Collection 2

Heron’s Ghyll Collection 2 moodboard. Image credits (clockwise from left): J.Crew 1988 via @lostjcrew; Kyôhei Shibata as Yuji Oshita; Perry Ellis; Robert Tyler; Pretty Woman (1990); Barry Lategan for GQ1982 via @thesimplicityman; Brooks Brothers via @maisonhomme__; Bob Dylan; Tom Wolfe in 1988 via Getty Images. Images are used under the fair use doctrine and remain the copyright of their respective owners.

Memory has a way of distorting clarity, softening what was once sharp. Polka dots, stripes—those sartorial codes of country club lawns and pressed collars—are now faded, like the ink of a postcard long forgotten in a drawer. In the 1980s, these patterns were semiotic markers, a visual shorthand for privilege and polish, where the irony lay in the fact that the punchline was capitalism itself, cloaked in the armor of a power suit. Collection 2 pulls these motifs from their historical moorings, reconfiguring them in the Meridian Suit—a reflection of the quiet disintegration of context. Here, power doesn’t rest in padded shoulders, but in the subtlety of defamiliarization.

Perhaps it was our rediscovery of Bonfire of the Vanities, a novel that felt both satirical and prescient. Or perhaps it’s the present—laden with existential fatigue, where the threat of a viral miasma feels too heavy to bear. It's partly nostalgia and partly a buffer, a way to soften the harsh contours of the now. In this, a polka dot becomes more than a pattern; it is a talisman of lightness, a response to the burdens of our time, much as it was in the 80s, a decade underpinned by irreverence. Today, amid the unrelenting Sturm und Drang, we choose frivolity—not as an escape, but as a quiet refusal to meet gravity with gravity. We wear the lightness of the past as a gentle protest.

We made a mixtape, too—yacht rock, natch—because sometimes levity is the most serious response of all.