Ho Chi Minh City · Menswear · Est. 2026
Long trousers. A low heel.
That is the whole of the dress code at the two riding clubs on Tam Đa street. Morela is being built for the rest of it.
The street
Two gates, one hundred metres.
Tam Đa street runs through Thủ Đức, on the eastern edge of Ho Chi Minh City, about fifteen kilometres from District 1. Two riding clubs stand on it, a hundred metres apart. The walk between them takes two minutes.
Workshop note · 4 September
No garment of ours has been worn on this street yet. Every measurement the house takes is taken against it. When that changes this note comes down.
The cloth
The tones, and one the man never wears.
Each colour is measured twice. Once against the tones the market already sells, so it is not a copy. Once against the others in the range, so no two are mistaken for each other at arm’s length.
The anchor of the warm ladder
Does not cross to the shirt
It goes on the door, the paper, the thread in a label. It never goes on the man.
A house that wears its own signage is asking to be looked at, and the rider has somewhere to be.
The heel
Why the heel is two and a half centimetres.
A flat shoe slides forward through the stirrup, and a foot that goes through the stirrup does not come back out at speed. A heel between two and a half and four centimetres stops the foot at the arch.
That is the reason, and nobody at the gate explains it. A house selling to riders in a country still learning to ride has one job before it has a product. Say what the thing is for.
Settled
What the house is
Ruled out
What it is not
The archive
What a riding coat does without telling you.
These are not our garments. They are the objects the workshop reads, and the standard the house is trying to meet: a detail that is present, useful, and never announced.
The saddle strap and the saddle pad
Built into the back of the coat so the seat sits flat under a body rising and sitting all morning. You would not find them unless you turned the coat over.
Wind cuffs, and a ring inside the collar
The cuff closes at the wrist against the air. The ring holds a guard for the hat. Neither is visible on the hanger.
A train engineered to fail
An 1892 riding skirt whose train breaks away at a set load. The one place the maker deliberately left unreinforced was the place a fall would kill her.
Two cloths, unsubstituted for forty seven years
Bedford cord and cavalry twill, named to a sealed pattern in the 1928 Army Dress Regulations, still in a hunting outfit made in 1975. A written specification held by an institution outlasts a taste.
The archive was written in cold countries. Ours is not one.
That is the part the house has to solve for itself.
The films
The films carry no dialogue.
Each one shows a single detail doing its work, at the length that takes. Hooves, cloth, breath. Nothing said and nothing to read. These plates are held for them.
Open
Not settled yet.
A house that tells you what it has not decided is easier to trust than one with an answer for everything on the first day. These are open, and they are being worked in this order.
- 01Which garment comes first, and what it costs to make
- 02The factory, by name
- 03The address of the room, and the hours it keeps
- 04Where to write to the house