The lift has been broken since February and the building is a former print works with windows that do not close properly. On the second floor, six independent labels share 340 square metres, two industrial machines, one overlocker that everybody complains about, and a kettle. Between them they put four collections onto London runways this season.
What sharing actually saves
The obvious saving is rent, which none of them could carry alone. The larger and less obvious saving is equipment and knowledge. A machine that one label needs for six days a year is unaffordable individually and trivial between six. More valuable still is that when something goes wrong at eleven at night there are usually two other people in the building who have already had that exact problem.
There is a real cost to it and everyone named the same one: you cannot keep a secret. Six designers in one room see each other's collections months early, and while nobody we spoke to had ever had an idea stolen, several described the low-grade anxiety of watching somebody else arrive at the same solution independently — which, in a shared room, happens more than it should.
“On my own I would have folded in year two. In here I just walked across the room and asked.”
A designer in her fifth season
Why it keeps happening in Hackney
This model has been quietly rebuilding London's independent scene for a decade, and it exists because the alternative does not. Studio rents in the centre are gone, and the wholesale infrastructure that used to support small labels has largely disappeared. What remains is a set of buildings in the east where enough people can each afford a sixth of something.
Insurance turns out to be the hidden glue. Cover for a shared industrial space is far cheaper per label than six separate policies, and two of the six told us it was the single line item that made the arrangement viable. It is an unromantic detail, and it is the reason this model spreads while artist-studio versions of it collapse.
The building itself is the risk
Every arrangement like this sits on a lease that somebody else controls. The print works has planning permission pending on the upper floors, which the tenants learned about from a notice on the door rather than from the landlord. Nobody we spoke to had a lease longer than eighteen months, and two were on rolling monthly terms — which keeps them flexible and means the whole floor could be given notice inside a quarter.
This is the part that makes the model fragile in a way the shared machinery is not. Equipment can move. What cannot move easily is the specific arrangement of six businesses who have learned to work around each other, and rebuilding that in a new building takes a year or more. Three of the six said that if the floor closed they would probably not restart the arrangement elsewhere, and would simply be smaller.
Ask any of the six what they would want from a funder and none of them says money for a show. They say a longer lease. The single most useful intervention available to anybody who wants to support independent design in this city is not a grant or a platform or a prize — it is five years of security on a floor of a building, which is unglamorous, entirely unphotogenic and would change everything.
One of the six has now grown enough to need its own space and is leaving in the spring. Everyone we spoke to described this as unambiguously good news and slightly regrettable, in the same sentence, which is about right.
