First published by T Magazine on 11 January 2016
A condensed version of this article appeared in the 17 January 2016 print edition of The New York Times.
In the airy reception room of a townhouse in London’s Chelsea, Arthur Yates has arranged a rack of vibrant unisex shirts next to a display of hand-painted milk urns. The two elements are unlikely halves of the same project: Bruta, his fashion and homeware brand that launched quietly last year. “There wasn’t some master plan,” he recalls. “I was just doing them in my bedroom with help from my girlfriend. And now it’s growing into something a little bit more serious, and people are taking interest.”
Yates is as much an entrepreneur as he is a designer. Now 25 years old, he was a teenager when he set up his first company in 2008, producing jersey pieces for high-street retailers who sold them under their own labels. When it began to thrive, he dropped out of King’s College London, where he was studying French (“It was completely irrelevant,” he says, with a laugh). The success of his company allowed him to fund small art shows, at which he exhibited his own paintings and sculptures.
By 2013, he says, the company was “eating at my soul.” He began to think about a project with a closer relationship between creativity and business, and Bruta was born. It began with a small fall/winter 2015 offering of shirts and pots that was picked up by a handful of boutiques — including H Lorenzo in Los Angeles, Idea by Sosu in Tokyo and Celestine Eleven in London. Now follows the new spring collection: “This season is almost our real launch, where we actually considered it and took meetings, and all that kind of stuff,” he says. Yates tends to talk about his work as though it has happened almost by accident.
The reality is that Bruta is an unusual, striking concept: two distinct products, the shirts and the pots, adorned with pastoral imagery in a warm palette. Dreamy silhouettes of leaves, flowers and stars are scattered across the work; the first collection was entitled “Go Gauguin Go,” while the second is called “Gaucho Zambo.” “When I was younger I stayed on a farm in Argentina and I met all the gauchos,” Yates says. “When I was out there, they were all being shifted off their pampas, because a big corporation was buying out all their land. So it was quite sad seeing that culture dying, and I was paying an homage to that. The Gauguin was a similar thing, because his whole idea of being in Tahiti was this idea of a paradise lost.”
Yates hand-draws the designs, then has them embroidered or appliquéd onto the shirts, which are all made of a very soft viscose. “I just wanted to keep it really focused on quite a strong, simple idea at the beginning, so it’s just one base, one fabric,” he says. For future seasons, he plans to introduce cottons and silks, but the range will continue to be unisex — though he is typically nonchalant about that decision. “It wasn’t a big conceptual idea; it was just quite organic. I know that sometimes when Phoebe wears something, I want to wear it — and vice versa.” (His girlfriend, Phoebe Saatchi, the daughter of the British businessman Charles Saatchi, often works alongside him.)
Yates sources the milk urns from farms around the UK and paints them himself; he enjoys the contrast between their tough, industrial shape and their gentle purpose of carrying milk. “I like playing with that balance between the really strong, and then something quite soft and romantic,” he says. No two of the pots are the same. “That’s something that’s always excited me: that no one else in the world can have it, that it’s just these one-off pieces.”
If there is a magic ingredient to Bruta, it may be Yates’s lighthearted, uncomplicated approach to his work. “It’s not necessarily fine art,” he says. “It’s something that’s a little bit more decorative and a little bit more playful. I do think it’s important that people take fashion and these brands with a pinch of salt. They are frivolous — but then I don’t think there’s anything wrong with frivolity, you know? That’s all part of life.”