Errolson Hugh Sees the Future
Metadata
Highlights
- The clothes are beautiful, sewn from expensive cutting-edge fabrics with names like SCHOELLER® 3XDRY® DRYSKIN™ and HIGH-DENSITY GABARDINE, and they possess a sort of dark, caustic energy; think Yohji Yamamoto meets Yojimbo meets Metal Gear Solid, all thrown in a NutriBullet. (View Highlight)
- “The thing to remember about Acronym is that they’re making products at almost prototype level,” John Mayer tells me in an e-mail. “These aren’t mass-produced by any means, and they’re artisan-made. There’s a spirit inside of them not all that different than that of a costume department for a Marvel movie. It’s as cosplay as whatever level you consider the Marvel movie Spider-Man costume to be cosplay.” (View Highlight)
- But really, our whole thing is, Acronym is really about agency. It’s about enabling somebody to do something they couldn’t otherwise. It’s inherently optimistic.” (View Highlight)
- Errolson’s real skill is a similar ability to articulate a contained universe, to conjure narrative out of fabric, not unlike a Rei Kawakubo (of Comme) or a Rick Owens. Acronym, then, speaks to a certain kind of clothes wearer. Someone who would rather buy less but buy better. Someone who feels most like himself when he looks a little strange. Or maybe just hates umbrellas.
To dress in full Acronym is to untether yourself from a sense of place and time. It’s a wholly realized aesthetic that opts the wearer out of the present reality. (View Highlight)
- To give you an idea of how Acronym approaches making stuff, let’s look at something real boring and basic.
Consider the pocket.
How do you go about designing what, when examined through a narrow technical lens, might be the single best pants pocket in the history of humankind? A pocket that could open a wormhole into new forms of stuff-holding?
First you consider what a wearer would keep in there: wallet, keys, phone, maybe a Juul. You cut the pocket larger and deeper than most—say, out of a sturdy Swiss mil-spec material resistant to abrasion. (Given the company’s advanced reputation, Acronym’s construction methods are pretty old-school: It uses scissors, rather than laser cutters or anything like that, which is mostly a function of how small the production runs are.) And then you consider how those elements might interact inside the pocket. The keys are a problem because they’ll scratch your shit up. So to optimize how everything sits in there, you cut the bottom at an angle.
This results in a pocket that, as Errolson explains it, is a “parallelogram versus a rectangle, which means that no matter what you put inside it”—keys, coins, etc.—“it always rolls to the front.” Then, to further index the wearer’s essentials, you add a few interior linings, creating a little mezzanine with a phone-specific pocket hidden inside another pocket inside another pocket, a matryoshka doll of divvied stuff. It’s augmentative, in a way. Makes you feel like a cyborg. (View Highlight)
- Gibson echoed a similar feeling. “Acronym clothing has been more fun to wear than anything else I’ve ever worn, for many reasons,” he explained. “But one is that I’ll sometimes wear something of Errolson’s for a long time without realizing why some little detail is exactly the way it is. Then I’ll get it. It’s like getting a joke, but it’s about function.” (View Highlight)
- That sort of reverse-engineered, solutions-based approach is still unique within the fashion space. If you look at it a certain way, Acronym is what happens when you focus on pure design. It’s a sandbox. The dominoes fell in a way that allowed the brand to operate outside the traditional runway-show fashion cycle, its own satellite planet at the edge of the universe. Out of the primordial goop, some pants and jackets. (View Highlight)
title: “Errolson Hugh Sees the Future”
author: “Chris Gayomali”
url: ”https://www.gq.com/story/errolson-hugh-acronym-profile”
date: 2023-12-19
source: reader
tags: media/articles
Errolson Hugh Sees the Future
Metadata
Highlights
- The clothes are beautiful, sewn from expensive cutting-edge fabrics with names like SCHOELLER® 3XDRY® DRYSKIN™ and HIGH-DENSITY GABARDINE, and they possess a sort of dark, caustic energy; think Yohji Yamamoto meets Yojimbo meets Metal Gear Solid, all thrown in a NutriBullet. (View Highlight)
- “The thing to remember about Acronym is that they’re making products at almost prototype level,” John Mayer tells me in an e-mail. “These aren’t mass-produced by any means, and they’re artisan-made. There’s a spirit inside of them not all that different than that of a costume department for a Marvel movie. It’s as cosplay as whatever level you consider the Marvel movie Spider-Man costume to be cosplay.” (View Highlight)
- But really, our whole thing is, Acronym is really about agency. It’s about enabling somebody to do something they couldn’t otherwise. It’s inherently optimistic.” (View Highlight)
- Errolson’s real skill is a similar ability to articulate a contained universe, to conjure narrative out of fabric, not unlike a Rei Kawakubo (of Comme) or a Rick Owens. Acronym, then, speaks to a certain kind of clothes wearer. Someone who would rather buy less but buy better. Someone who feels most like himself when he looks a little strange. Or maybe just hates umbrellas.
To dress in full Acronym is to untether yourself from a sense of place and time. It’s a wholly realized aesthetic that opts the wearer out of the present reality. (View Highlight)
- To give you an idea of how Acronym approaches making stuff, let’s look at something real boring and basic.
Consider the pocket.
How do you go about designing what, when examined through a narrow technical lens, might be the single best pants pocket in the history of humankind? A pocket that could open a wormhole into new forms of stuff-holding?
First you consider what a wearer would keep in there: wallet, keys, phone, maybe a Juul. You cut the pocket larger and deeper than most—say, out of a sturdy Swiss mil-spec material resistant to abrasion. (Given the company’s advanced reputation, Acronym’s construction methods are pretty old-school: It uses scissors, rather than laser cutters or anything like that, which is mostly a function of how small the production runs are.) And then you consider how those elements might interact inside the pocket. The keys are a problem because they’ll scratch your shit up. So to optimize how everything sits in there, you cut the bottom at an angle.
This results in a pocket that, as Errolson explains it, is a “parallelogram versus a rectangle, which means that no matter what you put inside it”—keys, coins, etc.—“it always rolls to the front.” Then, to further index the wearer’s essentials, you add a few interior linings, creating a little mezzanine with a phone-specific pocket hidden inside another pocket inside another pocket, a matryoshka doll of divvied stuff. It’s augmentative, in a way. Makes you feel like a cyborg. (View Highlight)
- Gibson echoed a similar feeling. “Acronym clothing has been more fun to wear than anything else I’ve ever worn, for many reasons,” he explained. “But one is that I’ll sometimes wear something of Errolson’s for a long time without realizing why some little detail is exactly the way it is. Then I’ll get it. It’s like getting a joke, but it’s about function.” (View Highlight)
- That sort of reverse-engineered, solutions-based approach is still unique within the fashion space. If you look at it a certain way, Acronym is what happens when you focus on pure design. It’s a sandbox. The dominoes fell in a way that allowed the brand to operate outside the traditional runway-show fashion cycle, its own satellite planet at the edge of the universe. Out of the primordial goop, some pants and jackets. (View Highlight)