It Has Pockets
Early Majority is a “technical outerwear system” with plenty of pockets (photo: Magdalena Wosinska).
Early Majority, a gender neutral fashion brand aimed at urban commuters, promises that all of its pieces are designed to have enough pockets.
Co-founders CEO Joy Howard and head of product Hanna Ter Meulen created the brand out of frustration with the current bifurcated offering of high street technical garment suppliers, where women’s sections still function as something of an afterthought. “Historically, outdoors and outerwear companies have taken a ‘Shrink-it and Pink-it’ approach,” explains Ter Meulen, “which is to just take a men's jacket, make it in pink, take away all the nice little features, because who needs pockets? If you're a woman, you have a handbag, right?” She adds. “We just really wanted to not do that.”
Pockets – and the lack thereof – have always been political, argues academic and author Chelsea G Summers. During the medieval periods, both sexes carried their important daily items in bags that tied to belts. To avoid the light fingers and sharp scissors of cutpurses, these purses became subsumed by generous layers of fabric in subsequent eras. But while masculine silhouettes allowed for a linear progression to built-in pockets by the 17th century, women’s fashion remained barren of the feature as Rococo opulence gave way to the figure-hugging skirts of European fashion during the French Revolution.
“Women’s pockets were private spaces they carried into the public with increasing freedom, and during a revolutionary time, this freedom was very, very frightening,” said Summers, writing in 2016 for the now-shuttered publication Racked. “Take away pockets happily hidden under garments, and you limit women’s ability to navigate public spaces, to carry seditious (or merely amorous) writing, or to travel unaccompanied.”
Women commuting today are perhaps less likely to be secreting seditious documents about their persons, but Early Majority wants to make its own small revolution against garments that prioritise form over function. It's a curious time to bring a new activewear brand to market. Outdoor gear has become popular within menswear, partly fuelled by the body-hacking, polar fleece-wearing tech bros of Silicon Valley (proponents of the hoodie, which famously features a large central pocket), while its more feminine counterpart, athleisurewear, has seen clingy yoga leggings (one credit-card-sized pocket, if you’re lucky) ordained as trousers. Do we need more practical fashion that allows us to remain perpetually in motion while we traverse to and from our jobs to our side hustles to our gyms?
Early Majority wants to chart a third course with what it calls its “technical outerwear system” – a genderless capsule collection of interchangeable jackets, coats, capes and base layers, engineered to be rainproof, windproof and, in some cases, UV-proof. The brand takes techwear – fashion that combines military-grade fabrics with streetwear silhouettes – and strips it of unnecessary “tactical” adornments – the straps and buckles that go nowhere.
Ter Meulen cites the work of Japanese fashion designer and artist Kosuke Tsumura and their urban survivalwear brand FINAL HOME as a major influence for Early Majority. Tsumura was a fan of pockets – a parka with 44 of them that was designed as part of FINAL HOME resides in MoMA’s permanent collection. When FINAL HOME launched in 1994, parkas designed to cope with apocalyptic conditions represented a cyberpunk vision of the future; less than two decades later, commuters in cities around the globe contend with everything from flash floods in New York to extreme heat in Amritsar.
Howard and Ter Meuelen are aware that launching a new garment brand is hardly a climate-friendly offering, but they have a plan to avoid falling into the pitfall of overproduction. A paid membership scheme adds a gloss of exclusivity to Early Majority, but the brand’s founders say that the goal is to gather feedback from members to continuously refine the existing pieces in order to only make items people want to keep, while offering a repair scheme for used garments.
The pieces eschew obvious branded-ness beyond an understated signature dark green and a wiggly logo – a gummy-worm shape suggesting an E curving into an M. Said logo, sewn onto a magnetic-backed patch, can be popped off altogether. Early Majority offers alternatives in the form of brightly coloured embroidered patches, designed by artists, that can be purchased individually. It may be a little counter-culture aesthetics as consumerism, but nothing is stopping you from pinning your own badges onto your jacket, or you can “can just step away from logo and go incognito” says Ter Meulen. “My approach has been to create a really functional system of dress, where you have jackets and layering pieces that work together for all weather and all eventualities. With a lot of pockets.”
Disegno spoke with Ter Meulen to discuss the process of designing functional fashion. An edited version of the conversation can be found below.
Disegno What’s the concept behind Early Majority?
Hanna Ter Meulen Joy Howard got me on board to create this modular system of outerwear that could be pieces she needed, as a woman who likes to travel to work on a bicycle. I also struggle with finding pieces for when I'm commuting. It was a meeting of two minds, where we wanted to create a brand, a range of products that would help people to commute, but also not create more waste in the system. Her approach was to look at creating a membership model, because one of the biggest problems in fashion is overproduction. Even at the biggest companies, you don't know how much you're gonna sell. You can't look into the future. Alongside this we created a system of dress, where all the pieces could work together, eliminating the need for having so many individual jackets for so many individual eventualities. Because we have this membership scheme, people are engaged in our community. We want to produce in a more sustainable way by being much closer to our consumer, to make stuff that people really want.
Disegno Traditionally, a lot of activewear has had “cis man going on an adventure” as its target audience. What was your kind of starting point for designing something that completely goes against that model?
Hanna My background is in menswear, actually. I've mostly designed for men, so I have always looked into function in garments. For a lot of designers who design for women, it's often about the silhouette and the latest trends. What I wanted to look at is the function of the garment. This Bauhaus principle of form follows function, but still make it aesthetically pleasing with a reduced, minimalist look. The garment isn't shouting that it has all these functions and it still blends into everything else that you own. It just works for you. Ruffles and whatever, that's not my vibe; I looked at it from a very functional perspective. FINAL HOME created these pieces that were insanely cool, and functional, and also looked great. Finding that intersection is is how we approached Early Majority.
Disegno How does the modular system work? Because, again, a lot of outerwear is about layering, or things that can be zipped or clipped on and off.
Hanna I stepped away from a clip-on, three-in-one kind of thing, because you often end up with a compromise, and the garment doesn't fully function on its own. I wanted to create standout pieces that you could layer on top of each other. It's not that hard to put two layers on instead of just one. It's all individual pieces that can be worn by themselves, but together, they create either an extra warmth, or an extra wind breaking layer or an extra rain layer. We call it the Anti Merch Map – a simple grid based on the questions that you ask yourself when you get up in the morning. Is it hot? Is it cold? Is it raining? The map gives you options of two combinations that will probably keep you sorted for the day.
Disegno Is each piece designed to be gender neutral? Given your menswear background, was that easier to work around? Because the fashion industry often makes out as though you have to have very strict men and women's sizing, but I always wonder if that's a myth.
Hanna For certain kinds of garments and certain kinds of looks, you want to create, there's no denying that some people have boobs. But at the same time, it's not necessary to differentiate body types that much. As you said, I have this background in menswear design, so I'm marrying that with women's functional requirements. It doesn't matter what your gender expression is, we just want you to feel cool and protected against the elements.
Disegno With the goal of preventing overproduction, how does that work with a membership model? Do people preorder? Or is it that having members means that you have a closer idea of how many you need to produce?
Hanna It's twofold. Yes, having the membership [means], over time, we'll get to know our members, what they want, and how many they'll buy. There will be a preorder element of that as well. But at the same time, we're inviting people to come into the brand to co-create with us, to help make things that people really want. We’re holding a town hall meeting with customers, and we have a Discord Server where people can reach us. Hopefully, we can bring that sort of feedback into the creation of the garments going forward. The idea is not to just bring out more and more and more jackets, it's [about] refining the pieces that we have, based on the feedback that we're getting.
Disegno Alongside this co-creation element, you also have a closed loop aspect. How does that factor into the design process? Are you always thinking of not just how you're creating, but how you're going to uncreate at the end?
Hanna For sure. The main design philosophy is asking whether this is designed to be recycled, or is this designed for longevity? Designing for longevity is what most [Early Majority] pieces are, because if you look at recycling garments right now, it's still really quite hard to have a garment that can be completely fully recycled. It's important to know that, if you recycle, the fabric degrades and the quality degrades. So at this point in time, it's still better to create something that has a much longer life cycle, because you'll get much more use out of it. What we really want to avoid is it ending up in landfill. When I'm designing something, it needs to last. The seams need to last, the protection needs to last, it needs to be repairable. Then, if you're done with your jacket, send it back to us. We'll bring it back, we'll repair and recondition it. We'll get it back into the system again.
Disegno What sort of like testing do you do on the garments? You mentioned the founder loves to commute by bicycle, so do you go out and cycle around in them?
Hanna Our whole team gets involved in testing and making sure that the functions we’re designing into the pieces actually function in that particular way. Alongside doing all the lab testing and making sure that the performance is there, user testing is a really core part of the product development. We had a product testing trip where we picked up our first set of prototypes from our factory in Portugal and went out into the mountains. We had fun, really trying to put them through their paces. We even stood under a waterfall to test whether the waterproofing worked – and it did, which was amazing. We've really tried to put our garments through their paces before they reach our customers.
Disegno Is everything made out in Portugal?
Hanna Yes. Another part of this, as you know, is that the world is facing this huge global supply chain crisis, which isn't looking like it will go away anytime soon. As a startup, you are more agile, but you're not immune to these kinds of problems. So one of the things that we really wanted to do is bring the supply chain as close to us as possible. Portugal has some amazing suppliers and you can keep it very local. But zippers and other components still come from further away. It’s a continuous journey to try and shorten those supply chains.
Disegno Could you take us through the badge system? Was that always the plan, or was that something you added later in development?
Hanna I came up with that concept very early on, actually, when I first connected with Joy. She was very inspired by the movie Black Panther, where Wakanda [the fictional East African country the superhero Black Panther hails from, ed.] has this forcefield that protects you against enemies. She had this idea of [Early Majority] as this magnetic force field protecting you from the elements, and really wanted to bring that [aesthetic] into the garments. At the same time, I personally was inspired by Joy's background as a musician. I think she toured with Nirvana at one point. I have always liked badges and fan T-shirts, and wrapping yourself in your favourite artist. I wanted to create a system where you can either be really overt with your branding and use badges as a vessel to communicate your allegiances, to show what you stand for, but at the same time you can just take it off and blend into the background. The only tell that you're wearing an Early Majority garment would be the magnets. We're gearing towards the post-streetwear life, I hope.
Disegno How would you describe the particular green that you produce all of the garments in?
Hanna It's a special Early Majority green, which we call Forest Black in a nod to going outside and blending into your surroundings. It's a particular Pantone colour that I was very fond of. We could have just gone all-out black for the launch, but I felt like this would be a much richer colour to come out to the world with. It blends so well into your wardrobe, and I want the Early Majority system to work with the things that you already have. It's a much more sustainable approach.
Words India Block
Photographs Magdalena Wosinska