Iconic clothing brand Kangol is teaming up with Hackney based label Terrible Movement in the first ever clothing collaboration in its 76 year history. Available at an exclusive pop-up event at Boxpark Shoreditch from October 5th – 11th, we caught up with Terrible Movement’s Tersha Willis ahead of the opening to tell us more about this groundbreaking partnership.
For readers who aren’t familiar, tell us about Terrible Movement.
We’re an accountable streetwear brand from Hackney via Kreuzberg. We’d say we’re known for our super low-cut muscle tees and high quality, statement pieces. We make stuff we love to wear and we make sure it has a positive impact on the world – because who wants to make more stuff that doesn’t make people’s lives better? Not us. We have some pretty awesome customers and supporters too – Cara Delevigne and Alana Haim count among those!
What’s your design process?
We’re not formally trained designers and we aren’t fashion grads either so our process is probably unique! We’re super inspired by music, art and pop culture, so the relationship between all of those is usually where we start. From there, we sketch stuff by hand and then process it again and again, sometimes digitally and sometimes by hand until we get to something that we know works. If one of us doesn’t love it gets binned, if it survives and is loved then we refine it and translate it to apparel – it has to be classic, comfortable, high quality and season-less. By default, that makes it live outside of the fashion world.
You’ve had lots of musicians wearing your product – is music a key focus for you?
Music is so important to us: we live, eat, breathe and sleep it and a lot of our work is deeply rooted in things we hear. We don’t create without it and I think that maybe translates into the clothes we make, and then it speaks to those who make music.
You guys are collaborating with Kangol. How did this come about?
Anyone who knows us or follows us on social media knows how we much we love pizza, so it will come as no surprise that one casual Slice Night meeting at Voodoo Rays this idea was born. It all seems really obvious now, but it dawned on us that Kangol and Terrible Movement actually have a lot in common. We presented some rough sketches and it became really apparent that Kangol and Terrible both speak the same language. A few meetings and sketches later, we all learnt that Kangol had never done a clothing collaboration, so this quickly became a really special collaboration for both brands – we’re rewriting the rules and adding something entirely new to the Kangol story.
What can we expect to see from the collection?
You can expect something really different to what you’ve seen before from Kangol in the past. We drew a lot of inspiration from the heritage of Kangol and then we looked to the streets of Hackney to give it context. It’s subtle, colourful, bold and freaking high-quality, comfortable street wear. Expect to be asked where you got it from when you are wearing it. We made the logo a feature on the products. For us it had to be a feature and that idea is new for Kangol, who has always been subtle, but with so much heritage tied to the Kangol logo, we really wanted it to be a part of the design.
What has the response been like to the collaboration?
We have never known so much excitement about something we’ve made! The response has been pretty surreal and overwhelming. We haven’t even finished the first stock take and we’re getting questions about when and where people can get it. I think we can safely say it has been amazing so far.
What else can we expect from Terrible Movement in the future?
Expect more collaborations, more product categories and more rule-breaking on a global scale! With all that, we hope to set the standard and make fashion and streetwear accountable models that have a positive impact on the world.
Words: Thomas Dearnley-Davison
Photography: Constance Victoria Phillips
MUA: Xavia Somerville
Models: Courtney at M+P, Savannah at Select and Mason at AMCK Models.