When Charlie Constantinou & 66°North Combine, Artisanal Arctic Gear Emerges (EXCLUSIVE)
For Charlie Constantinou, a leading voice in a new crop of designers pushing the boundaries of technical wear, collaborating with 66°North promised an opportunity to reimagine the brand's vast archives of outdoor gear. But adventures in the often harsh and enthralling environments of 66°North’s homeland? That’s something he couldn’t have bargained for.
“Every time I have gone out of Reykjavik (the capital of Iceland, where 66°North is based) and explored, it's been one really extreme location after another,” says Constantinou, dialing into our video call from his North London garden.
“We shot our first campaign in a volcanic crater, and then we went into geothermal lands where it's constantly pumping out steam and really high temperatures from below. But most amazing for me was when we shot our second campaign on top of a glacier in a cave made of ice… you’d think it was CGI or set design from how unreal it looked.”
A small island sandwiched between the Greenland Sea and the North Atlantic Ocean, Iceland’s landscape is scattered with the type of cinematic scenery you have to see to believe. However, for all its awe-inspiring views, Iceland's weather is a difficult beast to combat.
In the winter, polar nights mean the sun barely rises above the horizon. And while the sun never fully sets in the summer, the average temperature is around 50°F (that is 10°C for my fellow Europeans) and very unpredictable — “I noticed how sudden conditions can change. You can go from clear sunny skies to 40-mile-an-hour winds within 10 minutes,” says Constantinou.
Creating hard-wearing, functional gear that’s up to the challenge of Iceland’s extreme climate has been 66°North’s remit for almost a hundred years. Now, by way of a continued collaboration, it has also become Charlie Constantinou’s.
The exciting young designer and well-established outdoor label are embarking on their second collection together, building on their summer-focused debut range with more warmth-providing winter wear that will be released on October 23.
Delivering essential styles of outdoorsy clothing — a puffer jacket, weather-resistant lightweight layers, adjustable shell pants, etc. — the collection has a strong focus on adjustability with silhouette-changing zips, panels, and toggles peppered around every item.
“Sometimes we have all four seasons within the same day in Iceland. The guys did a great job in working with drawstrings in this collection, they play a practical role because we get rain from all directions and you need to adjust your jacket and the hood and so on,” says Helgi Óskarsson, CEO of 66°North, joining the video call with Constantinou. “There are all kinds of small details that may look like they’re just there for a cool factor, but they actually have a practical use.”
While being more heavily engineered than Constantinou’s experimental-leaning mainline, his typically inventive perspective on function-focused clothing shines through in this collaboration — hence why pieces from the 66°North collection slotted effortlessly into his debut London Fashion Week show (a runway cameo that was not contractually obliged but entirely dreamed-up by Constantinou, it must be noted).
The relationship between Constantinou’s usual fashion-oriented output and this collaboration created for Iceland’s Arctic conditions is most clearly presented in its standout, the Signature Quilt Jacket using Constantinou’s trademark quilting technique and 66°North technical materials — “That was a bit of a challenge for us but eventually we figured out how to produce it. I'm extremely proud of that jacket specifically,” comments Óskarsson.
Why this jacket would be difficult to produce is obvious at first glance: dotted with tiny down-filled pillows of varying sizes, it has an unorthodox construction designed to be expandable. Plus, manipulated into this scrunched-up texture is a fabric that’s undergone a four-day-long mineral dye process using clay, rocks, and other naturally found materials to create its playful, cloud-like blue and purple finish.
Putting lab-tested, cutting-edge fabrics through an artisanal, natural dye process is a paradoxical blend of the hi-tech and the handmade, an approach that extends beyond the quilted jacket: the Dyed Shell Jacket and Dyed Reflective Parka (returning styles from their first collection) are hand-dyed by Constantinou himself, giving each item a unique finish.
Dyeing of this kind is central to Constantinou's work, the designer exclusively uses upcycled materials and dyes them for his desired finish. It’s something he’s done since he was a student —a product of limited resources — and extends into this collaboration utilizing pre-existing 66°North fabric.
In essence, the techniques and styles that have made 26-year-old Constantinou a much-lauded young designer are largely translated into this upcycled, hand-dyed, and inventively quilted collection.
It’s an unfiltered expression of the strong technical elements that distinguish his creations, informed by 66°North’s outdoor expertise.
“While we are a London-based brand that shows at Fashion Week, we're also very much people who want to be outdoors and away from the city,” says Constantinou. “Being able to go from one world to another is very much the basis of the brand.”
