Studio Nicholson: Clothes, Not Fashion
Nick Wakeman has one sentence she returns to whenever anyone asks what Studio Nicholson is about: she designs clothing, not fashion. She means it literally. There is no interest in trend cycles here, no seasonal gimmick to chase — just fabric, cut, and a silhouette refined until it earns its place in a wardrobe that has to work for years, not one season.
East London, 2010
Wakeman studied Textile Design at Chelsea College of Art before spending decades inside the industry, and founded Studio Nicholson in 2010 out of east London with that experience already fully formed. The label wasn't a young designer's first idea — it was a considered response to everything she'd already seen go wrong in fashion: too much noise, too little permanence.
The name is her maternal grandmother's, a woman she has described as formidable and impeccably dressed. The founding idea was equally personal: Wakeman had spent years buying men's jeans, shirts and jackets and having them altered to fit her, and built the first collection around doing that properly.
The approach shows in the process. A single garment goes through four or five fitting sessions before it's finished, checked and rechecked until the volume, the drape, and the proportion sit exactly where they should. Colour is treated as a rare event rather than a default — the collections live mostly in stone, ink, ecru and black, with fabric doing the work that print or colour might do elsewhere. Roughly a fifth of the cloth comes from Japan and the rest from Italy, developed with the mills rather than chosen from a book.
A crush on old Japanese men
Ask Wakeman where the aesthetic actually comes from and she doesn't point to another designer. She points to elderly Japanese men — their gentleness, their unhurried way of wearing clothes that have clearly been worn for decades and only look better for it. That admiration runs through everything Studio Nicholson makes: the boxy denim, the sculptural outerwear, the volume that drapes rather than clings.
In 2023, the label opened its first Japanese store, in Tokyo's Aoyama district — a moment Wakeman has described as genuinely emotional, closing a loop that had shaped her design language for over a decade before the brand ever had a physical presence there.
The modular wardrobe
The organising idea has a name and a test. Wakeman's measure of a working wardrobe is whether you can get dressed in the dark — reach in, take out three things, and have them work together because the palette and the proportions were designed as a system rather than as separate garments.
That is why the signature cuts carry names instead of numbers, and why a second purchase is always easier than a first. It is also why the label has the customer loyalty it does: the system rewards staying in it.
Fifteen years in
Studio Nicholson marked its fifteenth anniversary with its Spring/Summer 2025 collection, still led by Wakeman, still resistant to trend, still built around the same question: will this still be worth wearing in a decade. For a house with no interest in fashion's usual clock, longevity isn't a marketing line. It's the entire design brief.
Buying it
Fit runs oversized by design in the outerwear and looser trousers — this is volume that's meant to be there, not a sizing error, so don't automatically size down. The fabrics are the whole investment: wool and cotton weights chosen for how they'll look worn in, not just worn once, so let pieces develop their own creasing and drape rather than fighting it with heavy pressing.
The trousers are the clearest entry point into the house's whole philosophy — precise cut, quiet fabric, no logo doing the work for you. Don't tumble dry the heavier cottons; the crop lengths are precise and the cloth will move.
At ANSH46
Studio Nicholson is the counterweight on our rail to everything louder around it — proof that restraint can be just as considered as maximalism. Our selection sits heavily in trousers, shirting and outerwear: the core of the system rather than the edges of it.
Browse Studio Nicholson at ANSH46, or see menswear trousers and all menswear.