From Sketch, to Stitch, to Store
Come with us as we chart the journey of our latest apparel collections and uncover all there is to know about the Liberty fashion brand
Read more
From Sketch, to Stitch, to Store
Come with us as we chart the journey of our latest apparel collections and uncover all there is to know about the Liberty fashion brand
By: Team Liberty
There's something rather special that makes our London emporium incomparable to any other: we are craftspeople in our own right. Home to an in-house design studio and dedicated team of creatives, all who continually collaborate to produce year-round collections of dresses, shirts, sleepwear and much more besides, Liberty is not only a place to discover the unexpected, but a design house forever changing the course of fashion.
“Liberty is full of possibility, a magical place with an enchanting spirit to innovate and a heritage that embraces integrity and authenticity. It’s this that inspires the Liberty fashion brand” says Mary-Ann Dunkley, Design Director of Liberty Fabrics and Products. “It’s our mission to create timeless pieces, beautifully made to be enjoyed and treasured, and as each piece is made using a Liberty fabric, the very material our pieces are made from has a story to be enjoyed and continued.”
As we usher in a new season of design drops, learn how our resident tastemakers create this unique brand of Liberty magic as we chart their process, from sketch, to stitch, to store…
Sketch
The origins of each apparel collection can be traced to one location that’s always a hive of activity: the Liberty design studio, connected to our flagship store by a rear wooden bridge. It’s there that our talented fabric designers collectively conceptualise and hand-produce hundreds of prints every year, from bohemian paisleys and characterful graphics to blooming florals and tropical botanicals. Working with a variety of materials including pencils, watercolours, gouache and collaged paper, they compose new designs either entirely from scratch or by reimagining, recolouring and rescaling historic patterns housed within our archive – an ever-evolving source of inspiration containing well over 50,000 prints (and then some). Slotting into seasonal story-telling collections, each Liberty print can take between three days and three weeks to obsessively fine-tune. Once transformed into a repeat pattern, these masterpieces are handed over to our printing mill, located near the banks of Lake Como, Italy, where they are brought to life on the finest fabric bases by highly-skilled, local artisans.
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Stitch
Once fresh off the printing press, and before being quality-checked by eagle-eyed master printsmen (every inch of every textile has to meet Liberty’s exacting standards), these hand-designed fabrics are then shipped back to Liberty HQ where our product specialists transform them into wearable works of art. Taking approximately six months, it’s a complex, multi-stage process that sees prints cherry-picked and thoughtfully paired off with products, and silhouettes meticulously developed until the sweet spot between supreme comfort and style is struck. Only then – with the expertise of Liberty’s favoured ateliers and tailors – can each garment’s finest details be perfected, from finessing fit for supreme comfort and selecting trims that enhance our prints to picking out buttons that look
Shop Liberty Shirts, Skirts and Trousers
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Store
The last port of call on this international voyage? Liberty itself, our Soho-based store that – since its grand opening in 1924 – has existed firmly at the epicentre of fashion’s most extraordinary and important movements. Both a barometer and beacon of style, it’s here that our garments take their exclusive place on rails, shelves and inside our imaginative window displays, ready to be discovered by shoppers like you. As for this season, the newest installment in our ever-evolving design story, take a stroll around our fashion floors and you’ll find brand new pieces alongside new takes on familiar favourites – all in our latest prints and rich colour palettes. Whatever catches your eye, perhaps an evening dress decked in golden flora or a silken pyjama set that’ll help you drift off into dreamland, we invite you to experience our artisanal touch and trademark attention to detail for yourself.
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