As much as anniversaries are cause for celebration, they naturally also prompt introspection. For Palmer Harding, this season marks 15 years in operation—and their 60th full collection. These are milestones well worth raising a glass to for any independent brand, not least one that has weathered the market instabilities and headwinds that we’ll take your understanding of as a given.
The past year has prompted particularly significant operational developments for the brand – a noteworthy one being the opening of a retail space within its East London studio. In part prompted by the widely attested decline of global wholesale retail, this direct-to-consumer pivot has allowed for an intimate atmosphere that, Matthew Harding says, “feels almost like when we first started; there’s more interaction between us, the clothes and the customer.”
This, in itself, became something of a prompt for their latest collection; less a nostalgic ‘greatest hits’ offering, more a zeroing in on the pieces they’ve seen resonate. “It’s very much a collection about refining and celebrating our key pieces, translating them into new silhouettes, new categories,” Harding adds.
Contemplating what exactly those pieces were didn’t take them too long. “When we actually hunkered down and said, ‘Okay, what are we about?’ The answer was cotton shirts and shirt dresses. When we find a shape, let’s just really hammer it home,” Palmer says, holding up a hefty poplin button-down with articulated pleating along its oversized sleeve, creating an easy, boomerang bend. First introduced two seasons ago, here, the aptly-named “Intention” shirt returns across a gamut of plain and striped cottons, and as a full-length dress imbued with a satisfying, fanning swish.
Elsewhere, the asymmetrically-hemmed “Super” shirt—“one of our hero pieces that really launched us way back when,” Palmer recalls, “but that we haven’t had in the collection for a long time”—showcases the duo’s knack for sculptural cut and drape with its tie-front and cape-like back. Though the piece that showcases that most intriguingly is what Harding dubs the “Precision” shirt, which features origami-like criss-cross pleating at the waist to create a line that skims the form.
There are, granted, more than crisp cotton shirts and shirt dresses on offer here. A denim riff on the “Intention” silhouette stands out, as does a ruby satin dress with swooping poet sleeves. Their insistent focus on their chosen fabric and garment, however, is in itself somewhat allegorical of the alchemical formula that’s spurred their trajectory over the past 15 years. “There’s something really wonderful about taking what’s seen as a boring, everyday fabric and elevating it in a really sculptural way,” Palmer says. “The result is something this blend of something that’s really understandable, but also very special.” A decade and a half on from setting out with that mission, the eclectic array of women willing to journey far beyond London’s well-trodden luxury shopping lanes to try and buy their wares in person proves that still holds true.
