Suit-up and Celebrate
Dashing Tweeds Celebrates 20 Years of Fabulous Fabrics
Textile design label Dashing Tweeds will celebrate twenty years since its founding this spring.
Dashing Tweeds creative director & co-founder Guy Hills in his boutique. Photographed in Marylebone, London on 16/3/26.
Clothes on display in the Dashing Tweeds boutique. Photographed in Marylebone, London on 16/3/26.
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The tweed design house will be honouring its momentous twentieth anniversary this spring. An upcoming collection will revisit the company's original work and adapt early designs in a variety of new colours to commemorate the occasion.
Dashing Tweeds was founded by woven textiles designer Kirsty McDougall and entrepreneurial fashion photographer Guy Hills (below) after they met at Kirsty's graduate showcase collection at The Royal College of Art. Since its establishment in 2006, the brand has become a staple of luxury British textiles. Their products are widely used by tailors on London's renowned Saville Row. They've collaborated with other clothing labels like Hudson, Nike, Converse and Fred Perry. Plus, their fabrics have been used to make costumes for movies like Mary Poppins Returns (2018) and the Kingsman film franchise.
Guy Hills wears a replica Mr Fish suit made from a Dashing Tweeds cloth, constructed by Alan Bennett. Photographed in Marylebone, London on 16/3/26.
I sat with Mr Hills in his Marylebone boutique to discuss these achievements, the anniversary of his label, and how his work has been inspired by the styles of the past.
Prior to his foray in fashion design, Hills was lead image-maker for The Saville Row Bespoke Association, a position which he says gave him 'carte blanche to go to every tailor on Saville Row and explore everything that they had'. He fondly recalls the experience as 'completely amazing' as he saw 'everything going back two-hundred-years,' obtaining 'a real education in the history of menswear'. This emersion in archival tailoring revealed for Hills a baffling common thread; the materials tailors had used in the past appeared much more colourful and expressive than those being used at the time. 'Where can I get these interesting fabrics?' he recalls asking his style-savvy interlocutors, and was told that such flamboyant cloths were simply no longer produced
like they once had been. Brimming with a desire to disrupt this drab status quo, Hills set up his first design studio with McDougall in Dalston, East London. The mission was to 'embrace something more exciting and joyful' by resurrecting the pulchritudinous patterns of old. Although Hills states, 'Dashing Tweeds, in my mind, wasn't a movement... I wasn't thinking to change the world', he does identify areas for improvement in the way people dress today:
I look out in the street, and everyone looks like they're off to funerals wearing black. People just need to cheer up; I don't think wearing black is very good for your mental health!
Indeed, providing a greater availability of colour in menswear is at the core of Dashing Tweeds' design ethos. 'It's important to give people more variety... it's really about not being constrained,' Hills says. To do this, the brand exclusively uses traditional production techniques. Their premium British merino wool is dyed in Ettrick, Scotland and hand woven onto wooden design looms to bring a desired pattern to life. However, not all the label's methods are purely ancient. Much like the adoption of modernity seen during The Peacock Revolution, Dashing Tweeds has embraced a deeply novel technique that injects a heritage cloth like tweed with the dynamism and functionality required for a fast-paced, urban environment. The centre of this innovation is their patented lumatwill: a truly unique tweed fabric that's threaded with strands of retro reflective yarn, allowing the resulting garment to glow upon contact with light. This lumatwill cloth has been used to create a range of cycle blazers (right) and other tailored sportswear, a truly original combination of form and functionality.
Guy Hills shows the reflective nature of lumatwill. Photographed in Marylebone, London on 16/3/26.
In the spirit of honouring the old and embracing the new, here's to twenty more years of fabulous fabrics!
Watch this clip to learn more about Dashing Tweeds' origins and recent designs:
