February 27, 2025 |
Offering, the exciting new London-based label, is about to bring serious cultural weight to the table – no thanks to the foursome who founded it. Renowned stylist and 10 Magazine contributor Simon Foxton, creative consultant and filmmaker Nick Griffiths, interior designer and antiques dealer Adam Bray and Cav Empt co-founder Toby Feltwell have distilled their decades of experience into a debut collection of menswear that is simple yet quietly brilliant. With no agenda beyond creating pieces they’d actually want to wear, Offering stands in stark contrast to today’s trend-chasing, over-conceptualised fashion landscape – focused instead on craftsmanship, collaboration and making something that’s genuinely worth owning.
Rooted in their deep appreciation for vintage textiles and ceramics, the collection, available from Dover Street Market London, reinterprets classic patterns with bold prints, fluid silhouettes and colours that demand attention. Made in Japan, each piece reflects a balance of tradition and modernity, with meticulous fabric selection and expert production ensuring both quality and longevity. While the influence of Japanese craftsmanship is undeniable, this isn’t about mimicking a particular style – it’s about creating something effortless, wearable and original.
As key players in era-defining cultural movements – from UK subculture magazines in the ‘80s to trip-hop’s rise in the ‘90s and streetwear’s disruption of high fashion – these four, once again, bring a whole wealth of experience to the mix that’s truly one of a kind. Here, they dive into their collaborative process, share what inspires them and offer a glimpse into what the future holds (and it looks like it’s gonna’ be a good’un).
What was it like working together on this project?
Nick Griffiths: Refreshing and fun to think purely about what collectively feels like a good thing to see come to life.
Toby Feltwell: It’s quite an unusual thing for a group of people, who’ve been working for this long in related but separate fields, to come together to try something new. It was a very pleasant and sometimes surprising journey. We tend to get so wrapped up in our own specialisations that sometimes you don’t know what you know.
Simon Foxton: I’ve found the process very interesting and a lot easier than I first anticipated . We are four people with quite strong views on how things should look but there hasn’t really been much disagreement about things . I think we all respect one another’s strengths and no one is vying to be the top dog.
Adam Bray: I Love collaboration and it was great to work with friends who have such deep experience in this world, a big learning curve for me.
What was the inspiration behind the project?
NG: The opportunity to work with people you value highly, unifying a vision to create a product that demonstrates our collective aesthetic principles.
TF: Just the feeling that it was time for something new. We all shared the feeling that there was a need for something that represented a new thought. Something that doesn’t require the context of anything else that’s happening at the moment.
SF: The genesis of it is so long ago now I’ve forgotten. I think Nick and I just wanted to make some clothes that we’d like to wear. Having Toby in the mix made it possible as he is an expert in that field.
AB: We had wanted to work together on something for a while and eventually it was ‘if not now when?’
The prints are derived from vintage textiles and ceramics – can you walk us through what this process was like? How did you draw from these inspirations to create the final product?
NG: Like most creative processes, we leaned into a strong reference bank which we built up and abstracted to arrive with what we felt was a new form.
TF: We all trust each other’s taste, and we have a similar visual sensibility – so there is never much need for discussion. Adam has a great archive of things that got us started down the path, they’re from very varied sources, but the trick is to create a kind of visual cohesion from that. Ideally the clothes need to speak their own language and that needs to be new but also to embody the feeling that it comes from somewhere.
SF: Adam was a great source of inspiration for these as he has an encyclopedic knowledge. He put forward suggestions of all sorts and then we took a long time deciding and biting. It was a fun process.
AB: A process of reduction, we each threw down ideas for how we saw the patterns being adapted and produced and the result was a happy amalgam of our individual points of view.
Photography courtesy of Dover Street Market
The products are made in Japan – how has Japanese style and fashion influenced the designs in Offering?
NG: I think the aesthetics and design principles are there in the mix, alongside other influences from other parts of the world, the “hand” of the fabric has the quality one associates with Japanese fabrics. The product feels good and looks great on the body.
TF: It hasn’t, really, except that there is a certain quality to Japanese clothing production that is very important to this project. Not in the sense of ‘good’ quality. although of course it is well made! It’s a certain kind of pragmatism in Japanese manufacturing where even quite humble techniques are honed to perfection. There is a depth to things intended for daily use, even when they aren’t luxurious or fancy.
SF: I’m not sure it has particularly. Perhaps the unstructured and uncomplicated nature of the pieces could be thought of as ‘Japanese’ but I don’t think that was ever a conscious decision. Perhaps the fabric choices more than anything .
AB: We have been inspired by the quality and finish of Japanese style and fashion
Will you be working on more projects as a group? And if so, what can we expect from them?
NG: We hope this project is well received so we can develop deeper and be expansive in an unconventional way. Fingers crossed it resonates with people.
TF: We hope so, we believe there’s a lot more that Offering can do, even outside of clothes, perhaps.
SF: I hope we can continue with this one and perhaps expand it from just clothing into perhaps homewares too.
AB: This project is not restricted to clothes, in time we will develop other products for personal and domestic adornment.
Photography courtesy of Offering.
