Shorn the chic
Fashion and homewares brand Toast creates clothes with a little everyday theatre – and knits that begin life in wool bales in Bradford. Words by Alice Simkins Vyce and Stephanie Smith.
TOAST, as visitors to the beautiful Harrogate and York stores will know, is a luxury fashion and homewares brand that takes care to showcase its collections in an immersive and striking way. Its current autumn/winter fashion collection, Everyday Theatre, explores the improvisational and free-spirited nature of those who see possibilities and beauty in all they encounter. “When designing, we focused on two muses – Saul Leiter and Jacques Tati – who used their art to encourage their audience to see the beauty and the humour in the everyday,” says menswear designer Catie Palmer.
American photographer Saul Leiter’s colourful images inform the rich and saturated colour palette, blending dusky pink with tomato and slate green with soft mint. The influence of French filmmaker, actor and screenwriter Jacques Tati brings a lightness and sense of humour. Witness the raglan-shouldered coats, wool overshirts and drawstring trousers.
The SS24 collection, Outdoor Pursuits, celebrates the communal experience of stretchedout summers, blending play and toil, with loose, easy silhouettes in cotton twill and linen made for whiling away afternoons cooking and conversing. Trailing florals are mixed with woven checks and sailing stripes to give a sense of spirited spring mornings.
Founded in 1997 as a mail order pyjama company by Jamie and Jessica Seaton, Toast is now 75 per cent owned by Danish fashion house Bestseller. It takes pride in its circular fashion initiatives, offering a Reworn collection of previously loved pieces, a Renewed collection of creatively repaired pieces, its Exchange events-based clothes swaps, and Repair, its free mending service.
It also strives to support British producers and farmers. One example can be seen in the Toast autumn/winter knitwear collection, for which a men’s and a women’s sweater have been created using undyed wool sorted from the mountains of fleece bales that fill the British Wool depot in Bradford.
Sean Crannigan, owner of Toast supplier Knoll Yarns in Ilkley, buys the wool directly from British Wool, and sends it to be spun nearby at Lightowlers in Huddersfield. The yarn is sent to Scottish knitters Harley, to be knitted into shapes created by Toast designers, making the finished sweaters entirely UK-made.
“Each grader will get through six tonnes of wool a day, 3,000 fleeces,” says Ian Brooksbank, who manages the operation at British Wool and has been working there since 1990. “We're just not sorting the wool by breed, we also grade by the characteristics that the buyer wants.”
There are more than 100 different grades, which are split into six main categories of wool – fine, medium, cross, lustre, hill and mountain. Ian runs his hands through a range of fleeces with different lengths