Monday Muse

Interview Georgia Dant, Founder of Marfa Stance

Interview

Georgia Dant

13 September 2021

Interview

Georgia Dant

13 September 2021

Coat season and London Fashion Week are upon us, so we thought there was no better time to catch up with Georgia Dant, the founder of London outerwear label Marfa Stance.

After honing her skills working at luxury brands for more than 15 years, including Rag & Bone and Burberry under Christopher Bailey, London College of Fashion alumna Dant used her considerable knowledge to identify a gap in the market. Her dream was to create a meaningful brand, built on sustainable and ethical values. In 2019 she did just that, launching Marfa Stance. Functional, adaptable and sustainable, its utilitarian womenswear is loved by us and the likes of Sienna Miller and Caroline Issa for its buildable elements and seasonless style. It’s also expertly made in family-run factories throughout Italy.

Here, on the eve of 100 designers presenting their collections at London Fashion Week, Dant shares her experience and advice on starting your own fashion line.

THE WICK: Talk us through a typical Monday.

Georgia Dant: Mondays are always the busiest day for us. We always start with our team meeting in the morning where we discuss what’s coming up that week, our stock levels and customer pre-orders, our social plan, our Marfa muses and newsletter. After our meeting, we get to work. We thankfully always have quite a few orders to carefully hand-wrap and send out to customers, and I usually am on calls with our PR team and graphic designer. Monday afternoons are when we do all our fit reviews with our technical team.

TW: How do you fuel your creativity while balancing the responsibilities of being a brand founder?

GD: Creativity is intrinsic to my role as designer of Marfa Stance. I am not designing for fashion, I am designing to offer our customers products that are solutions to their lifestyles whoever they are and for wherever they go – the fusion of style and function. However, I find creativity in equal measure through the role of founder and the daily problem solving that is required and integral to setting up any business or venture. I have to be resourceful as well as industrious with limited resources and I think this forces and fuels creative thinking in both design and running a business.

TW: Who are the muses that inspired your label?

GD: I am inspired by real people. My muses are women and men I respect who have a story to tell, strong values, a point of view and their own sense of creative and individual style and self-expression.

TW: What’s your advice to someone looking to launch their own label?

GD: I think the journey to launch a brand is very different for each person. My advice would be to have confidence and believe in yourself and your ideas. I think you don’t have to have all the answers when you initially start out, but I think you do have to be ready to think on your feet, adapt and be OK with failure and have humility. It is one of the hardest things that you will ever do, but one of the most rewarding.

The Wick - Interview Georgia Dant, Founder of Marfa Stance

“I hope that more brands find creative solutions like we are trying to do, to change the behaviour of the industry.”

TW: Sustainability is a core pillar of the Marfa Stance design approach. What are your hopes for fashion beyond 2021?

GD: Our mission is to create pieces that are made with exceptional quality in Italy and timeless enough to stand the test of time, but our brand’s unique selling point is offering our customers the option to create, update and wear our styles in multiple and personal ways. Through the reversibility of the garments and by adding buildable accessories, whether that’s for function across seasons and temperatures, for personalisation or to refresh garments with a new updated colour for example, you can keep each piece feeling new without replacing it with a new item. For me, this historical industry standard of ‘out with the old collection and in with the new season’, replacing pieces constantly with something new, is totally unsustainable. I hope that more brands find creative solutions like we are trying to do, to change the behaviour of the industry and work towards a new standard of buy less and buy better.

TW: If you could choose any artwork to add to your personal collection, what would it be?

GD: It would be very hard to choose between a Rothko, a Joan Mitchell or a Josef Albers. Each artists’ work captivates me, I really love Rothko and Mitchell for their emotive and expressive use of colour and the energy they capture in very different ways. However, I love the control and discipline of Albers while still offering the sensitivity to colour combinations and form that the others also explore.

TW: What’s your favourite culturally curious spot?

GD: I love Dia Beacon in Upstate New York. It’s where I spent a lot of time when I lived in NYC. I love the presence of artists such as Flavin and Serra that are exhibited there. But I have to say that Marfa in Texas needs to be at the top of my list. I was fascinated by the clash of art, culture, the space community and the mystical landscape all in one tiny town in the middle of nowhere.

TW: Cultural quarantine – which book do you want with you?

GD: I love the book A Chequered Past, which documents David Hockney and friends in New York back in the 70s. It’s a visually beautiful collection of photographs of their time there, their style, their freedom and their sense of creative exploration. During quarantine last year I rediscovered this book, which had been on my shelf untouched for years. Such a gem.