There is a particular kind of writing that resists the speed everything else is moving at. It does not shout. It does not try to win the afternoon. It sits with a question for a long time and comes back to it from different sides, and by the end you have not been persuaded so much as accompanied.
I think about that kind of writing a lot when I am cutting linen in the atelier in Bulgaria. Slow work asks you to pay attention in a way fast work never can, and slow writing, to me, is a close cousin of slow making. Both refuse the shortcut. Both believe the reader — or the wearer — deserves your full attention.
Aja Barber
I first read Consumed one winter evening, and I did not finish it quickly. Aja Barber writes about the systems behind what we wear — colonialism, labour, the quiet violence of cheapness — in a way that refuses to let you close the book feeling clean. She connects the threads without hurrying, and she insists, very gently, that we owe each other more attention. The book is not angry in the way you might expect. It is patient, which is harder. I find myself returning to passages of it when I am sourcing linen or deciding how to speak about a piece I have made.
Erika Veurink
The writer behind Long Live — Erika Veurink — publishes a twice-weekly Substack that has slowly changed how a lot of people think about acquiring anything at all. Her piece on the five questions she asks before buying something new is the sort of thing you read once and quietly carry forever. She makes a case for secondhand, for waiting, for letting a want settle and seeing whether it is still a want in a week. She does not moralise. She simply offers a better way and trusts you to meet her there.
Pandora Sykes
I have followed Pandora Sykes's writing for years, back through her High Low days, and now into Books + Bits, which has become one of the most quietly essential reads I know. She writes about what a book leaves behind after you have closed it, and that phrase — what stays — has become a small measuring stick for me in how I make. Not the noise of the thing, but the quiet afterwards. Clothes, like books, earn their place by what they leave when they are no longer in your hands.
If any of this lands with you, you can see the pieces I have been making at our dresses collection. Everything is handmade in Bulgaria, in runs small enough that I still know every piece by name. Slow writing and slow making are, I think, the same instinct in different hands.