Linen is, in a quiet way, a literary cloth. It creases like a page, it softens with use, it carries the mark of whoever wore it last. I have always felt it belongs in the same room as certain kinds of writing — unhurried, seasonal, willing to sit with winter or a long afternoon.
Three writers, in particular, have shaped how I think about slowness. Not about fashion necessarily, but about the weather in which slow dressing makes sense.
Katherine May
Katherine May's Wintering was the book that most changed how I think about rest. Her Substack, The Clearing, continues that conversation in smaller, more frequent doses. She writes about fallow periods as something to inhabit rather than power through. That stance is rarer than it should be. When I am sitting with a piece of cloth for longer than I meant to, I sometimes think of her work, and the thinking itself becomes part of the making.
Amy Liptrot
Amy Liptrot's The Outrun was written in Orkney, which is also where a lot of her Substack writing comes from. She pays attention to birds, to weather, to the particular light of a northern island in a way that will not be rushed. What I love about her prose is how rooted it is. She does not parachute in on a landscape. She has lived there long enough to be changed by it, and the writing is honest about that slow change. There is a kinship between that patience and the kind of making I try to do.
Paola Merrill
Paola Merrill writes and films as The Cottage Fairy, from the Cascade Mountains of Washington. Her book, The Cottage Fairy Companion, has a subtitle that stays with me — about becoming enchanted again. That idea of re-enchantment is something I think about when I am choosing linen at dawn. It is not a marketing word. It is a slow project. The world does not enchant itself for you. You have to show up and meet it, and Paola's work is very good company for that kind of showing up.
The pieces at Souls In Clothes are cut with this weather in mind — the long afternoon, the quiet morning, the walk that turned into a think. Handmade in Bulgaria, in linen, in small runs.