Arnar Már Jónsson’s Morphing Menswear Brings a New Kind of Function to Fashion

When Arnar Már Jónsson, Luke Stevens, and I met on a video chat, Jónsson had just come off three hours without electricity. “Typical North of Iceland!” he shrugged. The designer has spent the past couple of months in his homeland while Stevens, the brand’s co-creative director, has remained in London where they usually work together. The forced separation, the young menswear designers say, hasn’t upended their regular schedule that much, even with the occasional electricity outage. What has changed is the growing interest in the brand they started in 2017 as graduates of the Royal College of Art.

Founded on functional clothing for city or fjord, the label has gotten off to a quiet but successful start mostly through word of mouth. “In the beginning we weren’t too keen to expose what we were doing,” says Jónsson. “Also our stuff is quite technical so it took some time to develop the product properly, I think.” The pair don’t work from pre-existing garments or patterns; they prefer to upend the so-called rules of design with their own ideas of how sleeves should be set and seams should be laid, and where pockets should fall. “We had to be in the factories for the first few months because we had to show them how to make everything,” says Jónsson. “It was really our way of making clothes—but it’s not necessarily the normal way…. The way we approach our collections is that you’re ready for being in the city or being in nature. A lot of it is convertible so you can take a jacket off and turn it into a bag or reverse it so it has different properties.”

Photo: Courtesy of Arnar Már Jónsson

Their way of working, well, it works. This fall, the line will be stocked on MatchesFashion.com. For now, though, Stevens and Jónsson prefer to stay small. Their seasonal collections hover around 60-garments each and evolve on each other; new pieces literally fuse with old ones. “We build that into the techniques that we use, so we’ll carry stuff over. For example, the zipper pocket that we used on past garments—this time we introduced a secondary pocket to that, so you can take an old garment and you can attach a new accessory to it from a new collection,” Stevens explains. “We are always trying to make clothing that has a purpose and a use—we are never adding something into the collection purely for the sake of adding it or for an image.”

Photo: Courtesy of Arnar Már Jónsson

Instead, they prefer to think about “the sustainability of things, the longevity of things, and wanting to make things you can keep for a really long time.” “We do have a few principles in designing and the biggest one is longevity,” says Jónsson. With that in mind, the label’s seasonal palette tends to remain earthy and neutral and their zip-up shirts or semi-sheer anoraks spacious and forgiving. Pants come with zips at the calf to accommodate the change of weather or potential need to ford a river. (Jónsson says the latter is a regular occurrence in Iceland.) Most of the collection is made of overdyed Ventile, a performance fabric, which allows the pieces to work in all types of climates. To date, they estimate they have only really designed four categories—“a jacket, shirts, zip up tops, and trousers” Jónsson says. The tree sweater of spring 2021 is their first foray into knits.

Photo: Courtesy of Arnar Már Jónsson

Their dedication to consistency and sustainability aren’t the only reasons they are growing slowly. “It’s about money in the end,” says Jónsson. “I know as a consumer I can’t afford to buy something different when I get bored of it.” So they’ve designed clothes that can morph to meet new needs as they appear. It’s an exciting proposition for fashion’s hyper-saturated market: malleable garments made to last.