What inspired us to make an essential collection?

You can get inspired by everything. Look around you! The number one essential in life is our planet. 

It provides the air we breathe.
The soil we plan our path on.
The water we hydrate our bodies with.

Everything we - at Achilles and the Tortoise - say and do comes from the mantra “we want to balance the scales between human and nature.”

And that is where our Essentials found ground. 

A “forever collection” that showcases the latest innovations in sustainability for fashion. One that embraces the slow fashion philosophy in every fibre that goes into production. 

Technical fashion as a inspiring starting-point

So our creative starting-point was not a museum, an amazing vista, or impressive architectural innovation. It was the 360 project in Portugal. These amazing people are at the forefront of fashion innovation, and are pushing the possibilities of sustainability. 

They give us the opportunity to create products that are designed to last.
With techniques that are created to brighten our sustainable future.
And if you are sick of the clothes at some point?
We are at a point where clothes can be re-purposed in multiple ways. 

How does circulair fashion work?

To make clothing easily recyclable it is crucial to use a single blend of fibre. We have chosen to only use cotton for our tees: 50% recycled cotton, and 50% organic cotton. 

The recycled cotton comes from shirts that you brought to donation boxes, and pieces of leftover material the production facility ends up with during the production process (of all products). This recycled cotton is a huge step towards a circular production system in fashion. Which we obviously applaud. Yay.

Why not 100% recycled cotton? We have asked that exact question. Multiple times. Sadly this technique is not developed enough yet. Using a 100% recycled cotton would result in less strong fabric bonds: it would harm the quality of the product.
And that is the reason why investing in these innovations is so, so, so important! The more these systems get tested the better they can be developed, and the closer we get to circulair production cycles.

How do I find fashion inspiration?

If you came here because you have a creative blackout. You want to know how to get inspiration for clothing design, or design in general. I would want to give you the most boring advice - boring, because I think you will hear this everywhere: the only advice I can really give you is: to start “looking” for inspiration. 

What I mean is that you’ll have to practice analysing what you see around you. Don’t look at a tree and think: tree. Really look and analyse what is present around you. And actively search for inspiration in your day-to-day life.

Find the things you find interesting conceptually and aesthetically. 

Learn from things that do best: Let’s use the hottest topic at this moment in an example: Midjourney and OpenAI. How do you think these systems learned to be so “creative”? They’ve been thought to “look” and “see” everything on the Internet. Now, they use that information to create essays en visuals for you. Where they do in "Big Data", you should do in "refined taste": developing your 

So read books. Visit musea. Follow all the ‘great’ designers on Instagram. Go window shopping. Indulge in parties with interesting people.

Live a little.