Who decides that the clothes you liked last year are wrong this year? What does a sustainability certificate actually certify? And how did we end up making seven samples of the same jacket over the course of a year?

Welcome to the Frolickers Journal. This is where we open up the world behind the clothes: the industry we work in, the decisions we make, the ideas that keep us occupied and the things we think deserve a much closer look.

Building Frolickers has given us plenty of material. Between Marisa’s years inside luxury and our experience creating an independent brand together, we have seen fashion from very different positions. We have worked with factories, fabric mills, retailers, agencies, production studios and publications. We have heard the pitches, paid the invoices and seen what happened next.

Some of those stories are extraordinary. Some are absurd. Quite a few deserve to be public.

So we’re going to spill the beans.

We’ll tell you about a retailer that prides itself on supporting sustainable and ethical brands and presents itself as aligned with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, yet charged us more than $2,000 for a subscription, “lost” part of our stock, sold our clothes for a year and never paid us a single penny.

We’ll look at others that charged us simply to have our clothes listed, then took commission on sales while we carried the costs of production, shipping and returns. The subscription fees were due whether anything sold or not. Put those figures beside the promises of “supporting independent brands” and you begin to understand why we have something to say.

There are the production studios that charged substantial sums for remarkably little usable work. The magazine appearances you can purchase. The sustainability credentials we were offered for payment, without anyone asking to examine our garments or provide evidence of where and how they were made.

Wherever we can, we’ll publish the material behind these stories — emails, invoices, proposals, photographs and records — so you can see what happened rather than simply take our word for it.

From the customer’s side, almost none of this is visible. You see the shop, the campaign, the endorsement and the polished language about values. You might reasonably believe your purchase supports the people making the clothes. What happens to the money between you and them can tell another story entirely.

Speaking openly means standing out in an industry where relationships can determine access. We’re prepared to do that. If independent design matters, the conditions that allow it to survive deserve to be understood. Buying directly from a small creator is one way to help keep that work possible. We want to show you why.

But our experiences are only part of it.

There is a much bigger picture to explore. How are trends forecast, promoted and turned into something we suddenly feel we need? Why can a perfectly good garment begin to seem out of date when nothing about it has changed? Who owns the brands competing for our attention, and what influence do investment groups have over the choices on offer? How do algorithms and advertising work on our tastes, our insecurities and our sense of what is desirable?

These are subjects for the Journal because they reach into ordinary decisions: what we want, what we buy, what we believe and whose work our money supports.

“Choose deliberately” means having something more to go on than the sales pitch.

And this will not be a catalogue of everything wrong with fashion.

We’ll also take you inside the things we make. The jacket that went through seven samples over the course of a year. The fabric that made us want to turn the whole thing inside out. The construction decisions, specialist knowledge and small details that change how something feels when you actually live in it. There is a great deal of ingenuity in making a simple garment work beautifully, and we enjoy getting into it.

The same curiosity takes us into music, art, technology, the lives we have led and the things we still want to try. There is more to say about Freedom, Truth, Love and Responsibility than an About page can hold: where those principles came from, how they work together and what happens when living by them costs something. As Frolickers Adventures develops, there will be people to meet and stories that begin with doing something unexpected together.

That is the range of this Journal. Follow an interesting question far enough and a jacket can take you quite a long way.

There was a point when we came close to closing Frolickers. We decided to continue, and to put what we had experienced to use.

Which brings us back to the photograph at the top of this page.

A story from Herbie Hancock, one of our favourite musicians, whom we recently saw perform at the Barbican Centre, captures that decision particularly well.

During a European tour with Miles Davis in the 1960s, Hancock was playing a concert he remembered as the best night of the tour. The band was flying, the audience was with them, and at the peak of Miles’s solo, Hancock played a chord that sounded completely wrong to him. He thought he had ruined the music.

Miles took a breath, then played a few notes that somehow made the chord fit. What had sounded like a terrible mistake suddenly became part of the music.

It took Hancock years to understand what had happened. Miles hadn’t heard the chord as a mistake. He had heard something unexpected and found a way to work with it. His next notes changed what that chord could become.

That is the spirit in which we’re back. The experiences are ours; making something useful of them is our next move. We still believe in making good things, treating people properly and building a company that reflects those choices.

Now we have a lot more to bring to the conversation.

The Journal starts here. Sign up to the newsletter and we’ll let you know when the next story is ready.

Written by Wojtek Wróbel

This Journal documents our own ideas, experiences and creative process. References to third-party works, including film excerpts, imagery and interviews, are included to illustrate and discuss the subjects explored in our writing.
All third-party materials are credited where their sources can be identified. Frolickers is independent of, and not endorsed by, the creators or rights holders of those works.