Lu Flux
Lu Flux is a delightfully playful and eccentric women’s wear collection based on British eccentricity, and a love of traditional techniques combined with modern design.
Katie Jones
Katie Jones loves to crochet, and boy does it show. Spending as much as eighty hours working on a single jacket, Jones pieces together upcycled leather and denim to produce labor intensive, highly crafted fantasies of color. Jones’s work is a melodious juxtaposition of color, texture, shape and style. Flirty, frilly, playful and frothy, covered with hearts, frills, and bows, her sense of style is simply joyful.
The spring Summer 2016 collection is a riot of kitsch, Tex-Mex inspired color and texture that includes jeans plastered with multi-colored stars and hearts, knitted cardigans with candy-cultured ribbon fringing, a simple summer dress made from reclaimed denim, paneled and pieced together with classic bright crochet, the Katie Jones trademark.
The collection is produced from her studio in Stratford, East London, where she works alongside her mother, and a very small team, to produce her exuberant collection, each piece a labor of love. Favorite current pieces are made from denim and leather, hand punched and crocheted together with brilliant colored yarns. 
Jones is in her element, and clearly happiest when she’s doing crochet work. With a love of the hand made and the bespoke nature of her designs, the constant connection to the work, the knowledge of who made it and how, increases the innate value of the piece, embellishing it not only with crochet and patchwork, but also a transparent supply chain, and the stories and value of designs hand made with love, ultimately making the end product less likely to be wasted.
Graduating in 2013 from Central Saint Martins with an MA in knitwear, Jones has always had an aversion to waste. Going out of her way to use up yarn ends, she cuts up second hand clothes to remake into her own designs by punching holes, hand dying, embellishing with hand embroidery, and knitting, as well of course as crochet.
Jones’s design approach comes from a belief that the planet can’t take much more overconsumption and gratuitous waste. “You pick a couple of battles when working with sustainability and decide what you want to target”, for Jones, that means focusing on reusing waste. Challenging herself to make something new without using any new fabrics, the bulk of the collection is by default upcycled, with a small percentage of virgin British manufactured materials with local and transparent supply chains.
The collection is the epitome of British eccentricity, eclectic, innovative and entirely nutty. The Katie Jones label is based on the challenge of “creating something beautiful from nothing.” Designs are crafted from surplus materials, sourced from UK and Italian design houses, proving that sustainable fashion doesn’t need to be drab.
The original impetus for designing with waste came from stints in mainstream fashion, and seeing first hand the amount of wasted fabric, over runs and damages, combined with the need for thrift during her college years, something that ended up becoming second nature and her design ethos. Katie also believes in the importance of teaching people skills to support individual sustainability. Passionate about teaching others to darn and mend, thereby increasing the longevity of their clothing, and encouraging others to treasure their garments and produce less waste.
Website: www.katiejonesknit.co.uk
