Toby Clark is a environmental fashion designer and founder of ‘Toby etc.‘ – a design & branding company with a reputation for creating niche brands, centred in nature. 

An Ambassador for the Campaign For Wool, Toby focuses his interests on sustainable, natural and renewable materials that work in harmony with nature’s ecosystem. 

A founder of the Toby Clark label, co-founder of Blackhorse Lane Ateliers and Heartfelt Repairs Co., Toby is widely experienced in the fashion & textiles industry. His design methodology guiding influential clothing brands. Particularly, his decade of design for Margaret Howell received three nominations for ‘Menswear Designer Of The Year’ at the BFC’s British Fashion Awards.

A proven specialist in menswear – with a reputation for crafting authentic products and original future thinking brand concepts – Toby’s intuitive, evolutional approach, helps to grow loyal consumers.

Throughout his career, Toby’s felt a deep affinity with natural materials, particularly wool. Having learnt to hand-knit aged 8, under his NZ mother’s tuition, this early fascination with transformative textiles, prompted a career in fashion. After graduating from the Royal College Of Art in London, he started his own clothing label, becoming – Welsh Fashion Designer of The Year – at the Welsh Fashion Awards, held at the Savoy Hotel, London. His launch collection sold exclusively to Barneys New York, Browns Of London, Saks Fifth Avenue and Anglobal of Japan – being selected by the International Wool Secretariat for a showcase at Premiere Vision in Paris.

In recent years Toby renewed his love for wool, becoming an Ambassador for the Campaign For Wool NZ.  The CFW is a not-for-profit organisation with global reach, initiated by its patron HM King Charles III.

Toby is a co-founder of Heartfelt Repairs Co. a start up brand, with a mission to channel creativity in repair through user empowerment, to reduce the amount of clothing ending up in toxic landfills.

As a gentle activist of environmental causes, Toby favours brands with an authentic ecological purpose and who respect nature and our planet’s finite resources. Particularly brands adopting a new approach to consumerism by intentionally reducing consumption, implementing regrowth strategies and using high value circular materials from biowaste.

During the Covid-19 pandemic, Toby felt a strong personal resistance to the fashion industry and its insatiable demand for creating new products in new textile materials.  To emphasise his aversion, Toby adopted a radical approach, wearing the – Same Clothes Everyday – for 467 days. Washing the items in rain water and drying them with the sun’s solar energy. Wearing this single set of clothing, aimed to offset the negative impact Toby had personally created as a designer, estimated to be in the region of 500,000 products manufactured between 1990 to 2017,  and which contributed to a plethora of clothing the world’s consumers did not necessarily need, but rather desired as luxury items.  His Same Clothes Everyday manifesto was admired by world renowned Trend forecaster Lidewij Edelkoort who invited Toby to be a guest speaker for the World Hope Forum. 

To underline his design philosophy, Toby has written articles for academia, authoring ‘The Provenance Of Fashion’ published by Bloomsbury. This featured the important concept of certifiable transparency within the supply-chain, using Blockchain technology to trace each transitional process.  As conceived by Jessi Baker the founder of Provenance.org

While an art student in Bournemouth Toby’s written thesis on ‘Uniforms’ turned into a collaboration with fellow art student Wolfgang Tillmans. Tillmans is considered a world renowned, Turner Prize artist.  A part of this collaboration on Uniforms has sold through Sothebys to private collectors.

Having established a career as a clothing designer and brand consultant, Toby continues to work within sustainable and ethical parameters, seeking to preserve the natural balance of our eco-system and aiming to bring city dwellers closer to nature.

To review a fuller background of Toby’s career, please click on the Biography section.

A company profile and curriculum vitae is available on request.

~~~

“I think of myself as a Beta, Zeta, Omega sort of male and an arbiter of beautifully crafted objects. I guess a fashion philosopher of sorts.

Guided by the finest natural materials, I create honest functional design products that are quality driven, embracing the notion of extreme comfort, as well as being in harmony with nature.  I also carefully examine the potential design engineering fault-lines to seek solutions.

My career has tended to be entrepreneurial, developing original concepts for niche brands. I resonate with brands who embed a sense of purpose into their design discipline and that provides an important motivation for their brand existence. I admire creators of beautifully crafted products that are human-centered, with a direct correlation to the end-user’s sense of satisfaction and consideration for our planet. 

My design approach is quite purist. Starting by quietly observing the inner culture of a brand organisation. I seek to contribute meaningful creative solutions, which do not attempt to reinvent the wheel. I believe the simpler and more harmonious the design, the better it will be. The antithesis of Sisyphus labouring over his hill boulder.

I prefer to focus on the social benefits that good design can bring to the end user, rather than the profitable gain for shareholders. I help and mentor young designers starting their own brands and who share a desire to create an environmentally sound footprint. 

I value authenticity and integrity over imitation. I feel attracted to people who possess a natural, incidental style, rather than those who seek to draw attention to themselves or chase consumer trends. I resist technology that seeks to replicate human attributes and I feel a great aversion to the A.I. world of human avatars, seem destined to infiltrate our future society. Soulmachines is not a cool company.

I endorse holistic design-thinking. During the design creation phase I consider the environmental impact and social responsibility within the supply chain and strive to reduce the need to discard or throwaway clothing & textile products. I do this by creating timeless products that are quality driven and encourage their frequent use and lifetime repair. I personally enjoy repeatedly wearing the same set of clothes until they physically wear out. I believe it puts less stress on the planet. I also find the process of identifying fault-lines through repetitive wear incredibly informative as a designer.

My principal desire is to help bring progressive change to the fashion industry. I share the overriding concerns about global supply chains that often conceal how and where goods are made. The willing instigators of such practises, often adopt a blind moral code, and fail to consider the impact either on our planet, or how the garment workers are treated within the manufacturing process.  I hope to bring behavioural change to consumers who view consumption of new materials as an anti depressive. This sadly leads to the emergence of throwaway fashion, with huge volumes of clothing textiles dumped in bins and landfills, leeching toxic chemicals into the soil and water table in faraway continents. 

Am passionate about ‘localism’ in business models and concepts that directly connect people to their home place. I consider this a type of urban activism that subdues the reliance on the aviation industry and benefits our wider social wellbeing. 

I take inspiration from many different aspects of our living world and am fascinated by New Zealand’s tuataras. These fascinating creatures are the only living species on earth to have survived, when the dinosaurs died out. Born with a third eye for extra periphery vision, the ability to hear without external ears and hearts that beat just once per minute, they remain our planet’s greatest survivors. While the dinosaurs once dominated the landscape, demanding all of the attention with their sheer size, they did not possess the tuataras clever evolutionary ability to adapt, especially to climate change. A lesson we can all try to learn as climate change is now upon us. “