William Kroll (Tender Co.) Q+A
God is in the details for William Kroll. You’d be hard-pressed to find a business more aptly named than his menswear label Tender Co., such affection as Kroll’s for the garments he’s manufacturing is a rare find. Even the t-shirts are thoroughly thought-out, using a one-piece cutting method which eliminates shoulder seams, a point of stress and common cause of discomfort to the wearer. As a brand Tender has great reverence for history and for the ancestral roots of workwear and many designs are based on those worn by the hard labouring men of bygone days.
Appropriately, denim is Tender’s main export. The cloth once picked out as sturdy enough to clothe prospectors, factory workers and cowboys now spans social strata. The rivets ornamenting your favourite jeans would once have prevented garements ripping seam from seam at stress points. Look at a pair of Levis and you’ll see a memento of their lineage in the logo; two horses straining to pull apart a pair of these ‘indestructible’ trousers.
Although Americana seems almost woven into the fabric all Tender Co.’s products are cut, sewn and dyed here on british soil using heritage techniques. Leather for belts and accessories is tanned using the ancient oak bark method at a tannery that has stood on the same site and used much the same technique since the Roman invasion. Additionally, synthetic colour is eschewed for vegetable dyes, with garments painstakingly dip dyed by hand to build tone. This creates a richness and subtlety that cannot be produced via synthetic methods and over time the hue develops and softens, areas of wear revealing the cotton below. Taking up to a day to fully colour one item means vegetable dying is not an option for mass production, but rather a labour of love.
Unlike many brand’s attempts at ‘heritage’ marketing Tender comes across as completely bona fide. Visiting the website (www.madebytender.com) is a brief education in traditional manufacturing techniques and an insight into William’s own curious, intelligent and slightly bookish nature. There’s a real art to Tender Co. so I was very happy when William agreed to answer a few questions on influences and ethos:
Your garments are deeply rooted in tradition, particularly in terms of manufacturing techniques. What makes this kind of authenticity so important to you?
I’ve always been interested in the way things are made, since I started having a go at making furniture and clothes when I was 14 or so. I like when you look at something that was made a long time ago and you can see how it was put together. In a way it connects you to the person who did the work, if you can understand how and why they made it that way. Also, manufacturing techniques can tell you a lot about the time and situation the thing was made in. I think by trying to work on traditional lines of evolution in construction, you end up with a product that’s a bit more interesting and rounded.
Have you always wanted to produce garments this way? If not, at what point did it become a specific interest?
I did a year out from college to study with a bespoke tailor and cutter, who taught me a huge amount of respect for construction. He was quite unusual in that as well as being a superb (one of the best) traditional hand-tailor, he’d previously worked in factories, so he understood mass production too. That’s quite rare in the tailoring world. A lot of people think that you can only learn anything interesting from the very top of a field, but people who do things for a wider audience (in manufacturing, art, food, whatever) often have very fresh and extremely valuable views on things. My old boss taught me to respect different ways of doing things.
Do you have any environmental/ethical viewpoints that have encouraged you to keep production UK-based and using ancestral methods or is it a labour of love for the pieces?
I think that bringing environmental rhetoric into a conversation about the tiny level of production that I’m involved in can be a bit hypocritical. If I buy fabric from Japan, which itself is woven from cotton grown in the US, ship it the UK, sew it into clothes here, then fly it back to shops in Japan, I think it’s a bit difficult to present it as an environmental project. From that standpoint you’re actually much better off producing vertically in China or India. Having said that, from an ethical point of view, I am working with very specialist and skilled producers in England, who do a superb job and are paid well for it. It’s a real luxury to be able to spend time with people who really understand what they’re doing, and take pride in doing a good job, and I hope this attitude comes across in the products I design.
I find something quite romantic and fascinating about the history of jeans and the relationship one builds to a favoured pair. Is this something which drew you to denim and workwear?
Not initially, but certainly as I’ve come to appreciate denim it’s become one of the most (if not the most really) important things. The first time I got interested in clothes at all, and the first item I bought for myself, with my own money, was a pair of Evisu jeans, which I saved up for with weeks of paper round money, when I was 14. I was drawn in by the branding in the first place, but then when I finally owned them I became really excited about the way they were put together (and I started trying to make my own jeans, copying the stitch lines). I wore them every day, but I was very scared of losing the lovely dark colour, so I didn’t wash them, and I tried to keep them as clean and tidy as possible. It was only months later that I realized how nice and faded they’d got, and with my second pair (also Evisu, also saved up for) I went too far the other way really, washing them a lot to try to speed up the fading process. Now I have the attitude that it’s just jeans, and the best, most personal, results will come from just living your life in them, and not too thinking too much. Incidentally, a decade or so after I bought that first pair of jeans, I got my first job, as an assistant designer at Evisu, where I stayed until I started doing Tender, three years ago. Nothing wrong with a good bit of branding to draw you in!
Your interest in the history surrounding the products you design extends into the brand imagery. Could you tell us more about this?
Well, the name, Tender, is the coal truck on a steam engine. When I started off thinking about how to do a pair of jeans that was personal to me, and with a British slant to it, I was thinking about the railways, and the Industrial Revolution (Brunel, that sort of thing). I like old trains, and the way that they are made so simply, and understandably. There’s no magic involved. The word seemed to fit what I was after, and I like the idea that the owner of one of my products becomes its ‘tender’, looking after it, developing it into something more personal and special than when it left me.
As far as visible branding goes, there’s the elephant, which is a mortised advertising cut taken from a book of C19th advertisements given to me by my grandfather, who was magazine designer. It’s an ad encouraging young men off on the gold rush, to Nevada. This of course was where jeans as we know them were born, so it seemed an appropriate start. The face (Plautus) was an unexplained part of the elephant graphic, and I blew it up and adapted it for Tender’s logo. Plautus was a Roman playwright, and perhaps the first great plagiarist. He translated forgotten literature from the Greek, and passed it off as his own. Not so different from what I’m doing really!
Do you have a set period for the ‘research process’ or is it something more constant for you?
I think as a designer you’re always looking around and seeing things that start ideas off. Because I’m producing Tender seasonally, there’s a natural period when one season goes into production when you start sorting out the next season, but it all overlaps. What I do like to spend time on is the initial samples, which I make myself, to test out the details and shapes, to make sure that they’ll work in real life, not just look good or be conceptually interesting.
How have you found the experience of running your own brand and sourcing uk-based factories and craftspeople?
It’s fun! But can be extremely challenging. I’ve certainly learnt more in the last 3 years than ever before, I’d say. It’s so much about relationships, and understanding what people want and need from you, in order to make things easier for them. I’ve been extremely lucky to have met some really wonderful people, who’ve been extremely kind to me, both on the production and retail ends of what I do.
There’s a movement towards authenticity and heritage, as well as environmental awareness, among emerging designers. Why do you think this is?
It’s certainly helped get Tender off the ground (if it is), and it suits my personal taste- there are lot of things around at the moment which I think are brilliant, but I don’t know if there’ll be a broader, long-lasting change. I hope so. Of course there have been people doing the kind of thing that’s popular at the moment for years, and they’re doing very well now. Having said that, from a real fashion angle, I think the pure ’heritage’ dressing-up-as-a-farmer thing is evolving now, as it should, into something a bit more sophisticated. That doesn’t mean that the people who were on to serious vintage before won’t still be into it, and it will continue to be relevant and interesting to them. Real environmental/ethical concerns can be brought to people’s attention by small-timers, but real change will need legislation I think.
As to why it’s happened/ening,I don’t know- obviously these trends are much broader than just clothing, and I suppose it has a lot to do with the alarming financial, political, and environmental situation that much of the West finds itself in at the moment. There’s something reassuring about the idea that things are built to last and with an eye to the past (which we know, in 20-20, rose-tinted, hindsight, wasn’t so bad!). I truly believe though, that you’re better off buying well and infrequently, and fixing or adjusting over time, rather than buying cheaply and expecting to throw things away.
What are you working on right now?
I’m very busy! Later in the spring my fiancée Deborah and I are opening up a web shop, the Trestle Shop (www.trestleshop.com), to show experimental and supplementary things outside the main Tender line. This has taken me outside of clothes, to other little things which I’m also really interested in (I’m writing this on the bus home to London from seeing a cabinet maker and a potter). Aside from that, Tender AW12 (which is a lot more varied and broad than any other production so far) is going into work at the moment, and I’m developing new fabrics and ideas for SS13. I also teach the denim and sportswear projects at Central St Martins and Westminster, so as I say, I’m keeping busy.
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