Greek Makers

Fourteen names, most of them within an hour of the shop. Sofia runs this part of the list and it is the part with the least stock behind it.

Read the letters

Athenian clothes-making did not die, it went quiet. The workshops that dressed this city into the 1980s mostly closed, but the people trained in them did not all leave — some kept a machine at home, some taught, and a few kept working for houses abroad who never named them. Sofia grew up inside one of those workshops, on Solonos, and she knows which doors to knock on because her mother knew.

The programme started in 2019 with two names and is now fourteen. It is the only part of the buy where we occasionally pay in advance, because a workshop of three people cannot fund a season and wait ninety days to be paid, and pretending otherwise is how this trade killed itself the first time.

Who they are

Atelier Loukia — Athens

Four people in one room off Solonos. Trousers and linen shirting, and the first Greek house we bought. Nine years on it is still the largest single line on the rail.

A silversmith on Solonos

Asked not to be named until his production could keep up, and two years later it still cannot. Makes about sixty per cent of the jewellery on the accessories floor, by hand, badly lit.

A knitter in Volos

Two frames, one of them from 1974. Six styles a season, no more, and she will not take an order she cannot finish herself.

A weaver on Crete

Stoles and scarves on a floor loom in Chania. The wool is from her own island, the dye is not, and she is very clear about that distinction.

A leather workshop in Piraeus

Belts and small leather. Two brothers, one of whom does the cutting and neither of whom will discuss which.

Nine more

Listed with the year we first stocked them on the full designer list, including three we buy from only in alternate seasons because that is all they can make.

Why so much of it is gone

They sell out. Not as a sales tactic — there is genuinely no more. A workshop of three people making eleven hours a dress cannot repeat within a season, and a piece that goes in October will not come back before spring, if at all. We do not run a waiting list on most of it because a waiting list implies a promise we cannot keep.

What we do instead: if you tell Marília what you missed, she will write to you when the maker next delivers, and she will tell you honestly if the answer is never. About one in four of those emails ends with the word never.