What do we need to heal fashion? Designer and environmentalist, Tarryn Tippens, thinks what we need is more love, empathy, and community care – for our clothing, for each other, for the people in the fashion supply chain, and for the earth. She says of her recently launched brand, Loveland:

Loveland is really all about love. Everything we do each day should be through love. The best way I can express this is through design. The love I have for nature takes me to this place.

Browse through Loveland’s Instagram and you’ll be greeted by a collage of ethereal images featuring a whimsically designed, gently textured knitwear capsule collection against the backdrop of vast natural vistas. It’s as if the clothes are a part of nature.

Playfully named after the fairy characters from the animation series The Winx Club, the pieces in the capsule collection are a reflection of the elements. Each item is produced in limited batches and are hand-knitted by Tarryn using locally-sourced African Expressions yarn. She says:

Nature has taught me to let go. This is often when great things happen.

Weaving this teaching into her work, she says each piece is guided by the process. “I start knitting and see where the process takes me. It’s almost like a meditation, because it’s the one time, I am able to sit down and not focus on anything else.”

In the process of letting go of the desire for perfectionism, Tarryn found her design style. She has been knitting since she was at school and then revisited her knitting practice when she was creating her fashion school graduate collection in 2020, which was naturally-dyed. “At first, I was not great at knitting. But, I found my style in not being very good at it. I realised that I’m not good at being very structured – and that’s okay.” The deconstructed, textural feel of Loveland’s pieces are a reflection of this.

Taking it a step further, this focus on process as well as product says something profound about our collective need to be less fixated on short-term trending aesthetics, and more deeply focused on exploring style and cultivating a curiosity about the many hands our clothes pass through before they reach our closets.

For Tarryn, the clothing she makes and wears is an extension of the love she wishes to embody in the world:

Clothing is a form of expression. It is able to make us feel comfortable, confident, beautiful, and at ease. When we feel most at home in our bodies, we can be our most authentic selves, and that is when we have a positive impact on each other.

One of the ways that she is committed to creating positive impact is through her sustainable fashion brand, which she hopes to also use as a platform to share lessons about how to incorporate sustainability into everyday life. But, she emphasises that sustainability is always relative to circumstance. “It’s always about working within your means and applying sustainability to your situation. Loveland’s pieces embody this as well. Loveland is doing what it can with the means that we have, to be as sustainable as possible,” she says.

Part of Loveland’s journey and practice in love and community care is finding ways to make sustainable fashion as accessible as possible in terms of pricing and sizing. Loveland offers pieces at a range of price points, so that there is something that everyone can afford. They take custom orders and are able to create for different sizes and body types, because everything is made by hand. Tiffany says:

I want everyone to have the chance to own a sustainable piece and to feel that sustainability isn’t a distant idea.

Sustainable fashion may often feel like a lofty concept with more definitions than we can keep up with and big fashion businesses using metrics to achieve goals and issuing sustainability reports far removed from the making and wearing of garments. Loveland is simplifying this for us. What does sustainability look like in practice? Well, it’s love and care in action.

• Images: Photographs by Aaishah Satchipia. Supplied by Tarryn Tippens
  
• To learn more about Loveland and invest in one of their pieces, follow them on Instagram @lov3land_.