As you can probably appreciate with a small business, work never stops from getting orders out from our website, to running pop up shops and appearing in a Pirelli calendar! Yes Uptown Yardie has cut its teeth on one of the most iconic publications and it was all through a chance encounter.
Earlier this year we were running a pop up shop in East London with a friend and great womenswear and jewellery designer Teah Wilson. One day when neither Rohan or myself were in the shop a stylist called Sharon Sylvester popped by and saw our shoes. She told Teah that she loved our shoes and left her details. To cut a long story short Sharon works with the new British Vogue editor Edward Enniful and wanted us to include our shoes in a major project. You can imagine our eyes popped out of our head and we had to stop ourselves doing a happy dance whilst she was still there. (side note) we did do a happy dance once she left our studio.
We were sworn to secrecy, in fact we had to sign a NDA and couldn't say anything until the calendar was launched officially last weekend. I'm sure we don't need to tell you how big this is, really really big. The Pirelli calendar in itself is a huge achievement, the fact that it was being photographed by Tim Walker and styled by Edward Enniful even more humongous! And if we could get even more humongousness (not sure that's a word but that's how it felt) it was an all black cast. The concept of Alice in Wonderland is magical and brilliantly captured by photographer Tim Walker. You can watch the making of it https://youtu.be/fhVmFMFyO7s