LOADS Collection

Maleza Hatmakers was chosen as the first guest designers x LOADS Collection.
With more than 20 years of award-winning work dedicated to the restorative ecology and timeless beauty of wool, artist-activist Claudy Jongstra is returning to the fashion world with a radical, net-positive approach to garment creation — LOADS Collection.

More than a collection of garments, LOADS Collection is a collaboration among outstanding makers, any one of whose work on its own could be considered transformative. Bringing this work together, LOADS Collection forms a new, truly revolutionary system that values craftsmanship and supports the cultivation of high-quality, ecological materials with revitalizing impacts on the very landscape that produces them.

Relying solely on plant-based dyes, each colour in the collection can be traced back to its botanical source on small-scale biodynamic farms in the Netherlands and Spain.

LOADS Collection comes directly out of the collaborative, ecological and traceable way of working that Claudy Jongstra has carefully cultivated in her artistic practice. Her atelier and biodynamic farm in the northern countryside of the Netherlands, developed together with her partner Claudia Busson, has grown into a creative hub for a diverse range of creatives. LOADS Collection brings together the extraordinary work of collaborating makers, architects, farmers, designers, manufacturers and social enterprises.

RISCO, SHEPHERD’S HAT

Studying all the different shapes of shepherd hats on old photographs we found the one thing that connects all of these hats, regardless of the region they come from: that it appears weathered, having lost some of its original shape, now taking on a more organic, rounder form, resembling more of a skull.

MAKING PROCESS

For this project we worked with cones of merino wool that were dyed by the team of Claudy Jongstra. The blue colour is extracted from biodynamic woad leaves from the Beersche Hoeve Odin farm in the Netherlands, the other two colors come from freshly harvested biodynamic sunflowers and coreopsis from Entheos farmers in Lerín, Spain.

WHERE TO BUY

This hat is exclusively available at the Art Room of See All This magazine.