you are here: | Top Billing spends time with local designer Nicholas Coutts
Top Billing spends time with local designer Nicholas Coutts
Top Billing hears from Nicholas Coutts about where he finds inspiration
Fashion designer Nicholas Coutts has his own story woven into his fashion. Fishing trips with his dad which gave him a love of nature and having a mother who taught him to weave, together these make for designs as unique as the life of this artist.
His designs are visually stunning and become more impressive the closer you get to them. There is pattern and colour, but by specialising in knitting and weaving, Nicholas Coutts garments offer a second level of design to do with texture and construction.
His studio is the best place to learn about the kind of pattern you have to touch to fully appreciate, and he invited Top Billing inside to discuss his techniques.
Having started at a young age, Nicholas was still in his teens when he took various internships to learn these skills. His hands-on talent is equally at home with technology as it is with crafts and his collaboration on a range of leather goods shows how one field of know-how supports the other.
He has grown into an incredible local designer and is interested in the entire productive process of design and fashion in South Africa.
Nicholas believes this is a manufacturing economy we need – taking a South African commodity like wool, turning it into a finished export product, creating jobs and earning foreign exchange.
It doesn’t hurt that his designs also look incredible on the catwalk. His clothing is brilliant, inspired, and has incredible passion behind every piece. It is clothing for men and women, made by hand, expressing the modern diversity of Africa. Owning a Nicholas Coutts original is a source of pride.
