Built from mud.
Everything we make is built from mud. CORROPT is the wear. CHROMA is the colour. The mark between them is the wearer. Heavyweight cottons, garment-dyed in earth-grade tones, broken in before they leave the studio — the result of an unglamorous, deliberately slow process. Nothing here arrives pristine. It is not meant to.
- The wear.
- The body.
- The streets.
- The night.
- The grief.
- The guilt.
- The dying.
From the 13th-century Catalan word for “broken in.” The clothes are not pristine. They are not meant to be.
- The colour.
- The soul.
- The light.
- The morning.
- The joy.
- The innocence.
- The creating.
From the Greek root for colour, hue, saturation. Where light enters the body.
A boiler room and three hundred bad tees.
The first studio was a converted boiler room in Harare, hot through the dry season and unforgiving in the rains. We started with a screen printer borrowed from a friend's father and a single roll of unbleached jersey. The first run of tees — three hundred of them — were uniformly mediocre. So we tried again. And again.
The word “corropt” is older than its modern English cousin — a thirteenth-century Catalan word for “spoiled” or “broken in.” That second meaning is the one we use. The clothes are broken in before they leave the studio. They are not pristine, and they are not meant to be.
Total Limited Restock · Coal · 14ozWeight is a position.
We work in heavyweight cottons, compact jerseys, mercerized piqués, Japanese selvedge denim, Biellese merino. The fabrics are heavier than is fashionable. They drape with intent. They wrinkle correctly. They earn the cost of the garment back over the years they spend in your wardrobe.
Every textile arrives with a paper trail. We can tell you, for any garment we have ever sold, the name of the field its cotton grew on. If a piece is going to last a decade, the least it can do is know where it came from.
Slowly, then suddenly.
A piece takes between eleven months and three years from the first patternmaking sketch to the moment it ships. We do not work in seasons. We work in chapters. When a chapter closes, it stays closed — no restocks, with the rare exception of pieces we believe deserve a second life.
We do not advertise. We do not run sales. The way to buy something from us is to be on the list, to read the letter, and to show up the morning of the drop.
A short history, in five lines.
A studio in Harare
Two graphic designers begin printing tees in a converted boiler room. The first run is 40 pieces. None of them survive.
Built From Mud, vol. 1
The first complete collection drops on a single Sunday in November. The site crashes for forty-two minutes. The reputation does not.
Carbon passport
Every garment ships with a serialized provenance record — fibre origin, dyer, seamstress, kilometres travelled. We believed it would slow us down. It did the opposite.
Made-to-Order opens
Made-to-order tailoring opens above the Harare studio. The waiting list is five months. We do not advertise it.
Total Limited Restock — Link System
The current chapter. Heaviest fabrics we've ever cut. The clothes are intended to outlast the people who buy them.