On 19 October we took the range out of the mill and set it up in the atrium at Shangri-La in Ulaanbaatar — a free-standing stand on the ground floor of the mall.
Coats and knitwear on open rails, mannequins at both entrances, and a lit wall of campaign photography down one side.
The rail is the part worth showing a trade buyer. Almost everything we produce is specified from a colour reference — a swatch, a Pantone code, a number off the colour card — and a reference is a hard way to judge a range. Hung together and graded, it reads differently: blush beside yellow beside green beside teal, heavy coats next to fine-gauge knitwear, all of it the same fibre.
It is a consumer format and it was a consumer audience. But it is also the only time the whole range sits in one place, unpacked and at arm's length — and that turned out to be the useful part. Not the selling. The seeing.
If you are working from our colour card and want to know how a shade behaves as a finished garment rather than a swatch, ask for it in the piece you are actually developing — that is a sample rather than a swatch, and it answers a better question. The full range is in the catalogue.