Merrell Hambleton

This story is from the forthcoming print issue of MOLD magazine, Design for a New Earth. Order your copy here. If you have spent time in the American South, you are probably familiar with kudzu (Pueraria montana), the perennial vine that creeps up and carpets over trees, telephone poles, underbrush and anything else it encounters, forming dense, ghostly landscapes.

When preparing for a trip to South Sudan last May, the American designer Sandra Zhao’s packing list was straightforward: “I wanted something I could shove in a backpack, that wouldn’t look like I’d just shoved it in a backpack.” Zhao, a New York City transplant, was living in Nairobi, where it’s fast and cheap to have clothes tailored, so she designed the dress she had in mind: resistant to wrinkling, airy enough for the equatorial sun and long enough (in sleeves and skirt) to be culturally...

“I always wore my father’s things,” says Margherita Cardelli, half of the duo behind a new Italian line, Giuliva Heritage Collection. When she met the lawyer and designer Gerardo Cavaliere, now her partner in business and life, the habit continued. “I started to steal from his wardrobe.” Cardelli, who consults on communications for brands like Alberta Ferretti and Moschino, saw an opportunity to create something new for women: an edited collection of outerwear based on quintessential men’s cuts.