![]() It’s a lifestyle: you can wear Cole Buxton 25 hours, 8 days a week. There’s no room for anything but 110% perfection in what we create, and I think that’s what we admire about that old-school athleticism. Bodybuilders back when the gym uniform was cotton shorts, cotton t-shirts and a pair of Converse share that mentality with us. It doesn’t matter what it takes, you get it done. ![]() I want to strip it all back and make things as minimal as they can be. A lot of sportswear, for instance, has become very over-designed, overly technical and the fundamentals of the product get diluted. I’ve always been about drilling down into the bare minimum. It’s more just an alignment between that sport and that era and our values as a brand. Cole Buxton as a lifestyle is about focus and discipline and I think that’s reflected in the garments.Ĭole: The old-school bodybuilder aesthetic was never a conscious aesthetic influence or point of reference. It’s about living a life of little noise taking care of yourself focussing on what really matters and not getting distracted by all the over-stimulation that surrounds us. The concept of essentialism, it goes beyond the clothes. Jonny: I don’t think it was ever a decision, it’s just a case of that’s where our taste lies. Jonny, how did you come to be involved with the brand and how does the partnership work between you both? The brand is Cole Buxton, but it feels like there's a definite co-creative directorship at play. People think Jonny and I have been friends for years, but that’s not the case we’ve only known each other for about 2 minutes, but we’ve connected in our vision for the brand and the creative partnership we've formed makes people think we've known each other forever. It was inevitable that we would cross paths and work on this together. You feel as though you exist outwith the establishment in a sense and so there's always this undercurrent of saying fuck you to the man.Ĭole: We have a similar backstory - Jonny's just a lad from Sunderland and I'm just a lad from Derby - and even now we both feel like we’ve got something to prove. When you’re in Britain and you want to work in this industry there’s a sense of having something to prove if you’re not from London. It comes down to a culture thing of growing up outside of London. I’ve come from a line of people who’ve always worked their way up from nothing so the desire or feeling that I needed to work for somebody else was never there for me. What made you feel it was the right decision to start something of your own versus cutting your teeth at another brand?Ĭole: Again it goes back to my family. You started the brand straight out of university, Cole. Approaching design almost as an engineer would. You saw past the bullshit of copyrighting certain words that are all just euphemisms for nylon or polyester at the end of the day.Ĭole: Exactly, because of my uncle I think I’d always seen past all that and wanted to start a brand that stripped it away and just focused on the product. ![]() Jonny: You took the rules from the degree – the fundamentals craftsmanship, the knowledge of materials, the pattern cutting – and interpreted them in a way that made sense to you to make our products. I was never really into that side of the industry: my passion is for the product above everything else. It’s kind of like tech, it’s all about the branding and marketing of the products, even if they’re all essentially the same. Obviously, sportswear is all about fit, fabrics and performance, but what I learned is that a lot of it is all down to the marketing of the product more than the product itself. Everything was highly technical and from there I found my aesthetic and what mattered to me as a designer pretty much straight away. I went to university, but instead of studying fashion, I did a proper performance sportswear design degree. Growing up around it - especially watching my uncle build his sportswear brand from nothing - there was never really another option or path I considered. On my dad’s side, they have a retail background – menswear and womenswear - and on my mum’s side, my uncle owns a massive golf brand in Canada. Cole: To be honest, it was sort of in my blood that I would get into this industry in one form or another.
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