BOLTxEDIE

London moto apparel and custom builders team up with bikes-in-the-blood clothing designer for a ciderfuelled collaboration. Destination: Paris fashion week

Words: Andrew Almond Photos: William Waterworth, Cole Quirke, Tom Pigeon, Andrew Almond, Edie Ashley

IFIRST CAME across fashion designer Edie Ashley as an enigmatic and fearless force at various motorcycle events; she tends to stand out in a crowd. From winning best effort on her vintage Cheney Triumph on the Swank Rally at Wheels and Waves, to taking off into the Welsh hills near her home town, she’s had motorcycling ingrained since a child. When I received an invite to her graduate show at East London’s Truman Breweries, I was excited to see how her background in motorcycling had transfered to the catwalk. The collection drew on influences from motorcycle garments dating back to the 1930s and reworked them to a contemporary, tailored style. It was great and, as the owner of Bolt Motorcycles – a shop in London – my kind of thing. So, immediately after the show we headed for a drink and decided to collaborate on producing a collection together.

This was an opportunity to focus more or less entirely on the form and to create garments that reflected motorcycling for its pure style. We began with an academic process of working through our large collections of literature; classics like Rin Tanaka’s guide to leather jackets and helmets are some of the best. With over a hundred years of inspiration to plough through we focused on small details, those borne from functionality and that defined the garments as motorcycle attire. The asymmetrical-buttoned jackets from ’30s TT races, the different style of knee and elbow padding and the high waist of vintage scrambling trousers were all inspirations. Explaining our collection to Mark Wilsmore, owner of London’s Ace Café, he made the interesting observation that motorcycle attire was becoming increasingly more conformist while, in contrast, fashion trends were adopting the traditional symbols of rock ’n’ roll. The contemporary custom scene has attracted new audiences and grown alongside a revival in heritage

(clockwise from top left) Race Wrap top in vintage Crêpe de Chine; Edie in the Race Wrap top and vintage trousers; Cosy! Models (the designers’ friends) in a mixture of BoltxEdie and classic motorcycle clobber; Lightbox shining brightly outside the gallery in Paris; Like moths powered by free booze, crowds form outside the fledgling brand’s Paris launch; Edie and sister Lily playing records at the party; Forget the rag trade, we’ve invented wheelbarrow pool, we’re going to be millionaires!; Edie, Rosie and Lily on Edie’s Cheney Triumph

styles, adopting a more gentlemanly appearance than previous motorcycle subcultures. Long gone is the image of the leather-clad menace and the attitudes bestowed on the original greasers. There has been a preoccupation in motorcycle clothing with marrying style on and off the bike. It’s creating a need to fit in, to appear like everyone else, a monoculture of mass trends adopted at a surface level. Meanwhile, current high street trends extend from studded leather jackets to direct references to outlaw motorcycle gangs; the look is much more counter-cultural. With BoltxEdie we wanted to create something innovative and authentic that championed one’s identity as a motorcyclist.

From the outset, we decided to use only reclaimed fabrics, there is more than enough already. This we soon realised would take us on a series of adventures, countless wild goose chases and the occasional pot of gold. Our most intriguing lead had to be the news of cases of silks dating back over a hundred years that had been found intact in the hold of a sunken ship off the coast of Devon. However, they had yet to be retrieved and it was going to take more than a snorkel and flippers to get them out of there. It was a regular at Bolt who told us about an old workwear factory in the north of England that he had taken possession of. It had been in decline for decades and in that time had built up a mountain of apparel filling all five floors of two warehouses. Always a fool for curiosity, it wasn’t long before I had organised a truck and a trip up north to see what we could find. We came off the motorway and drove over the moors before dropping down into Dewsbury. Rows of terraced

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houses, in the pale sandstone you see all over Yorkshire, formed geometric patterns on the hillsides. The warehouses were boarded up and in a state of disrepair. We were quickly ushered in and the doors locked behind us; apparently the previous owner was not well liked and a number of firebomb attacks had followed his departure. There were three of us, five floors and innumerable shelves of bails of clothes tightly packed from floor to ceiling. If this wasn’t enough, there was a huge, unlit cellar and an attic, both packed to their capacities with more bails. By my own conclusion, the best stuff had to be the hardest to reach, and with this in mind, guided by the faint glow of our phones, we clambered down among the sea of bails and started trawling for our catch. After eight hours of fishing through the stock we pulled together our findings. Edie had netted rolls of satin-faced moleskin while I’d found boxes of new-oldstock zips from the 1930s onwards. There were Talon, Aero, Cliq, Lightning and other military zippers; I was proper geeking out on the find. But still we needed more. Finding enough fabric to produce the collection took us to Paris and eventually to a small fabric house that traded off-cuts from the famous Parisian ateliers. We were now starting to build up a handful of reliable dealers who would put aside any unusual fabrics for us and over the months we had filled a garage. The next stage was to create the twills, essentially these are the dry builds for the garments to come. This took place in the Bolt garage with a team of fitting models, pattern cutters and seamstresses working away among partly dissembled motorcycles and benches covered with tools. We stood around with cups of coffee, refining every seam, adjusting and re-adjusting the fit, trying to find that perfect equilibrium of form and function. It was Edie who suggested we launch at Paris Fashion

Clothes and motorcycles look best when set in movement... We found some jumps and spent days fooling around

Week rather than in London. It was ballsy. This gave us a month to prepare but I had no idea where to start. I figured the first step would be to find a venue. We jumped on a train and started to search the Paris streets for a suitable space for our launch. We covered 32km (20 miles) on foot that first day and it was painfully clear that the only pair of shoes I’d taken had a good chance of bringing me to my knees. The next day, I shuffled along at such a pace I didn’t think we’d make it as far as the hotel lobby. Outside, we came across the bright orange electric scooters that litter the streets of Paris and suddenly they seemed a lot more appealing. Literally the antithesis of everything I like about two-wheeled travel, I justified it to myself as an electric walking stick and that since even looking at my feet hurt it might actually be my only feasible means of mobility. Edie was bang up for it and before long we were tailing the traffic up the Champs Elysees at a mild pace of 19kph (12mph). Taking on the Arc de Triomphe with its six lanes of traffic and no road markings was more challenging. We’d seen 50 venues in two days when we stopped, exhausted, and agreed that the first one we’d seen was clearly the best. In the heart of the Marais, tucked in a corner overlooking a quiet, cobbled street, the venue was perfect. When we arrived back at London’s King’s Cross station I would have happily dragged myself on my belly along the platform to avoid using my feet. We were now down to just three weeks and our to-do list was a mile long. Our plan was to present the collection alongside an installation, photography and film exhibition. Both Edie and I have a good circle of creative friends so we invited as many as could come down to Edie’s family farmhouse in Wales. Over the course of a few days and with motorcycles, horses and gallons of homebrew cider, we planned to shoot the collection. Our only problem was that as car after car arrived we were still without the samples. Eventually, after a lot of phone calls, we were promised that a stranger would arrive on the last train with samples in hand. We had to cross our fingers and enjoy the cider. Thankfully, the midnight exchange went smoothly and the next day we rose with the sun and started shooting. Edie directed the shoot, with William Waterworth photographing portrait, Cole Quirke a more documentary style on film and Joel Kerr capturing everything on Super 8. Clothes and motorcycles both look best when set in movement, and, with a vintage Cheney Triumph scrambler and a more modern Beta, we headed into the hills above the farm, found some jumps and spent the next few days fooling around. As we descended on the local pub, en masse, we were welcomed by the locals, an incredible bunch, and I spent the night listening to the old timers telling stories of wins and escapades representing Wales in enduro racing. Almost everything for the Paris show was being made bespoke, from the metal display cases to the vinyl window splash commissioned from artist Joel Clark. On top of this, we had 100 scarves to print and sew by hand, sound systems, drink sponsors, press releases and invitations to organise; we didn’t sleep in the final week. It ended up that everything being made was to be delivered the day before we set off. Miraculously, it was. The next morning, we loaded our mate Rui’s van with a 1943 flathead Harley,

Materials are a mix of satin-face cotton, Crêpe de Chine, moleskin and duck canvas. Start the diet now

1972 Guzzi Eldorado, the Cheney Triumph and my own Triumph café racer, and headed to Paris. With so much to do, I’d left finding accommodation till the night before, that’s the night before the start of Paris fashion week. Hotels would have cost thousands, as would an Airbnb – if there was anything left. There was a tiny boat just big enough to fit a mattress and I resented paying to be a stowaway. My other option was an incredible-looking chateau which looked too good to be true. Then I realised it wasn’t even in Paris. That was a short while after I had booked it. I had ten days to learn to navigate my way in and out of Paris and to master the art of lane splitting through 20km (12 miles) of traffic at high speed. If you take your hand off the throttle for a moment there’s a backlog of angry scooterists jabbing at their horns. The first morning, we set the exhibition up and things were looking good, so we headed off to check out the parties. We came back to the gallery late at night and as we closed the internal shutters they jammed half way. We managed to unlock the door but it wouldn’t open, then the alarm went off. It couldn’t have sounded any louder in the quiet Parisian square. I didn’t think it could get any worse until there was a flash and a loud bang. A thick plume of smoke descended from the ceiling until the space filled with an impenetrable fog from the anti-theft device. This really wasn’t looking good. All our work from the last year literally disappeared before our eyes in a puff of smoke. I’d already thought it couldn’t get worse the evening before, when I had my phone pinched. Nick Ashley1 turned up in his usual sharp style, rolling in a wide-bodied Ford Escort Mk1 estate that he had livened up in BoltxEdie livery. It looked great and staked our claim in the square for the evening. We set up the sound system in front of the gallery windows, built a bar under the trees and lined the street with motorcycles. The exhibition attracted a diverse crowd, from the likes of Alexa Chung2, Dimitre Coste and members of Razorlight. I was only into about my third record when the first complaint arrived from an elderly lady in a dressing gown shouting at me in French. But the people kept on coming and by 10pm we’d filled the square. Our exhibition ran for a week and the afternoons would see an crowd gather as we sat outside and drank beers into the evening. The cobbled square soon started to feel like the yard back at Bolt in London. Fashion Week saw parties happening all over the city and, with our two Triumphs, Edie and I tore across town making noise. Motorcycle style has had an influence on fashion since the ’50s, and the leather jacket has become the uniform of rebellion. As a motorcycle brand, it felt right that we should present at Fashion Week and hopefully influence future trends with styles developed with authenticity. The motorcycle scene needs constant innovation, to push design into new areas and, more than anything, it needs to take risks. It is the small independents, interconnected and active in the culture, who will shape the future. It’s always been that way.

(above) Ford Escort street sleeper (it has a Honda S2000 engine) outside the Paris exhibition (right) Edie and her old Triumph

Appendix

1 Edie’s dad. Respected fashion designer, desert racer and motorcycle nut. Son of Laura Ashley. 2 Model, TV presenter, writer.