This collection is the end of a 24-year era and our final ready to wear fashion collection.

When you start working on a collection with sketches, and some fabric swatches pinned on a board, alongside beautiful photographs of what you have been inspired by, you rarely end up with the original vision sitting in the office on a rail waiting to be photographed. Each collection is a little journey.

While writing this, we still haven’t seen the whole collection together. There are a lot of unknowns – what will the fair isle look like knitted into a sweater or a scarf, which to date has been developed with tiny strands of wool stapled to pieces of paper. Will the Fair Isle sit with the tiny scrap of canvas that will eventually make trousers? Will everything look very ridiculous, and will anyone want to have it in their wardrobe? Or, will we achieve what we set out to make; a nostalgic, cosy and practical collection that will do Cabbages & Roses justice.

 

I set out to make a collection that is nurturing and I think it reminds me of my childhood; with generous skirts and cosy, old fashioned knits, often paired with some sturdy boots and possibly a good battered old belt – me at waist height hiding in the skirts; layered with an old lived in coat in the colder winters we used to have.

I would like to think that our founder and my mother would want to wear some of it; some of her favourite shapes are in the collection; the dresses and trousers and sweaters that she lived in day in day out, and the dresses, trousers and sweaters I so fondly remember her wearing.

 

I have focused on shapes that are intrinsically Cabbages to me; that I picture when I think back to 2008 (when I was roped into being a model in some of our earlier shoots), or even looking back to our first foray into repurposing second hand hacking jackets, that we used to sew patches onto, in front of a cosy film in the very early days. We have developed lining from a little note we found tucked into a bookshelf; Fair Isle inspired by an old shrunken piece of knitwear found in a treasured box in a wardrobe.

We have worked with one of the first Scottish mills we ever worked with; who I was fortunate enough to visit, who still had developments from C&R in 2008 on file, as well as our trusted heritage British mills producing waxed cotton, soft lambswool, and sturdy tweed to be made into classic C&R designs down the road in Cambridge.

There have been some big changes for this collection, and we have spent nearly 2 years researching where our fabrics come from, and where possible; making our products there too. This means that some of our production is being done in India; using hand stitched cottons, picked, woven and dyed within a few miles; completely chemical free, block printed silk, which has been painstakingly hand made in Delhi by a couple who have been doing their craft for over 30 years, as well as a screen printed fat chintzy floral, printed by hand, onto a soft organic cotton – our new Christina Rose print.

I have watched 47 collections being developed and made at Cabbages & Roses. I was fortunate enough to work on them with Christina, and then Violet for the most recent decade. I really hope that I have done justice to the work and the foundations they have put in place.