Argyle and Oxford S/S'14: Eat it Up! It’s Healthy

Fashion and food are oft thought of as two mutually exclusive entities, but with the recent debut of Argyle and Oxford’s latest spring/summer collection, “Eat it up! It’s Healthy”, that old canard may be set to change.

Carrying on from and contrasting with the first part (“These are a few of my favourite foods”: think basic, block colour knits, emblazoned with an embroidered array of ambrosial delights from French fries, to fried eggs) of their four-part preceding collection (“Anniversaries” – named so to mark the label’s second birthday), Argyle and Oxford have cooked up a sartorial smorgasbord founded on structured, directional silhouettes, and framed with understated and artful fruit motifs.

Inspired by the proliferation of salubrious snacking and lifestyle trends, “Eat it up! It’s Healthy” offers the wearer a fun, light-hearted selection of looks and gives them license to look at their diet as a creative stimulus and a reflection of the self, as well as a source of nourishment.

Based in the Indonesian capital city, Jakarta, and founded in 2010 – by “twisted mind[ed]” designers Velda Anabela and Rebecca Billina – Argyle and Oxford evoke the kind of quirkiness, whimsy and folly most commonly connoted with the British Isles; this is something that, undoubtedly, stems from Anabela and Billina’s choice of brand name (an homage to the “traditional [Scottish] knit pattern” and those “classic English brogues”) but, then, goes much further – permeating through the very fibre of what Argyle and Oxford do, aim to do and are about.

Argyle and Oxford dedicate their collections to “anyone who needs a little fun in their wardrobe”; and with “Eat it up!! It’s Healthy” they go beyond that, creating a collection not only for those whose wardrobes are crying out for an injection of levity – nor for those wanting to assimilate some latter-day British quirk – but for those looking for an alternative spin on that old adage, “you are what you eat”.

Tara Okeke

For more information, check out the Argyle and Oxford website.