Hucklebones London is one of my favorite girls’ brands out of the UK with handwriting that’s clean, feminine and sophisticated. I’ve been following Hucklebones collections season after season, so it was a pleasure at Playtime Paris to interview designers Zoe India Goldsmith and Daniel Stockley about this gorgeous collection for girls ages 3 months to 10 years.
Interview with Hucklebones Designers Zoe & Dan
“Every garment is meticulously considered, with close attention to tailoring and the finer details to ensure each item has its own charming style. Each season offers new, specially created prints that are exclusive to Hucklebones and designed ‘in-house’ from our London based studio.”
Hucklebones London Party Dresses for Spring Summer
Dan: I’m from a creative background in multi-media. I’m used to creating and generating new ideas all of the time.
Zoe: I’m from a womenswear background. I used to work for Abercrombie & Fitch, and after that, I worked for a designer label in London called Orla Kiely that’s famous for handbags, prints, and really lovely women’s clothing. And then from there, Dan and I decided we wanted to create something together, we put our heads together to figure out what we could create with both of our skills.
And we somehow decided that childrenswear would be a great idea. It was before all of the designed started creating fashionable kidswear. There wasn’t as much of designer children’s clothing going on then. So we thought, let’s make something that has the womenswear element, and looks at the element of fashion and what’s being shown on the catwalk, but still has that classic timeless quality and that boutique feeling that’s so lovely in women’s fashion.
Dan: Here at Hucklebones we design all of our prints, and we actually design a lot of our fabrics as well. We work closely will the mills. It just helps to give Hucklebones that unique feeling. There’s nobody in the market with the same prints and the same products. It works, and the end consumer really loves that.
Zoe: They’re looking for something special and we’re offering all those pieces that are a little bit different – like hand-illustrated prints that Dan designs in-house and we go on to print them on to silks & chiffons. And also the patterns and the cuts. We do every single pattern in-house. We’re really perfectionists in terms of cut and fit. So everything gets tried on, checked, tweaked, and the pattern gets altered. It’s tailoring for little children.
Hucklebones London Baloon Dress
For Spring Summer 2014 for Hucklebones we looked at a gorgeous vintage photo that was taken in the 1909 Parisian Air Show. It was in the Grand Palais so it was really beautiful. It was all about adventure and pioneering technology at the time. We just thought that it was a fantastic concept. You can hop in an air balloon and you who knows where it’s going to take you. And the print which Dan designed…
Dan: We directly took from those images – essences, shapes, the air balloons, the paneling. We just recreated prints. It’s very literal in many ways.
Zoe: It’s combining playful elements with our classic shape, which I think is what Hucklebones does so well.
Some of the lovely pieces from our collection are the Daisy Chain Dress. It’s a gorgeous aqua color. So it’s in a really fresh, vibrant and modern color. It’s a classic shape in a 1960s shift dress that just trimmed really prettily around the collar with the daisy chain appliqué. So it’s got that really pretty summer fresh feel.
Another piece is the balloon panel dress. So we’re taking the inspiration from the hot air balloons. We literally took the trapeze dress and put the balloon panels down. So we’ve got coral on cream and it looks absolutely gorgeous. So every little girl gets to be a balloon for the day which is really cute, floating about. So it’s really playful.
Hucklebones is available in age ranges from 3 months to 10 years. We have cute little capsule babies ranges which are just kind of taking over the main pieces of the collection and putting them into baby lines. The mainline girls go for 2-10 years.
