One of my favorite luxury knitwear brands for baby & kids is Bonnie Baby designed by Tracey Samuel located in the UK. Starting back in 2005, each season Tracey brings a fresh new collection based on her years of expertise in knitwear at large fashion houses including Sonia Rykiel. At Playtime Paris Tracey shared with me her fruit-filled Spring Summer 2015 collection.
Interview with Bonnie Baby Designer Tracey Samuel
“I’m Tracey and I’m the designer of Bonnie Baby. We’re a British Clothing Brand for baby and kids up to the age of 7. We’re mainly known for our knitwear including lightweight for Spring Summer on organic cotton which is great. We’re trying to move more and more to an organic base in the future. For the first time this season we’re also going up to the age of 7. Which means the older kids can enjoy our baby knitwear too. Our colors are fresh and fun. And the Summer season is filled of fruity and fun adventures.”
“The idea for Spring Summer came about when last season I went to see an exhibition Kew Gardens in London called The Incredible Edible. It was this bonkers British mix of architecture by Bompas & Parr. They turned the boating lake into a giant fruit salad. There was a giant Pineapple and Banana Grotto.”
“It was crazy but it was such great fun. My kids loved it. And it really made me think, this is exactly what kids love. There was also a great message about healthy foods, proper eating and what makes foods grow. It just made me realize that we need to carry on that message. It made me get creative and base things around fruit.”
“So we have Madame Cherise, our lovely cherry with her little blinking eyes. And we’ve got Senior Don, our grinning pineapple, and Mr. Banana, our banana superhero. And they’re all having fun with Mr. Sunshine who’s checking everything out with his giant shades, and he’s helping everybody grow. So the whole collection is very much based on everything that’s good – sunshine, fruit, fun colors, zesty highlights of colors, and lots of fun. As usual for Bonnie Baby the colors are key so we have a lovely bright yellow, a fruity, zesty green, and a nice bright pink. All on bases of grey and ecru colors.”
“Bonnie Baby is known for its knitwear, and obviously, in Spring Summer it’s difficult to do lots of knitwear because it’s generally seen as an Autumn Winter fabric. So we brought knitwear to jersey wear and we printed a knitted stitch onto super lightweight jersey that’s 100% organic cotton to give it a knitted look. And that’s become the base for most of our appliques and our fruit ideas, that are appliqued on top of a lovely knit stitch print.”
“Another idea to get a knitwear look for Spring Summer is a sweatshirt knit fabric that looks textured with herringbone so it looks slightly more knitted. And we’ve done some cross-stitch embroidery on top – rainbow, cherry or sunshine.”
“For knitwear, most of our knitwear is on a 14 gauge, very lightweight, 100% organic base. All of our knitwear this season is organic which is really exciting. We brought in what we’re calling our giant knit stitch – so it looks like a knit stitch but it’s very colorful geometric print. We have some cushions and blankets to give an idea for some interiors as well.
We also have a crazy zigzag stripe or fuzzy stripe as we call it. And also an elephant print and that’s part of a range that we call Pick and Mix. It’s a jersey range where you can pick all different separates. You can put different items together over the different prints and can make a combination of different looks. So you can take a knit stitch based bottom half and a fuzzy striped top half. You can mix the colors together, like the sweets basically pick and mix to make your own flavor.”
“We have some great lightweight chambray range denim that is sold with a pack of iron-on stick badges so your kids can customize their own look. Obviously, they’ll tell mom where to place the badge because mom’s got to do the ironing. You can choose where to put the cherry, popping out of a pocket or sunshine coming out of a hem. We also have a t-shirt in the same theme where you can place your stickers wherever you like.”
For me it was a bit of a throwback to the 70s. My mom used to always put patches on my jeans. We would reuse clothes. We didn’t throw them away. Things were good in the 70s, we passed clothes on – that’s part of our message – “Buy once, buy well, pass it down”. We were creative if something had a hole we would just cover it up with one of these crazy iron on badges. So I brought that back to reminisce from my childhood.
Discover gorgeous Bonnie Baby clothing and shop the collection online that ships worldwide.
