Joshua Millard’s store in Soho, London, complete with workshop, welcomes a loyal clientele of women who adore his luxurious yet refined tailored style. And while Millard has extensive training in classical tailoring, his aesthetic is anything but traditional, with designs that demonstrate a lightness of touch, clean lines and movement.
Pictured: Joshua Millard
BRINGING THE ETHICS OF CLOTHING TO THE FORE
His reputation lies in his skill in combining textures; shearling and leather with different fabrics within a single tailored garment. His renowned tweed and shearling biker jackets or tweed shepherd’s overcoat with leather detailing are brilliant examples – both available as made-to-measure. His fluffy tigrado shearling shrug with suede detail back, worn casually over a dress, shirt or jumper, is dreamy yet practical. He also produces a range of cushions that combine houndstooth tweed with leather panels in a range of tans, Bordeaux and greens.
But the brand is best known for its made-to-measure offering and Joshua Millard the designer clearly relishes the opportunity to engage with clients who visit him at his store and workshop. He dedicates time to understanding their lifestyles and what makes them tick, so that the encounter and resulting creation becomes a collaboration that not only reflects and endorses a client’s personality, but also their lifestyle. He celebrated his clients in a recent ad campaign using them as models in a series of honest, unfiltered images, nestled within the natural environment of the Dorset landscape that is his constant influence.
HIS REPUTATION LIES IN HIS SKILL IN COMBINING TEXTURES; SHEARLING AND LEATHER WITH DIFFERENT FABRICS
When you learn that Joshua Millard comes from a Dorset sheep farming family, you begin to see those subtle influences in his designs. He talks of cold, rainy mornings on the farm where practicalities of layering texture and fibre constantly feed into his work to this day. And his love and knowledge of a wide variety of different sheep breeds drives his use of shearling and underpins his responsible, respectful, slow fashion philosophy.
Joshua Millard is on a mission to bring the ethics of clothing to the fore, from fair pay to the environment and animal welfare. His belief system guides him in creating contemporary but enduring, high-quality pieces that are not subject to the vagaries of rapidly changing trends and avoid fanning the flames of overconsumption. If that places him outside the fashion industry, then that’s fine by him!
He is also serious about aiming to source his beloved sheepskin and leather as close to home as possible, even exploring the role the family farm might play in supplying skins for the brand’s use, in an effort to drive transparency. Growing up with an understanding of a farm animal’s life cycle and seeing the shocking waste of skins, a by-product of the meat industry, sent to landfill after slaughter, means that he is keen to promote the use of leather and shearling as a sustainable, responsible, enduring and biodegradable choice.
