British Fashion Council Comes to Hiut Denim

September is when the fashion industry looks to the fashion capitals of the world: London, Paris and New York. It’s when the biggest houses debut their new collections to the media and buyers from the world’s biggest department stores. A week largely for insiders, where seats at events are bartered over months in advance.

This year, the British Fashion Council wanted to bring some of that energy beyond the fashion capitals, hosting events across the UK to highlight the people and businesses shaping fashion around the country. Hiut was invited to host one of these events, and I was also asked to join a panel discussing the future of Welsh fashion.

When deciding what we should put on, we kept coming back to one question: what does Hiut do differently? There is a long answer to that, but the simplest is our makers. We are one of the few brands still making everything in house, and doing so to the standard that we do.

So we invited people into the factory to see exactly what that means.

They saw that every pair of jeans starts with a paper pattern. Every piece is cut by hand, with each pair made up of 17 individual pieces. They saw pockets, coin pockets, pocket bags and belt loops being hand pressed before being attached by our makers, rather than being fed through an automated production line.

None of this is particularly visible in the finished pair of jeans. That is rather the point.

A pair of Hiut jeans might look simple. But behind that simplicity is a huge amount of skill, time and attention. More than four hours of making goes into each pair, with our Grand Masters handling the jeans through each stage of their construction.

They also met the people behind the making. People like Elin, who has been making jeans since she was 16. She has seen the denim industry in Wales at its height, watched it disappear almost entirely, and then helped build something back from the ground up here in Aberteifi.

We wanted people to be able to see the hundreds of small decisions and acts of craftsmanship that go into making one pair of Jeans. The hands, the knowledge and the experience that sit behind every stitch.

Fashion Week is often about what is new. Our event was, in many ways, about something much older: making things properly. And showing that there is still a place for that in fashion.

Photography by Leia Morrison & Joe Arnold