Charlie Constantinou, the London-based designer pushing the boundaries of technical-wear, is back with another 66° North collaboration, this time for the cold winter season. It’s the second time the CSM graduate is collabing with the Icelandic brand, and for this collection they’re going for extreme weather conditions with intricately quilted puffers, shell sets and wools. “This season’s more for intense, cold, traditional Icelandic winter, so we have a lot of heavily insulated technical pieces,” Constantinou says.
With this collection, the NEWGEN designer wanted to pay homage to the rough, cold, natural beauty of the label’s motherland: “A lot of the colour palette this season is referenced from Iceland’s natural landscape – the blue and white of the glaciers, the rocky reds, and earthy tones, it’s all reflecting from Iceland.”
Founded in 1926, 66° North has been making protective, extreme weatherproof clothing for Icelandic fishermen and workers for almost a century, and the young designer got to explore the archive. “They do so much beyond just regular pieces they sell in stores,” Constantinou says, “they do stuff for Iceland’s fishermen, and search and rescue services, they’ve got jumpsuits and stuff like that from 30-40 years ago, it’s insane. It’s not things that are commercially available, they’re examples of garments being purely functional, which is very rare.”
He adds: “Some of the pieces we originally pulled from last season had been out of production for over 25 years, the shell set wasn’t something being made. We took the brand’s archive of finishings and applied it to our silhouettes, which became a hybrid of our world and 66’s world.”
You can see that in the shell trousers. “When it’s fully zipped shut, it’s just an ordinary 66° North-fitting trouser, but when you open it it’s a completely different silhouette, so it’s a lot more transformable than a regular 66 garment. Pieces like that, where you can have both the classic version and the new version in one, are very exciting to me.”
And we’ve got to talk about the main character of the collection: the Signature Quilt Jacket. “It’s my favourite from the collection,” Constantinou says, “I think that’s most people’s answer as well.” The puffer uses Constantinou’s trademarked quilting technique – “it’s something I developed at my MA at CSM, and something we’ve been doing in our mainline as well,” he explains. “We used one of 66’s puffer jackets as a base of the fit, and went on from there.”
The quilted garment was a bit of a challenge but we got there in the end, comments 66° North CEO Helgi Óskarsson – all the pieces were crafted by hand in Constantinou’s Tottenham studio first, and then sent for production at the company’s factory. And you can see why it was difficult for manufacturing: the garm is assembled by down-filled pillows in different sizes, with the smaller pieces designed to stretch out. “66 have all the facilities to make [our vision] come to life, they have their own factories, machines, they don’t do anything externally,” he says adding that this time round he had more creative freedom – which obviously has paid off with the insane puffer.
It’s refreshing to see a big brand letting a young designer have that creative freedom. A lot of collabs these days (not saying names), will not give small designers much creative authority. 66° North is different, however, and insists on giving young designers the resources, the platform and the trust to do what they do best. And Constantinou stands by that. When we ask him for any advice he’s got for young designers working on their first collab he says: “Find the balance between how much you give and how much they give. Establishing that from the beginning is the most important point. I think the really classic industry way of collabing is a big brand links up with a small brand, they offer them a product and say pick a colour – we didn’t want to use what already existed we wanted to make new products. Find that balance and have creative freedom. Being able to have control and make creative decisions of what you’re doing is vital.”
The collection is available to shop now at 66north.com
Featured images 66° North©
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