact, a study at Stanford University in the US demonstrated that those who multitask are more easily distracted, less productive and make more errors. One of the professors said that people who text while watching TV, maintain multiple instant chat conversations or flit around the internet while working are "suckers for irrelevancy".
Ouch. I thought 2020 had already ground my intellectual nerve-endings down to desiccated stumps, but that got me in the feels.
Perhaps we should take lessons from the clothing brands that just make one product, or variations thereof? Maybe those that swim against an unending tide of growth, evolution and speculative investment can teach us something about getting to the heart of life? (That was a supremely heavy-handed segue and you fell right for it. You must be one of the suckers.)
Hiut makes jeans and only jeans in a factory in Cardigan, West Wales. The business is based heavily and explicitly on the concept of doing one thing well. It’s written all over the flipping website. "We make jeans" it says. "That’s it. Nothing else. No distractions. Nothing to steal our focus. No kidding ourselves that we can be good at everything. No trying to conquer the whole world. We just do our best to conquer our bit of it."
Hiut jeans are good because they are built to be worn forever. They use the best quality denim the company can source (selvedge from the Kuroki and Nihon Menphu mills in Japan, for example) and employ a modest amount of skilled people to hand-make each pair to the highest standard. “For me, quality is almost like a business plan,” David Hieatt told Esquire last year. “We can’t make more than everyone else, but we can make better than almost everyone else.”
In East London, Stepney Workers Club has pretty much perfected the simple canvas trainer. In a small pond that already houses the big fish of Vans’ Authentic and Converse’s Chuck 70, they somehow managed to create a new, unique (I think) riff on the theme. And not only is the shoe itself good, but the branding is good, the marketing is good, the collabs are good and the price is really, really good. The Dellow, which, admittedly, is available in low or high top, starts at £65 and top-out at £120, but that’s for the really special ones. The shoes are "a rethink of timeless, genreless, vulcanised classics that have been adopted by varying sub-cultures over the decades," says the brand. And that may be true, but I find them to be the perfect ‘beater’ shoe, and I’ve worn mine pretty much every day in 2020.
For your torso, there’s Paynter: a two-person maker of over shirts. They release just three drops of their simple, pocketed jackets every year so that they can eradicate waste and ensure quality across the batch. Each drop sells out within minutes, so they must be doing something right.
"We’d rather have a bigger impact than be big in terms of revenue," say founders Becky Okell and Huw Thomas. "We’re actually more of a research project than a brand, and we’re very happy with it being that way."
"We’re definitely more Patagonia than Prada,” they explain. "We don’t make a whole collection, we just make jackets. One style at a time. We don’t show at Fashion Weeks or sell wholesale, we’re only available online three days a year. Our purpose is to bring meaning back to clothing rather than try to sell as much of it as we can."
Paynter exhibits a number of the virtues modern brands strive for, and when I say modern brands, I mean brands in the post-pandemic landscape. They offer simplicity and authenticity; are sincere and are able to market honestly and directly to the consumer because there is no skullduggery in their supply-chain. They also make something that is designed to last – designed to slot into a lifestyle based on experience rather than goods. That they make just one product (for now) is charming, but that isn’t Paynter (or SWC or Hiut’s) only selling point.
The next batch of Paynter jackets is due in January(ish), and in a slightly annoying skewering of this column, Okell and Thomas have informed me that they will soon be expanding the product range to include a product that is not a jacket, too. They are expanding, it would seem, but I don’t think there are handbag collections and fragrance ranges on the horizon just yet. Making more good stuff is fine, it’s just more ‘stuff’ we need to be wary of.
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