Working Clothing: Where Industrial Grit Transmutes into Sartorial Sorcery.

At first glance, Working might summon images of grease-stained overalls and calloused hands, the archetypal uniform of the tireless laborer. But this is a ruse, a wink at tradition. Working is less about elbow grease and more about cerebral rigor - a sartorial experiment where the raw poetry of the Steam Age waltzes with the precision choreography of cutting-edge innovation.

Victorian grime crashes the future party - this jacket’s got time-travel swagger and zero chill.

William Kroll and Robert Newman operate as twin alchemists in separate ateliers - Kroll, the steam-powered romantic obsessed with the machinery and mystique of a bygone industrial era; Newman, the visionary technologist pushing textiles into uncharted frontiers.

From Glasgow’s smoky corners to Phoenixville’s quiet studios, their initials - WK and RN - are stitched into the very fabric of Working, a clandestine signature and pact of intent.

This is time travel in threads, where the soot and clang of Victorian factories meet the whisper of future technologies. Theirs is a wardrobe of paradoxes: garments that recall history yet speak fluent futurism, achieved through bespoke dye techniques and construction methods that render fabric alive, a palimpsest of past and present.

Their debut collection, Book 1, is a masterclass in material dialogue - overdyed Italian technical cotton, rinsed Japanese denim, and ethereal cotton mesh converge in a cross-seasonal uniform that challenges expectation. The jeans, conjured in collaboration with Edwin Japan’s avant-garde SKEWed workshop, twist and bend railroad heritage into sculptural, three-dimensional rebellion - a Möbius strip of denim refusing to lie flat or be contained.

Peep the peekaboo - mesh panels so daring, they practically moonlight as fashion’s answer to a saucy wink.

Central to Working’s alchemy is the “loft” fabric: a triple-layered textile sandwich that, when garment-dyed, becomes a living canvas. Each layer shrinks and absorbs pigment in its own idiosyncratic rhythm, a textile jazz where harmony meets discord, creating a surface that breathes, pulses, and shifts with uncanny tactility. Classic silhouettes inflate and morph - an anorak that seems to have lived a thousand lives, jeans that expand and contract like a memory breathing beneath your skin.

But Working is not mere surface; it is an ongoing conversation - a dialectic between utility and artistry, history and futurity, form and formlessness. Inspirations collide from cinematic dystopias like the Alien Nostromo crew, through the angst-ridden swagger of ’90s nu-metal frontmen, to the quiet geometry of children’s furniture design and the dusty archives of textile history. It’s an eccentric, eclectic manifesto that thrives on the unexpected and the beautiful oddity of human creativity.

The garments themselves defy convention. Seams disappear, fabrics fold back or dissolve, patterns subvert their own logic - clothing as a living text, rewritten with every wear, a uniform that refuses to uniformize. It asks: what if the clothes meant for work were less about conformity and more about transformation?

At its core, Working revels in objects designed to perform - both aesthetically and functionally - paying homage to the language of traditional workwear and military uniform while playfully twisting that language into new dialects. This is a wardrobe that embraces the freedom to sidestep the expected, morphing references into fresh conversations.

Far from a mere label, Working functions as a perpetual motion machine, a sartorial dialogue that refuses closure. It’s a wardrobe that works - not in the clock-punching sense, but as a living, evolving testament to the dance between labor and imagination. Brawn and brain, uniform and iconoclast, past and future - tangled in a beautifully wrinkled embrace.

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Words by AW.

Photos courtesy of Working / Mark Gillies.