The jacket was the first piece we really began to solve.
The question behind it was simple: if you could have only one jacket in your wardrobe, what would it need to be?
We wanted to make the kind of clothes that stay. Not necessarily because somebody has decided they are a classic, but because you keep reaching for them. The piece that gradually becomes yours through use. Something you can wear for years, across different parts of your life, without feeling as though it belongs to one particular season or moment in fashion.
So the jacket had to do quite a lot. It needed to work casually, but not be so casual that it could never be dressed up. It needed to work through autumn and spring, but leave enough room underneath for heavier layers when it got colder. It had to work with as much of an existing wardrobe as possible rather than requiring a particular type of trouser, shoe or person to make sense. And it had to look good while doing all of it.
Before designing the collection, we spent a lot of time looking backwards. Fashion has a habit of declaring things new that have appeared many times before, so we looked through previous decades and paid attention to the silhouettes that kept returning. Not just on runways, but in films, television, photographs and ordinary life.
One of the references arrived while watching The Sopranos. In Season 1, Brendan Filone appears wearing a lightweight navy blouson over a white ribbed vest and gold chain. The jacket itself is almost anonymous: loose body, straight zip, elasticated cuffs, very little decoration. What changes it is a tobacco-brown collar and matching brown interior, which become visible around the open front.
There was nothing particularly extraordinary about it. That was precisely what made it interesting. It demonstrated how little a garment sometimes needs. The proportions were right. The silhouette was uncomplicated. The dark navy and warm brown did enough. It looked like something that could have existed before the episode was filmed and could still work decades later. That was the moment the bomber/blouson shape began to make sense for us.
A hood would have made the jacket more specific. Useful in one context, certainly, but harder to wear in others. Removing it left something cleaner: a collar, a zip, a simple body and enough room to change what was happening underneath. A T-shirt changed it one way. A shirt changed it another. A hoodie or knit could sit underneath when the temperature dropped.
We weren't trying to make the jacket do everything by adding more to it. Quite often, versatility came from taking things away.
Colour was approached in much the same way. One unlikely reference was a Steve Harvey clip explaining how a small wardrobe built from black, navy, grey, brown and tan suits could be separated and recombined into a much larger number of outfits. The exact formula wasn't important to us. The principle was: a colour becomes more useful when it makes the rest of your wardrobe more useful too.
That idea fed into a much broader look at what colours people already own and what tends to remain useful over time. We eventually built the jackets around three reversible pairings: black with navy, olive with evergreen, and tan with espresso. The intention wasn't to invent difficult new colours for people to solve. It was to make each side easy to place among things they already had.
Then came reversibility. Reversible clothing can very easily become a trick. Two sides sound better than one on a product description, but if one side always feels like the lining, you don't really own two versions of anything. So both sides had to be treated as proper garments.
That created an enormous number of problems. A conventional outer-and-lining construction wasn't good enough for what we wanted the jacket to become over time, so the relationship between the two fabrics had to be reconsidered. Pockets had to work from either direction. Hardware had to make sense whichever face was outside. Seams and finishing had nowhere to hide.
More importantly, the two materials had to earn their place. For the technical side, we chose a cotton twill from Olmetex in Como, a specialist Italian mill producing technical fabrics for fashion and performance applications. The base cloth is 100% cotton; its shower-resistant performance comes from the addition of a technical membrane. That distinction matters to us. Once another material is added to give cotton a technical property, describing the complete construction simply as “100% cotton” stops telling the whole story. Olmetex itself specialises in precisely these kinds of coated, bonded and multilayer constructions.
We had originally been slightly obsessive about the idea of everything being 100%. Eventually the more useful question became: what material actually solves the problem properly?
For the other side, we chose 100% cotton corduroy supplied by Brisbane Moss, a company whose history in corduroy and moleskin reaches back to the nineteenth century. That choice began with touch. At textile fairs we would handle hundreds of fabrics, and the first test was almost primitive: do you actually want this material against you?
Marisa had also been irritated for years by jackets that use a beautiful warm material around the collar or cuff to create the impression of a luxurious lining, only for that material to disappear a few centimetres later. If the part that feels good is the part you want against your body, why stop there? So we didn't. One entire face became corduroy.
The pairing gave the jacket two genuinely different characters. Technical cotton on one side for changing weather; soft, substantial corduroy on the other. Because the garment is reversible, neither is really the “inside.” You decide which one is.
The same thinking continued into much smaller details. Pockets, for example, are surprisingly often designed as shapes rather than as places where somebody has to put things. Ours had to hold a full-size phone properly and close securely. Because there are usable zipped pockets on both faces of the jacket, the pockets on the reverse become internal storage when that side isn't being worn outward. In London, where having a phone visibly sitting in an open outer pocket is increasingly unwise, that turned into another useful property of the construction.
It wasn't designed as a security jacket. The architecture simply gave us somewhere safer to put things.
Then there is the pocket lining. Luxury normally concentrates on the parts other people can see. We became interested in the parts they can't. You put your hands into a jacket pocket hundreds of times. So rather than treating the lining as an inexpensive material whose only purpose was to stop your keys falling through the garment, we used an exceptionally soft 100% Italian viscose.
It is a tiny thing, but that was the point. Putting your hands into the pockets should feel good. It is a small private luxury that belongs entirely to the person wearing the jacket.
Touch became important throughout the garment for another reason too. We were conscious from our own experiences, and those of people around us, that tactile sensation can matter enormously. Some people are particularly sensitive to materials; others find certain textures comforting or grounding. That includes some autistic people and people experiencing stress or anxiety.
We have never clinically tested the jacket for any of this, and we would never claim that a fabric treats a medical or psychological condition. It doesn't. But sensory comfort was something we consciously considered when choosing what somebody would repeatedly touch and wear against their body.
The collar went through similar scrutiny. It is deliberately wider and taller than it strictly needs to be aesthetically. That gives enough room to wear a scarf without everything becoming cramped around the neck, and enough height to tuck your chin behind it when the wind picks up.
The sleeves presented another problem. Calling a garment unisex is easy. Making the same proportions work across different bodies is considerably harder.
Different bodies distribute length and volume differently, and the obvious solution to one problem frequently creates another. During development, for example, we produced sleeves that worked well on taller male fittings but felt too long on smaller female fittings. Shortening them too aggressively simply transferred the problem in the opposite direction.
The final proportion became a compromise in the proper sense of the word: not an inferior middle ground, but the point at which the garment could accommodate the widest range of people without looking wrong on either.
The corduroy can also be turned back at the sleeve, shortening it while revealing the contrasting face. Something that began as a construction problem became another way of wearing the jacket.
That process repeated itself everywhere. Length. Volume. Collar. Sleeve. Fabric. Colour. Fit. The jacket went through seven samples and more than a year of development. Some changes were large; others were measured in centimetres. Sometimes an idea that seemed correct on paper wasn't correct once it existed.
Fabric is particularly unforgiving in that respect. A swatch can tell you its colour and hand, but not exactly how a whole garment will behave. You need enough surface area to see how light moves across it. Two colours that seem perfect beside one another as small squares can behave completely differently once one occupies the entire body and the other appears at the collar, cuff or open front.
So we kept making it. Each sample exposed another problem. We changed proportions, lengths, colours, collar dimensions and fit until there was nothing left that we felt needed fixing.
The hardware received the same attention. The jacket uses Riri zips and Cobrax snaps. Riri began in Mendrisio, Switzerland, in 1936 and remains a specialist in high-end zip systems; Cobrax, now part of the same group, is its Italian specialist brand for snaps and buttons.
Those are expensive decisions for parts that most people will never research. But that was also part of the point. We had become tired of the gradual erosion of quality: garments becoming more expensive while the materials, linings, hardware and construction quietly became worse. We wanted to see what happened if we moved in the opposite direction and treated every part of the jacket as something worth solving.
Even the idea of ownership became slightly less fixed. The proportions were developed so the same jacket could sit closer on one body and deliberately oversized on another. That meant, depending on size and preference, two people could potentially share one. Add the reversible construction and one object could effectively occupy several different roles across two wardrobes.
We liked the absurdity of that. Instead of finding reasons to buy four jackets, we were trying to find reasons why one might be enough. That, more than reversibility itself, is really what the jacket is about.
It wasn't designed from a single flash of inspiration. The visual idea came partly from a nearly anonymous jacket on The Sopranos. The colours came from thinking about wardrobes as systems. The fabrics came from textile fairs, touch and London weather. The proportions came from fitting different bodies. The pocket size came from a phone. The lining came from putting our hands into bad pockets. The construction came from discovering that our first solutions weren't good enough.
Wojtek approached much of it like an engineering problem: list the things that are wrong, propose solutions, make the object, discover where those solutions fail, change them, and repeat. Marisa brought the perspective of somebody who understood the machinery of fashion from inside it, but also knew exactly which conventions irritated her enough to question them. Somewhere between those two approaches, the jacket emerged.
It also became an unusually literal expression of the ideas that eventually sat underneath Frolickers: freedom in how something can be worn; truth about what it actually is; love expressed through details that exist purely for the person using it; and responsibility in trying to make one thing useful enough, adaptable enough and good enough that you want to keep it.
That is why the chameleon eventually made so much sense to us as a symbol. The popular idea that chameleons change colour simply to disappear into their surroundings is incomplete. Colour change also plays an important role in social signalling, communication and thermoregulation, although its functions vary between species. It isn't only about hiding. Sometimes changing how you appear is a way of expressing what is happening inside.
And perhaps that is the simplest explanation of the jacket too. It doesn't become a different object when you turn it inside out. It is still the same jacket. You have simply chosen which side of it you want to show today.
Written by Wojtek Wróbel
FROLICKERS founder.
