East Meets West with the Tracksmith and Taylor Stitch Collaboration

Feb 4, 2021 12:30 pm

taylor stitch x tracksmith february 2021 — Photo Credit: Courtesy of Tracksmith x Taylor Stitch

We’ve written about a lot of great fashion collaborations recently, but rarely is there a partnership that seems as perfectly tailored to our interests as the just-announced collection between Boston’s Tracksmith and San Francisco’s Taylor Stitch. At their respective cores, both brands are highly focused on creating clothing that feels equipped to take on our modern era. For Tracksmith, that’s the brutal conditions that can come with running, while for Taylor Stitch, it’s about creating sustainable and stylish clothing for men that can last for decades.

What happens when you put the brands two together? The result is equal parts practical and exciting.

Lazy loaded image — Tracksmith x Taylor Stitch

The six-piece menswear collaboration feels like a true execution of the best of both worlds. Pared down to a series of essential silhouettes from Taylor Stitch — long and short-sleeve tees, a henley, an overshirt, a bomber, and a short — the collection iss bolstered by the high-performance technical fabrics you’d find in every piece of running gear from Tracksmith. That means the cotton pocket tee from Taylor Stitch is now a merino-wool tee that’s capable of being worn under a sportcoat for date night, while also wicking away moisture from your body as you work to crush a new personal record running around your neighborhood. A standard overshirt is now both wind and water-repellent, with plenty of stretch for you to toss over a jacket should the weather get too breezy or it starts raining.

The technical nature of each piece allows for a harmonious relationship between performance and swagger, making it feel like a collaboration that’s representative of how men move through the world today. It’s classics you know and love, capable of handling a diverse array of situations — all while making sure you look and (literally) feel as cool as possible.

Like a lot of their other products, the collection will be offered as part of Taylor Stitch’s Workshop program, which functions as a crowd-funding platform (sort of like their own branded Kickstarter) for new products. This will help to ensure the collection doesn’t evaporate in seconds (since you’re pre-ordering each piece) while actively funding production costs. As an added bonus, you’ll be able to get a bit of a discount upfront for early support. When collection feels this well-considered, this well-thought-out, and this well-executed, we’d likely buy it at any price. The discount feels like an added cherry on top. The collection will be available on the Workshop for four weeks ahead of a wide release in May 2021.

As mentioned above, collaborations like this are the big thing in the fashion world right now. Yet this is one collaboration we’re actually excited about. The key to any good collaboration clothing ilne is making it seem like it’s seamless. That’s a difficult line to toe, but a collaboration like Tracksmith and Taylor Stitch executes it so perfectly that it feels like an afterthought. That’s not to diminish the considerable thought and time that went into the process but to say that it’s just a perfect execution of two brands that just get one another in a meaningful way. We can only hope it’s the beginning of a beautiful friendship.