Meet The British Knitwear Brand Beloved by Tilda Swinton, Alexa Chung, and Chloë Sevigny

Reported by Harper's Bazaar.

When Cassie Holland spotted "Tilda Swinton" in her order queue in 2024, she did what any reasonable person would do: had a small heart attack, then cold-emailed an icon. Swinton wrote back. The result was a collaboration between the actress and Hades — Holland's Birmingham-founded, Scotland-manufactured knitwear brand — that has now produced two capsules and shows no signs of stopping.

The second collection, Notes from the Precipice, is the more charged of the two. According to Harper's Bazaar, it draws from Swinton's 2025 Berlinale speech — in which she called out "greed-addicted governments, planet-wreckers, and war criminals" — and her poem Notes For Radical Living, handwritten and screen-printed directly onto knit skirts and dresses. The aphorism "make friends with chaos" runs across sweater chests and knit bags. As Holland puts it, Swinton built these phrases as "a tonic for these times" — and on knitwear, somehow, that lands without feeling preachy.

Band Merch for Women Who Actually Have a Waist

Hades was built on a very specific frustration: Holland, a lifelong music obsessive, couldn't find band merchandise that fit well. New band tees were unflattering; the good vintage ones were impossible to find. So in 2016, just after her 30th birthday and freshly fed up with a desk job, she cold-called a small manufacturer in Hawick, Scotland — the same one she still works with today — and reached out to four bands: Sonic Youth, Patti Smith, The Slits, and The Smiths. Alexa Chung wore that blue Smiths sweater to Glastonbury that same year. A Liberty buyer came calling shortly after. Holland quit her job.

The brand has since expanded into deadstock cotton skirts, screen-printed dresses (one features a faux iron burn; another, a John Hinde photograph of the Scottish countryside), and their sculptural "Carrington" cardigan fitted with novelty buttons — Greek mythology emblems, ceramic cigarettes — all molded in-house. A leather handbag, made in the Midlands and finished with a screen-printed panel, arrives later this year. Celebrity customers now include Chloë Sevigny and Lena Dunham alongside Chung. The band programme runs annually — Joni Mitchell last year, David Bowie the year before — and consistently sells out.

Holland and her co-founder sister Isabel have no formal fashion training, no outside investment, and no interest in scaling up. Staying small, Holland argues, is precisely what allows Hades to be strange and specific in the way its customers love. The brand's entire appeal lives in that constraint.

If "make friends with chaos" on a hand-knit sweater made by a Tilda Swinton collaborator in Scotland doesn't count as a conversation piece, nothing does.

Read the original at Harper's Bazaar.