cover image by @taletellerrrr
It is a rare day that I don’t see a ‘small, slow fashion’ brand pop up on my Instagram ‘suggested for you’. From newly minted, supposedly ‘luxe’ tracksuit labels to delicate silk slips that differ only slightly between brands, my feed is a steady stream of familiar ideas. Every so often, something genuinely catches my eye: a funky waistline or an oversized set of buttons, added to my ever-growing bank of screenshots to be revisited at a later date.
Our digital age has made it easier than ever for literally anyone to step into the role of designer, opening up the industry in exciting ways. It’s also made it increasingly difficult to stand out: originality, clarity of vision, or even the basic creativity needed to make something worth wearing haven’t necessarily grown as our digital personas have. Everyone’s job title can be creative director now (thanks LinkedIn) - not everyone’s should be.
Meeting Uncle Tribbiani, it was clear that he wasn't short of creative gumption. The Cleethorpes-hailing designer, also known as James Robinson, started his brand Cold on a Sunday almost by mistake, and after previously swearing off interviews, he’s decided to chat to me about it.
“I never studied fashion [design],” Robinson tells me as he sits in a bright Copenhagen bedroom, visiting his girlfriend, Kristel. It was in his final year of studying for a fashion film bachelor’s degree that he realised how much he wanted to start a clothing brand. “I ended up winning best fashion film director in Seoul, and everyone was like, ‘Okay, you need to make another film now. Hit the ground running and come out of uni really strong.’” Instead, Robinson said to his tutors that he wanted to start a clothing brand. Of course, this wasn’t met with particularly happy faces. “They told me that I do fashion film now. I was set to be pretty successful.”
Obviously, Robinson decided not to take his tutors’ word as gospel (and thank goodness for that, or this interview would have been pretty short). “I decided that I was just going to make a film about me learning to sew. I was like, oh, f*ck, okay, yeah, I’m gonna do that. And then for an entire last semester at uni, I filmed myself learning how to make Cold on a Sunday. How to make what is now the Felix vest.”
The Felix Vest by @byemiliawoods
When asked how he would describe the brand’s vibe, Robinson said instead that it would be easier to explain what he’s trying to do with it instead. “You can’t elevate men's fashion by just going hard, avant-garde. You’d alienate the male customer. I think men [on the whole] are quite naive and slow with fashion and progressing their style.” That’s not for lack of trying: “I think they struggle with it because of getting called gay and slurs and things - I had that growing up, and it limits guys.”
“I have this sort of dual personality,” he says, claiming he has a ‘confused’ sense of style. “I’ll go really far-fetched sometimes, but when I actually think to myself, what would I actually want to wear in day-to-day life, I pull it back. I want it to always be practical and just work. I don’t want it to be too performative and artsy, but I want to progress a little bit.”
“When I was making the film, when I made the vest, I realised how f*cking hard it was [to sew]. Like nothing I’ve ever bought could have been worth the small price it’s sold at. There’s no way, even the brands you’d consider well-made, have been made with good standards, where the people are happy. I wanted to bottle that up and sell it as a feeling.”
For Robinson, the act of making clothes can completely shift a person’s relationship to fashion. His dissertation explored whether teaching people to sew could stimulate the same ‘epiphany’ he experienced: a deeper understanding of labour, value and consumption.
Image from Cold On A Sunday's recent campaign shoot by @byemiliawoods
“Then, everyone would actually dress and make clothes truly by themselves. I think it would bring back that 1960s feel, like your mum would make her own dress before a party era.”
In Robinson’s eyes, this would encourage more creativity too, and I’m inclined to agree. If we all knew how to make clothes, there would be more experimentation, fewer trend-driven collections and an all-round more interesting fashion landscape. It could be somewhat of a logistical Everest, although ‘teach a man to fish’ comes to mind…
“The brand’s slogan is Cold on a Sunday, the brand that makes nothing. I would always encourage people to buy the [hypothetical] DIY kits. I think you would be ten times cooler than just buying fashion itself. It was meant to flip high fashion on its head.”
To no one's shock, Robinson’s day-to-day is consumed by Cold on a Sunday, although ‘day-to’day’ might be too orderly a phrase for what Robinson describes.
“At the minute, it’s just making the old collection so I can survive,” he says. Cold on a Sunday is his full time job, and his days are split between keeping the current collection afloat and trying to build the new one. One minute he’s conceptualising an upcoming drop: campaign shoots, briefing photographers, sourcing models and figuring out the broader story he wants to tell. The next, he’s back at his sewing machine, racing to complete customer orders by hand.
“It’s so sporadic,” he tells me. “I’ll spend half an hour on the campaign and then be like, ‘F*ck, I’ve got to make that person’s order by Friday’.”
Then there are the less glam tasks that come with building an independent label: checking samples obsessively, sourcing buttons that somehow consume entire afternoons, negotiating with the finance team (also known as Robinson’s girlfriend, Kristel) because they want the cheaper buttons.
“We’ve only got a certain amount of money to get samples made,” he explains of his exploration into factory production. “So we’ll spend days in a room checking every measurement on a pattern, making sure it’s correct.
It sounds exhausting (it probably is) but it’s also refreshingly honest in an industry that often sells the illusion of effortless creativity. Robinson’s work is deeply conceptual, but it’s also administrative, and obviously thought through intensely. Of course, mistakes still happen. He’s candid about the reality of making garments by hand at this scale, and that sometimes pieces arrive with faults.
He handles the brand’s DMs himself, and while most messages are positive, the occasional customer will flag an issue. Rather than treating returns as a transactional inconvenience, Robinson asks for pieces to be sent back so he can repair them himself. Perfection, he seems to understand, is neither realistic nor is it particularly interesting.
It’s the same level of thought that extends to details that most customers may not consciously notice. Robinson soaks his labels in a custom perfume before sending pieces out, a gesture that feels almost absurdly intimate in an era of mass production.
image by @taletellerrrr
“I almost want people to bring that label up to their nose and smell it, so you pull it out the package and you’re like this smells ace. The fact that you have to travel for it, and it’s only on that label, the actual participation from the customer to have to smell it is a really cool feeling.” It’s a small act, but one that perfectly encapsulates Cold on a Sunday: slightly romantic and rooted in the idea that clothing should feel (or smell) like it was made by an actual human being.
Cold on a Sunday’s next collection is released on May 10th, and you can see it here.