Why We Name Our Coats After Female Artists

Every EdNerat coat has a name. Not a number, not a season, not a trend reference — a name. And every name belongs to a British female artist: a painter, a sculptor, a printmaker. Women whose work was largely ignored at the time they produced it.

The women our coats are named after — Frink, Hepworth, Hamnett, Nicholson, Eardley, Brett, Downing, John — were working in a world that largely ignored them. Their male contemporaries were celebrated, exhibited, collected, written about. These women were often overlooked, their contributions marginalised or misattributed, their careers interrupted by the demands that women's lives have always made. Some of them are better known now than they were in their lifetimes. Most are still not known well enough.

I should say that many of these names were new to me when I began this work — and I consider myself someone who cares deeply about art and visits galleries regularly. Finding many of them required what I realise now was an embarrassing amount of research. But perhaps by naming our coats and giving these women a little more of the exposure they deserve we will save others that embarrassment.  And perhaps even provoke some fresh interest in them.

Many of the women we have in mind when we design our coats are, in many ways, not so different from the women our coats are named after. They are women who do things. Women whose contributions are not always visible in the places the world tends to look. Women who have spent careers being overlooked by industries — fashion among them — that were never designed with them in mind.

We do not name our coats after trends, because trends pass. We do not name them after places or seasons or abstract concepts, because those feel like evasions. We name them after women whose work lasted, because that is what we are trying to make: clothing that lasts, that means something, that is worth keeping.

When you wear a Frink or a Hepworth or an Eardley, you are wearing a coat named after a woman who made extraordinary things in the face of considerable indifference. We think that is a good thing to carry with you.