Go Bold in Love

When the romantic lyrics of 18th-century Scottish poet Robert Burns get interpreted by the cheeky punk-rock designer Johnson Hartig, for international Schumacher fabrics, then shipped to the Mid-Atlas mountains of Morocco for Arabic-speaking women to embellish these Scottish couplets with their century-old embroidery, and back to the States to premier on the Ibu runway, you've got… love gone wild.

Sometimes you need an irreverent riff on a classic to catch the freshness that was there all along. I'm crazy about this neon tribute to a traditional heart song. Love gone bold.

Johnson Hartig's designs for the fashion line Libertine possess the same witty, exhilarating genius, often riffing on traditional themes but exploding them into something utterly new—and always fun. This is exactly what Ibu strives to do in conversation with our artisans partners who carry the poetry of their culture in needle and thread. How to find the soul deep in ancient languages of cloth—and let it sing in a new key?  

Here, the tiny buttons down the front of the jacket, handmade by women in Sefrou, Morocco, are punctuation in a fearless poem; the strong border contains all of this ardor. The writing of women in thread is writing nonetheless—whether a chromatic composition or an essay in the textures of life. I look at these utterly unique, limited drop jackets and see a poetry slam, a world in exclamation. Love gone global.

Clockwise from top left: Robert Burns fabric by Schumacher; Chelsea Rampersant and Eddie Irions shine on the Ibu Runway in Robert Burns head wrap and jacket; new Ibu Moroccan jacket; Susan with Julia Millay Walsh, Senior Director of Sales Marketing at F. Schumacher, at the debut of Schumacher X Ibu curtain collaboration in Charleston, SC.

Here's to summer's revelry, to creative combustion, unfettered poetry on the loose. For all of us, here's to love gone lion-hearted.

All the best,
SHW