I lived in New York City for seven years, and sometimes it felt like a dream. My apartment was in Chelsea, in a building overlooking the High Line. Every morning, I would leave my building, grab a coffee from the corner deli, get on the High Line and walk down toward work in the Meatpacking District (I was VP of Design for Rag & Bone, the fashion brand), organising my diary for the day on the way. That was my daily routine — it was the stuff of cinematic New York dreams. 

While I loved New York for its buzz and energy, and really immersed myself in that whole lifestyle, my partner missed the slower pace of life in the British countryside. So in 2015, he moved back to the UK, and I started a mad routine involving a transatlantic commute. 

It sounds crazy, I know. The way it worked was that I would fly back to London at least every month, sometimes every two weeks, to see him and work out of our London office. It involved a lot of time on planes. And planes are great places to think. During those journeys, it struck me that I’d become quite disillusioned with fashion. I felt I was making all these collections, seeing a tonne of product all the time. It had become meaningless — just a constant churn of seasonal product, in and out, on sale, and then replaced by the next season’s designs.