Four dresses and four fine-gauge layers, folded in Leverkusen.
One dress, three winters
The idea behind this shop is a small wardrobe that survives a heating season. A dress bought in October has to work under a coat in December, over a layer in February and on its own in April, which is a question of cut rather than of styling. The four dresses here are cut with a defined waist and enough room through the sleeve to take a fine knit underneath without the shoulder line rising. A dress that pulls across the seat when it is sat in, or that rides up when a pram is pushed uphill, does not stay in the wardrobe long enough to be worth making. Nothing is listed here until it has been worn through a working week.
Fine gauge, measured twice
The four tops are the technical half of the shop. A layer is only useful if it stays flat under a sleeve, and most knitwear quietly grows: half a centimetre at the cuff, a centimetre at the elbow, and by the end of the day the dress over it sits wrong at the shoulder. So every knit here is measured flat before it is approved and measured again after two washes, and anything that has grown is dropped. Rib at the cuff is knitted in rather than attached, which is the difference between a cuff that returns to shape after a wash and one that stays stretched at the wrist for the rest of its life.
Velvet, brushed one way
Velvet and plaid are the two fabrics on this rail that punish a rushed cut. Velvet pile has a direction: cut two panels in opposite directions and the front of a dress will carry a visible seam where the light changes, no matter how carefully the seams are pressed. So velvet is brushed in one direction before cutting and panels are cut from the same run. Plaid has the same problem in two dimensions, and here it is matched across the centre front as well as at the side seam, which uses more cloth than most factories would accept. It is also the reason a plaid dress looks calm from across a room.
The name on the label
Orders leave under the name of the business that operates this shop: STEFAN PAUL JAHNKE. That name appears on the site, the invoice and the label, and no separate fashion house has been invented to stand in front of it. The advantage of that is straightforward: the people who answer the email are the people who chose the velvet, so a question about whether a cowl neck sits flat under a coat is answered from having tried it rather than from a script. Parcels are folded flat and shallow, because a crease set into a velvet panel for a week in transit is still there in the first photograph a customer takes.
