Emilie Casiez is the designer behind the Nigel Cabourn women’s range. Combining a keen eye for detail with a passion for vintage clothing with a story to tell, her designs bring classic shapes right up to date, creating functional clothing for the modern age.

Seeing as her new collection has just landed, now seemed like a good time to catch up with Emilie and talk about her work…

Starting at the beginning, both sides of your family were involved in the clothing industry. Can you tell us a bit about that?

My father is French and my mother is Japanese. I grew up in Paris, where my mother was working for a luxury French fashion brand called Maison Gres. My French great-grandmother also had a lace factory in the north of France in the 30’s.

Were you always destined to follow in their footsteps? Was clothing design something you always wanted to be involved in?  

I loved drawing from a young age and always was interested in what was going on in fashion, but it’s when my mother invited me to see a catwalk at 14 years old that I thought I wanted to become a fashion designer. 

What sort of clothes did you look for when you were growing up in Paris?

At 17 years old I started going to the flea markets in Paris every weekend. I loved Levi’s 501 jeans, and used to wear them with matching denim shirts and Type II Trucker denim jackets, and used to dye them in different colours and customise them.

This love of clothing soon led to you starting your own brand, which you ran for ten years before moving to Japan. What made you want to move out there?

I started my own brand while I was at fashion school in Paris, so I was very young. After ten years of  running my own business and store, I got the opportunity to get further experience with a famous Japanese designer in Tokyo, who was doing catwalk shows in Paris, and as I am half Japanese I was interested to go live there.

You’ve been the women’s designer at Cabourn for a few years now. How did you meet Nigel?

I met Nigel while I was living in Tokyo, I was introduced by a mutual friend. Nigel asked me to do some drawings of the way that I would see Nigel Cabourn Woman, and then when I showed him the drawings he really loved the style of the drawings and the designs. 

We met in Paris again a few months later and went to the flea market. I tried on a few women’s french workwear pieces on and this is how we realised that we had the same tastes and ideas of how we wanted the women’s collections to look for the future and started working together.

Your designs often take details from French, British and American work-wear. What is it about these clothes that you think stand up to the test of time so well?

Originally workwear was made to last, for workers in factories (as Lybro was originally making in the 40’s).

Their fabrics, their interesting fades, made naturally through the years, and their functional, practical design make them beautiful, simple and timeless. Those WWI and II workwear fabrics, like moleskin, canvas, cotton herringbone, and satine, are some of the fabrics we like using for our LYBRO collections.

What are the main differences between the designs from those countries? Are there any standout details only found in French work-wear, for example?

You can recognise French workwear by its indigo blue colour, while American and British work-wear was often made from khaki drill. Denim is very prominent in workwear, and the US military has been wearing denim since the 1930s. Since the 1920s the French working in the fields were patching their pieces, to repair them to wear them longer and pass them down to their family.