Piecing Together a Fashion Statement - The New York Times

From Paris to Los Angeles, patchwork has become a style craze.

When ASAP Rocky stole the style spotlight at the 2021 Met Gala in a multicolored patchwork cape by Eli Russell Linnetz and the quilter Zak Foster, even the rapper must have been surprised by the reaction.

Vogue called the cape “rule breaking,” capturing “the essence of American fashion,” while the online magazine Highsnobiety declared it “the cream of the crop.” And a TikTok video of Rocky’s quilt-wearing arrival with his partner, Rihanna, drew more than 980,000 likes. (Then an Instagram user identified the quilt as her great-grandmother’s work, which had been donated to a thrift store in California, and the internet went wild.)

The whole episode was just one example of how patchwork — a domestic craft found in such disparate locations as Egyptian tombs, traditional Korean clothing and the rural community of Gee’s Bend, Ala. — has turned into one of the fall’s hottest high fashion trends.

Even the fall 2021 collection from Maison Margiela’s Artisanal line, the house’s version of couture, included a blue jersey darned with vintage newspapers and done in collaboration with the artist Celia Pym as “a way to push the different techniques of craftsmanship and the techniques in the atelier,” said Thierry-Maxime Loriot, the curator of several well-known fashion exhibitions, including “Thierry Mugler, Couturissime,” now at the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris.

Among the highlights of the fall collections, now in stores: a Chanel wool skirt that gave the house’s hallmark tweed a zigzag twist ($7,600), a Louis Vuitton dress that sparkled with Swarovski crystals, flanked by panels of yellow alpaca, silk and wool with steel and glass embroideries, a leather dress with a patchwork scallop design at Chloé, from Gabriela Hearst’s first collection for the house ($12,395), and Simone Rocha’s puff-sleeve tulle top, with a floral print sleeve and a pleated front panel “that extends to the knee,” according to the Harrods website ($1,243).

Outerwear had a turn, too: Junya Watanabe’s hooded zip-up coat with patchwork of printed camouflage in orange and brown fleece ($1,849); a Valentino patchwork denim jacket ($2,924); and Colville’s eye-popping gilet pieced together from multicolored vintage down jackets ($3,039).

And even streetwear has been using patchwork: sweatpants by Priya Ahluwalia machine-stitched from vintage fabrics; Kapital’s paisley bucket hat in khaki or vivid purple; a patchwork crochet knit crop top by Marco Rambaldi; and a sheer mesh bodysuit by Glenn Martens’s Y Project.

But why patchwork — and why now? “People want to be more and more individual and more and more different,” Mr. Loriot said, “not to be all uniform and wear all the same thing.”

And as most patchwork involves a variety of fabrics put together in random ways, “of course it is a unique piece,” he said.

For Molly Powell of London, 21, wearing her patchwork pieces for university classes or shopping with friends “makes me and what I say stand out more.” After all, she said, clothing like her cardigan by Rhi Dancey, with patches of brown, tan and black nylon mesh accented with cheetah and tribal prints, is “very loud and tends to clash.”

But dressing with distinction is not the only aspect of patchwork’s appeal, according to Damien Paul, head of men's wear at MatchesFashion. “Because of the fabrications and techniques, automatically the pieces look elevated and feel luxurious,” he said, but they are relevant to today’s lifestyle as people are “dressing in a more casual way.” An email from the company said it had more than 140 patchwork styles for women and more than 70 patchwork men’s styles this fall, with sales in that sector up more than 35 percent over last year’s levels.

And the patchwork trend coincides with what Dennis Nothdruft, curator of the Fashion and Textile Museum in London, described as “a lot of conversations that fashion is having to have around all sorts of issues — in terms of sustainability, authenticity, mass production versus craft and artisanal skills.” (He curated the museum’s current exhibition, “Beautiful People: The Boutique in the 1960s Counterculture,” which features patchwork dresses by Thea Porter and others.)

Consider the Sycamore Skew dress that the 33-year-old Dutch designer Duran Lantink dropped in September. It was pieced from a wool sweater found in an army warehouse, some printed cotton fabric left over after the Chinese brand Sankuanz collaborated with the Los Angeles store H. Lorenzo on a sweater, some printed silk crepe de Chine that Balenciaga had discarded and a metal zipper from a bomber jacket in the designer’s own wardrobe (1,650 euros, or $1,920).

Some designers are using the technique as their strategy, as what they do, while for others, “it’s just what they are doing right now,” said Rebecca Arnold, senior lecturer in history of dress and textiles at the Courtauld Institute of Art in London.

Walid Damirji, 59, founder of By Walid, is one of the former. He has been hand-stitching one-of-a-kind jackets, blouses, trousers and more from 19th-century Chinese silk and other antique textiles since 2012.

For the last four years he has worked on items ranging from a jacket to a tote, made of neckties from his own wardrobe as well as those of his father and brothers. “It was much more time-consuming that I thought, you know, slotting them all in,” because of the size and age of each tie, he said via Zoom from his West London atelier.

“I just flattened them,” he said of the ties. “Pinned them down — undid them, you know — and just thought, ‘Why not put them to better use?’”

Mr. Damirji had always hated wearing ties. “They always represented someone breathing down my neck. Some teacher,” he said. “But at the same time I used to be fascinated by the beautiful prints.”

It also has been more difficult than he expected to work with some ecclesiastical textiles dating from the 17th and 18th centuries that he acquired as “they are shredded in most cases,” he said. Case in point: the Ilana jacket now for sale on MatchesFashion.com (2,775 pounds, or $3,821), which was made by what Mr. Damirji called “just trial and error.”

While he has an established network of auction houses, dealers and small-lot vendors, Mr. Damirji said the combined effects of the pandemic and Britain’s departure from the European Union had increased the difficulty of finding fabrics — and cost him about 15 percent of his customer base.

“I used to go everywhere, but since Covid, now everybody sends me messages and pictures,” he said, adding that he chooses fabrics on instinct. “Some of these old textiles, the dyeing technique is no longer possible and the vibrancy of the color that comes through you cannot produce anymore.”

And as for Brexit, it “has been such a disaster for us,” he said. “The dealers who used to come from France have now got to get a carnet and list each and every item to get in,” he said, referring to the industry term for an international import-export document. “It’s a bit time-consuming and ridiculous. And it’s costly. And they are all a bit grumpy about it.”

Patchwork is also the signature style of Rave Review, founded in 2017 in Stockholm by Livia Schück, now 31, and her business partner, Josephine Rosenqvist, now 33. “We work with really old fabrics,” said Ms. Schück, like duvets from the 1970s and 1980s and sleeping bags machine-stitched together to create an oversize coat with a matching scarf. For the first time they are using kilts this season because, “you get a lot of fabric from one kilt,” she said.

Handwoven carpets are the raw materials for Osman Yousefzada, 44, the multidisciplinary artist and founder of Osman Studio. He patched together strips of rug slightly less than eight inches wide — made in a village near Tashkent, the capital of Uzbekistan — to create the coat and two jackets in his current fall collection.

As Mr. Damirji, Ms. Schück, Mr. Yousefzada and just about everyone else who patchworks says, the painstaking artisanal aspect of the technique is what makes the garments so special.

Patches create “these miniature frames,” said Emily Adams Bode Aujla, founder and owner of the men’s wear label Bode and a longtime patchwork devotee. “It kind of allows us to have placement on the garment in which we embroider or appliqué or add beads or charms.” An example: the custom suit she made for GQ’s editorial director, Will Welch, to wear to the Met Gala this year.

Ms. Aujla has used quilts as old as the 1840s for one-of-a-kind jackets and has reproduced quilts, using other fabrics like merino wool or cotton twill, to make other garments. “The quilt itself is what informs the technique,” she said. “If we are going to do something by hand or by machine is decided by what I want to preserve about the history of the quilt.”

Case in point: a yellow and beige shirt in the Bode fall collection. The original quilt had “so much hand-stitching all over it,” she said. “We emphasized it a little bit when we reproduced it because it added to the texture.”

Her process begins by making “the first one as a sample in our own studio,” Ms. Aujla said. “So we’ll individually patchwork together, you know, the fabric and embroider it and then either send that piece to India to reproduce or we do it in New York at an embroidery shop here.” India, she noted, has a history of hand work and “they are more likely to be able to take on creative ways of working and producing clothing using hand techniques than our New York factories.”

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New techniques also create more individuality, like the hand painting on top of printed silk scarves, tablecloths or other fabrics — or the contrast created by patchworking the prints with dyed color block fabrics — from the Berlin-based fashion and accessories label Rianna + Nina. At the New York-based brand Sea, coats, puffer jackets and more appear to be “different pieces quilted together, but it is a print that looks like a quilt and then it is stitched on top so that it looks like that it has been pieced together,” said Monica Paolini, 44, a co-founder of the label.

Yet that kind of painstaking care is also what led Joe Brunner, a men’s wear buyer for Browns in London, to point out that there are manufacturing limitations for anyone trying to scale up production of patchwork pieces.

But, he wrote in an email, “with so many people taking to it, it’s impossible to see this as a trend anymore.”

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