Featured Item - Christopher Raeburn
Christopher Raeburn's lightweight parka is wind and rain resistant, crafted from Italian nylon. Retails for £475.00
Christopher Raeburn
Utilizing re-appropriated military fabrics, young British fashion designer Christopher Raeburn is known for creating original, ethically-aware men’s and women’s wear outerwear collections. Raeburn proudly specializes in garments that are functional, intelligent and meticulously crafted, proudly ‘Remade in England’ and produced in East London. His extreme attention to detail is reminiscent of the military over stock and overruns that he utilizes as his base material. Items are crafted and reworked from an array of military materials, including Swedish camouflage tank Tyvec and forty year old army snow suits, as well as Royal Air Force issue lightweight windproof cotton flying suits, Virgin Airways hot air balloons and Euro Star train uniforms.
Broken into three different collections, Raeburn fashions wool bomber jackets and coats from scraps of patch-worked military battledress, a line of hoodies and parkas made entirely from British milled cottons, both pure and rubberized, and a range of jackets and coats fashioned from Virgin Airways hot air balloons and military parachutes. Luminous and mesmerizingly translucent hooded jackets and parkas featuring fine taped seams overlapping and intersecting in intricate patterns create a graphic effect on the sheer, lightweight parachute silk, with most designs rolling up into tiny coordinating bags and pouches.
Raeburn spends a lot of time searching and researching fabrics for his “remade in England” collection, a pivotal focus for his collection. Careful to source his materials to ensure there is enough to produce his orders, and now working with British cotton mills for ends of rolls and dead stock fabrics.
A graduate from London’s prestigious Royal College of Art in 2006, Raeburn is fast becoming known for his pioneering work towards the future of ethical design. Launched in 2008, Raeburn’s collection was handpicked for an exhibition at the Imperial War Museum in London entitled ‘Camouflage,’ he also showed a capsule collection of reversible garments, titled ‘Inverted’ at London Design Week, and produces a men’s wear collection in collaboration with British designer Tim Soar, which is showcased at Paris Men’s Fashion Week.
Being named winner of the “Emerging Fashion Designer” category of the “100” competition by The Independent Newspaper and The Hospital Club, as well as a winner in the International Ethical Fashion Forum’s Innovation competition, has secured a place at London Fashion Week for Raeburn, and led to women’s wear orders from Browns, and a collaborative capsule collection with upcycling company Worn Again. He is also now selling at Isetan, Tokyo, Takishimaya, New York, Browns, Liberties, Harvey Nichols, 10 Corso Como, and Barney’s to name just a few. Raeburn is also a recipient of the esteemed British Fashion Council NEWGEN sponsorship and the Centre for Fashion Enterprise’s Venture Program, through which he receives mentoring advice from industry expert Susanne Tide-Frater.
Website: www.christopherraeburn.co.uk
