By now, I hope you'll have caught sight of the newly released collaboration with stand-out independent lingerie brand Edge O' Beyond, as part of their 10th anniversary collection! It's special for so many reasons, neither of us have ever done a collaboration before, and this is EoB's first foray into corsetry! But ultimately, I'm just so very proud of what we've created together, and I feel it really brings together what makes our brands unique and special.
I thought it would be fun to let you in on what goes into a collaboration like this, and to introduce you to some of the people who are making your Charlotte corsets. The increasing awareness of "who made my clothes" is something I wholeheartedly support, and over the last few years, I've spent a lot of time with this incredible team!
Naomi, founder of Edge O' Beyond (EoB) first brought up the idea of us collaborating back in 2019. I've been so grateful for the way she has reached out to me, and supported me as I try to develop Orchid in new areas, and being considered for something as important as their 10th brand anniversary collection was an enormous blow to the old imposter syndrome! It did take us until Summer 2023 to begin planning this in earnest, but once we got going, things started to flow quickly.
It all started from this sketch, bringing together the two designs that we had agreed to base this piece on: EoB's outstanding Charlotte range and my best selling Seirian waspie. My initial design used the scallop edge of their signature embroidered tulle to dilineate the waistling of the corset, but after a suggestion from Naomi we decided to angle those panels to follow the sweep of the hip arcs!
I visited the South Wales atelier in-person for almost all the sampling, and the head machinist Tracey and I have spent days and days, heads together, problem solving, note taking, experimenting, begging the onsite sewing machine genius James to make us special folding attachments, and, inevitably, unpicking stitches! Each sample corset we created would raise another question, or suggest another small alteration in the pursuit of perfection. The thing it's important to get across, is that corsetry is really complex to try and make in a time constrained, efficiency focused setting like this. Adding in the complexities of a design like this, and the new techniques that need to be established to make it possible, and you have quite a puzzle on your hands. I feel confident in saying that most brands would have tried to cut this design back to something more basic, and I give EoB so much credit in having faith that we could make this work.
