We recently caught up with Cathal McAteer, founder of Folk, and quizzed him about his influences. Here’s what he had to say about where it all comes from for Folk.

‘We try and do our own stuff, we don’t tend to buy a lot of old garments and replicate them - we take influence from them, just like most people. But all our influence comes from stuff we’ve done in the past and the things we like.

Also, the thing that could be the catalyst for a lot of ideas could be really small. For instance, a watercolour painting, [and it wasn't even the whole painting] just the shapes and the tones of that become almost the whole voice of the collection - it’s nice when it comes that easy. Usually, you’re trying to find it in various areas.

(At this point) we’ve made so many garments and a lot of those garments are still there. So we’re continually looking at those and improving them. Sometimes improving them, sometimes stripping them bare and starting again. We try and stay in our box in a way, because we know who we are and what we like, so we try and improve on that.

We like making garments better with different fabrics, playing with it a bit, merging garments that we’ve already made. Because we owe that to the people that buy from us. They’re expecting us to make the really nice striped jumper because we do that really well and they enjoy buying that, so we wanna give them an even better one for next season.’

Photography by Andy Barnham