Paris Fashion Week

I first came across Edie Ashley as an enigmatic and fearless force at various motorcycle events; she tends to stand out in a crowd. From winning best effort on her vintage Triumph Cheney on the Swank Rally at Wheels and Waves to taking off into the welsh hills of her home town, she’s had motorcycling ingrained in her since a child. When I received an invite to see her graduate show at East London’s Truman Breweries I was excited to see how her background in motorcycling would transfer to the catwalk. The collection drew on influences from motorcycle garments dating back to the 1930’s and reworked them to a contemporary tailored style. It was great and my kind of thing so immediately after the show we headed for a drink and decided to collaborate on producing a collection together. This was an opportunity to focus more or less entirely on the form and to create garments that reflected motorcycling for its pure style. We began with an academic process of working through our large collections of literature; classics like Rin Tinaka’s guide to leather jackets and helmets are some of the best. With over a hundred years of inspiration to plough through we focused on small details, those born from the functionality and that defined the garments as motorcycle attire. The asymmetrical buttoned jackets from the 30’s TT races, the different style of knee and elbow paddings and the high waist of vintage scrambling trousers were all inspirations.

Explaining our collection to Mark Wilmore, owner of the Ace café, he made the interesting observation that motorcycle attire was becoming increasingly more conformist whilst in contrast fashion trends were adopting the traditional symbols of rock n roll. The contemporary custom scene has attracted new audiences and grown along side a revival in heritage fashions adopting a more gentlemanly appearance then previous motorcycle subcultures. Long gone is the image of the leather menace and the attitudes bestowed on the original greasers. There has been a pre-occupation in motorcycle clothing with marrying style on and off the bike. It’s creating a need to fit in, to appear like everyone, a monoculture of mass trends adopted at a surface level. Meanwhile current high street trends extend from studded leather jackets to direct references to outlaw motorcycle gangs, the look is much more counter-cultural. With BoltxEdie we wanted to create something innovative and authentic that championed ones identity as a motorcyclist.

From the outset we decided to use only reclaimed fabrics, there is more then enough already to warrant making more. This we soon realised would take us on a series of adventures, countless wild goose chases and the occasional pot of gold. Our most intriguing lead had to be the news of cases of silks dating back over a 100-years that had been found in tact in the gallows of a sunken ship off the coast of Devon. They had yet to be retrieved and it was going to take more then a snorkel and flippers to get them out of there.

It was a regular at Bolt who told us about an old work-wear factory in the north of England that he had taken possession of. It had been in decline for decades and in that time it had built up a mountain of work wear apparel filling all five floors of two neighbouring warehouses. Always a fool for curiosity it wasn’t long before I had organised a truck and a trip up north to see what we could find. We came off the motorway and over the moors before dropping down into Dewsbury. Rows of terrace houses in the traditional yellow stone that you see all over Yorkshire formed geometric patterns on the hillsides. The warehouses we were looking for was in the centre of town and we found it boarded up and in a state of disrepair. We were quickly ushered in and the doors locked behind, apparently the previous owner was not well liked and a number of firebomb attacks had followed his departure. There were three of us, five floors and shelves of tightly packed bails of clothes from the floor to the ceiling. If this wasn’t enough to go through there was a huge unlit cellar and an attic, both packed to their capacities with more bails. By my own conclusion the best stuff had to be the hardest to reach, and with this in mind and guided by the faint glow of our phones we clambered down amongst the sea of bails and started trawling through the catch. After eight hours of hauling through the stock we pulled together our findings. Edie has unearthed rolls of satin-faced moleskin whilst I’d found boxes of new old stock zips from the 1930’s onwards. There were talon, Aero, Cliq, lightening and other military zippers; I was proper geeking out on the find. Finding enough fabric to produce the collection eventually took us to Paris where one lead led to another and eventually to a small fabric house that offered the off cuts from the Parisian ateliers. We were now starting to build up a handful of reliable dealers who would put aside any unusual fabrics for us and over the months we had filled a garage.

The next stage was to create the twills, essentially these are the dry build for the garments to come. This took place in the Bolt garage with a team of fitting models, pattern cutters and seamstresses working away amongst partly dissembled motorcycles and benches covered with tools. We stood around with cups of black coffee refining every seam, adjusting and re-adjusting the fit, trying to find that perfect equilibrium of form and function. We kept working on the garments over the coming months and then with our ateliers in London who would be producing the collection.

It was Edie who suggested we launch at Paris Fashion Week rather then in London, if anything it was ballsy. We had a month to prepare and to be totally honest I had no idea where to start. I figured the first step would be to get our selves over to Paris and find a venue. So we quickly jumped on a train to Paris and started to search the streets for a suitable venue for our launch. I’d only brought one pair of shoes, a pair of church’s, which were as smart as they were solid. We covered a 32km walking around Paris on the first day and it was painfully clear my shoes had a good chance of bringing me to my knees. The next day I shuffled along at such a pace I didn’t think we’d make it as far as the hotel lobby. We made it outside and the bright orange electric scooters that litter the streets of Paris suddenly seemed a lot more appealing. Literally the antitheist of everything I like about two wheel travel I justified it to myself as an electric walking stick and since even looking at my feet hurt it might actually be my only feasible means of mobility. Edie was bang up for it and before long we were tailing the traffic up the Champs Elysees at a mild pace of 19kmh. Taking on the Arc De Triumph with six lanes of traffic and no road markings was more challenging. We’d seen probably 50 venues in two days when we stopped exhausted and agreed that the first one we’d seen was clearly the best. In the heart of the Marais, tucked in a corner over looking a quiet cobbled street the venue was perfect.

When we arrived back to Kings Cross I would have happily dragged myself, belly down along the platform to avoid using my feet. We were now down to just three weeks and our to do list was a mile long. Our plan was to present the collection alongside an installation, photography and film exhibition. Both Edie and myself have a good circle of creative friends so we invited as many as could come down to Edie’s family farmhouse down in Wales. Over the course of a few days and with motorcycles, horses, gallons of homebrew cider at our disposable we planned to shoot the collection. Our only problem was that as car after car arrived we were still without the samples. Eventually after a lot of phone calls it was down to meeting an unknown stranger arriving on the last train who would have the samples in hand, we had to cross our fingers and enjoy the cider. Thankfully a midnight exchange happened seamlessly and we rose with the sun and started shooting. Edie directed the shoot with William Waterworth shooting portrait, Cole Quirk a more documentary style on film and Joel Rodeo capturing everything on super-8. Clothes and motorcycles both look best when set in movement, and with a vintage triumph Cheney crosser and a more modern Beta we headed up into the hills above the farm. We set up an obstacle course and found some jumps and spent the next few days fooling around. As we descended on the local pub en mass the locals were an incredible bunch and I spent the night listening to the old timers telling stories of the wins and escapades representing Wales in enduro racing.

Almost everything for the Paris show was being made bespoke, from the custom welded metal display cases to the hand cut vinyl window splash commission from artist Joel Clark. On top of this we had 100 scarfs to print and sew by hand, sound systems, drink sponsors, Press releases and invitations to organise; we didn't sleep in the final week. It ended up that everything that was being made was to be delivered on the day before we set off and miraculously it did! The next morning we loaded our mates Rui’s van with a 1943 Flat Head Harley, 1972 Moto Guzzi Eldorado, a Triumph Cheney and my own Triumph Café racer and headed off to Paris. With everything to do I had left finding accommodation to the night before, that also being the night before the start of Paris fashion week. Hotels were literally in there thousands as was Air BnB if there was anything left. It came down to a tiny boat just big enough to fit a mattress and I resented paying to be a stowaway. My other option was an incredible looking Chateau which literally looked too good to be true until I realised it wasn't even in Paris. That was a short while after I had booked it.

After a ten-hour journey we pulled into the picturesque village and followed google maps till we located the Chateau. Rui and me walked up to the huge locked gates with the accommodation looking as stunning as ever in the moonlight. I could see a figure in the window so I waved out and waited. The doors of the Chateau opened and around 15 teenagers brandishing an assortment of weapons charged out, my personal favourite was one kid menacingly waving two giant metal serving spoons. The teenagers were livid and it seemed they genuinely wanted to kill us, if the gate wasn't there I’ve no doubt we would have received to spooning of our lives. It turned out that my Chateau was next door and whilst every bit as beautiful as the pictures I couldn't shake off the idea of the pack of bloody thirsty youth on the other side of the garden fence.

I had ten days to learn to navigate my way in and out of Paris and to master the art of lane splitting through twenty kilometres of traffic at high speeds. If you take your foot off the throttle for a moment there’s a backlog of angry scooterist jabbing at their horns. We woke the first morning and set the exhibition up and things were looking good so we headed out to check out the parties happening in the city. We came back to the gallery late in the night and as we closed the internal shutters they jammed half way. We managed to unlock the door but it wouldn’t open, then the alarm went off. It couldn’t have sounded any louder in the quiet Parisian square. I didn't think it could get any worse until there was a flash and a new sound appeared. From the ceiling a thick plume of smoke descended until the space was filled with a thick fog, this really wasn’t looking good. All our work from the last year literally disappeared before our eyes in a puff of smoke. I thought it couldn't get worse the evening before the launch, and then I lost my phone. Nick Ashley turned up in his usual sharp style rolling in a wide-bodied escort Mk1 estate that he had livened up in a hand cut Bolt x Edie livery. It looked great and staked our claim in the square for the evening. We set up the sound-system in front of the gallery windows, built a bar under the trees. The exhibition attracted a diverse crowd from the likes of Alexa Chung to flat tracker racer Dimitre Costa and members of Razor Light. I was only into about my third record when the first complaint arrived in the form of an elderly old lady in a dress gown shouting at me in French. We had been given cases upon cases of Piston head gin for the launch and soon one thing led to another until we finally packed up in the early hours. More people arrived and by ten o’clock we had filled the square. The exhibition ran for the next week and the afternoons would see an increasing crowd gather as we sat outside and drank beers into the evenings. The cobbled square soon started to feel much like the yard back at Bolt in London.

Fashion Week saw parties happening all over the city and with our two Triumphs we tore across town making noise. After ten days of carrying on I was on my last legs when I felt the Triumph splutter as the last drops of petrol dripped into the carbs. If I had tried to switch to use the reserve before I would have learnt that there was no such thing, I was well and truly stranded. It was midnight and most of the garages in Paris had closed. There was one, 3.6 km away that closed in 40 mins; I did my calculations and it didn't look good, I had to push the bike at twice the average walking speed and I couldn't stop. I made it, pouring in sweat, my arms felt like jelly, my legs buckled and I triumphantly filled her up. Motorcycle style has had an influence on fashion since the 50’s and the leather jacket has become the uniform of rebellion. As a motorcycle brand it felt right that we should present at Fashion Week and hopefully influence future trends with styles developed with authenticity. The motorcycle scene needs constant innovation, to push design into new areas and more then anything to take risks. It is the small independents; who are interconnected and active in the culture who will become the fire starters of tomorrow.