Marfa Stance Designer Georgia Dant Wants Customers to Get Crafting

It’s a 21st-century quandary, and British designer Georgia Dant may be close to solving it. How to fuel a fashion brand — season after season — without making or wasting so much stuff?

Dant set the bar high when she founded Marfa Stance, a brand known for its colorful, reversible coats and detachable collars, hoods, linings and vests, all made of materials sourced from leftover luxury fabrics.

She also wanted to unlock customers’ creativity and urge them to create their own looks by buttoning different colored, textured bits onto Marfa’s quilted jackets, which are meant to be seasonless and last for years.

“The reason I went with buttons, rather than snaps or zips, is that you learn to create,” says Dant, a new mother, in an interview from her London studio, where her baby is cooing in the background.

“It takes time to button, you have to think about it, slow down and use your hands. It’s more artisanal — and quite analogue,” she adds.

Since she launched the brand in 2019 there have been furry fuchsia collars, an aviator style with a single snazzy stripe underneath and shearling ones with Zsa Zsa Gabor flair.

Dant has also reworked leftover cashmere, wool and shearling into the hoods, linings and vests. They also attach, via a set of sturdy buttons, to Marfa’s reversible parkas, bombers, coats and jackets.

The color and texture of the add-ons change each season, depending on what’s left over from Dant’s Italian factories, which produce for luxury brands including Loro Piana, Loewe and Saint Laurent.

The jackets’ signature parachute quilting is made of sustainable, recycled or surplus material.

The lightweight quilted coats and jackets come in a delectable range of shades including buttermilk, pale pink, clementine, chocolate and sage and — not surprisingly — have been replicated on high streets everywhere, but without the detachable accessories.

Pricing is luxury, with a quilted parka costing around 1,200 pounds, and the cropped quilted jacket 700 pounds. Depending on the materials, hoods and collars range from around 300 pounds to 500 pounds.

Whatever the price, customers can’t get enough of the colorful designs, or Marfa’s build-a-bear style approach.

Rachel Carvell-Spedding, founder of the British knitwear brand Navygrey, has taken part in trunk shows and pop-ups with Dant, and said that customers love the Marfa Stance story as much as they do the coats.

“They find Marfa different — and exciting. These are customers who want to invest, but in the right way. And it’s not just the style they are buying, but the expertise,” she says. “The Marfa team knows that product inside out.”

Before launching Marfa, Dant spent much of her career in fashion, mainly in the Burberry menswear studio when Christopher Bailey was at the creative helm, and at Rag & Bone, where she worked on menswear, womenswear and soft accessories.

She had cycled through a dizzying number of seasons and knew all too well about fashion’s churn and the waste involved in making and marketing multiple collections a year.

“I felt a little bit disillusioned by the system, which is broken. As a designer, you put so much in to what you do, and you want it to be meaningful,” she says.

With the seed of Marfa Stance already in her mind, Dant “stepped off the carousel, and took the time to go to the factories, develop and test product. I wanted to discover what was important to me, and not be influenced by somebody else. I wanted to have a very pure vision,” she says.

She also set out to create outdoorsy clothing that could straddle country and city life. She wanted something that wasn’t too fashion-y that would date after a few seasons, or anything that was too plain or functional.

Dant had even more ambitions. She wanted to come up with a “system” that would allow her “to do more with less. I thought to myself, ‘How do you create that?’ It wasn’t easy,” Dant says.

Her modular system was a hit and today most of her business is in the U.S., and her private investors are mainly based there. She has a store in the U.S., on East 67th Street and Madison Avenue in Manhattan, and did a pop-up in TriBeCa at the end of last year.

The brand also has a stand-alone store on Ledbury Road in Notting Hill, London, and sells direct-to-consumer and through select retailers. They include Biffi in Italy, Lane Crawford and I.T. in Hong Kong and Beams in Tokyo. Marfa Stance has five points of sale in Seoul, where business is booming.

She says the name Marfa Stance reflects the duality of the brand, which is part-creative, part-value driven.

Marfa is the name of the small desert city in west Texas that’s home to The Chinati Foundation, founded by artist Donald Judd on an old U.S. Army base.

The place is filled with Judd’s large-scale, minimalist works and those of other artists including Dan Flavin. The light is magical, and the town has become a pilgrimage site for art lovers.

“What I was really struck by in [the town of] Marfa was the sense of community and creativity and the very purest vision of Donald Judd when he originally went there in the 1970s. I loved that spirit of doing things differently. He did things his own way, and created a movement for other people,” she says.

The word stance doesn’t have as poetic an origin, but for Dant it’s powerful. “I’m wanting to, quite literally, take a stance in this industry. If Marfa represents the creativity, the community, the soul, then stance represents the sense of responsibility, sustainability and our mission.”

That name has become Dant’s day-to-day inspiration.

In 2022, Marfa Stance collaborated with Gee’s Bend, the group of quilters who live and work in Gee’s Bend, Ala., along the Alabama River, who are carrying on the historic work of their enslaved ancestors on the cotton plantation that belonged to Joseph Gee.    

The Marfa Stance x Gee’s Bend collection featured oversize reversible, hand-quilted blankets and jackets with hand-quilted panel inserts.

Thirty-eight artisans, ages 19 to 86, came together to work on the project, with two quilters or more per item, and each piece took more than a week to make. 

The project was close to Dant’s heart. She just loves the idea of quilting. “It’s where art meets survival,” she says.

Dant gave the artisans luxury fabrics, including cashmeres, wools and fly-weight nylons left over from Marfa Stance production in Italy, which they combined with their own found fabric.

All of the proceeds from sales went back to the Gee’s Bend quilters, part of Marfa Stance’s wider charity and impact work.

Marfa’s most recent collaboration is with the multidisciplinary artist Mickalene Thomas, whom Dant recently met at the Frieze art fair in Los Angeles, and who helped reimagine the Marfa Stance raincoat and rain hood using surplus materials from Dant’s arsenal.

The collection has been produced in a limited-run of 50 coats, and proceeds from the sales are going to the L.A. Arts Community Fire Relief Fund, one of the charities the brand is supporting this year.

Going forward, Dant says her dream is to collaborate with the Judd Foundation. In the meantime she’s cooking up other ideas — for knitwear, accessories, home and ski.

For the latter, she envisions creating a single coat with a variety of attachments and layers that could work on and off the slopes — solving yet another 21st-century fashion conundrum.