Forty houses. Élise has stood in every one of their workrooms, which is the only qualification any of them had to meet.
We buy from forty houses and carry no more than 180 styles a season between them, which works out at four or five pieces each. That is a deliberately uncomfortable number. It means every house is represented by the things it does best and by nothing else, and it means that when a house has a weak season we simply do not buy it, without anybody having to have a difficult conversation about shelf space.
The list is grouped three ways, and the groups are geographic rather than aesthetic because that is honestly how the buying happens — three trips a year, and what comes back from each one has more in common than any category we could invent.
A house gets bought after somebody has been to the workroom. Not a showroom, not a trade fair stand, not a video call — the room where the cutting happens, with the people who do it in it. It is slow, it costs us three trips a year, and it is the reason we can tell you how long a dress takes to make and be right.
Houses leave the list too. Three have gone in ten years: one that moved production without telling anybody, one whose second cut of a coat was noticeably worse than the first, and one where the founder stopped being in the building and it showed within two seasons. We do not name them, and if you ask in the shop we will tell you why but not who.
Every house we carry has a letter written about it, from the workroom, on the day. They are in the journal, they are not press releases, and two of them have been taken down at the maker’s request — once for naming a fabric price, once for describing a room as cramped, which it was.