On Cyclical Conversations & Asking The Questions We Care About

It's here – the start of a conversation that will never end.

Actually, It's the start of sharing the conversation we've been having for years: the one that has built our friendship, our company, and our many collaborations. We've been discussing the questions that matter for years, and now we want you to join in.

For this first edition we’re sharing the backstory of Mae & Ku's friendship, our exclusive partnership with artist Marusya, the making of the Aran sweater plus, a few thoughts on love, enlightenment, and an accidental encounter with a polyamorous book club. —Mae & Ku

A Never-ending Conversation - Take 1 

Edited for your reading pleasure (9 min read)

Ku: Okay. Here we go. This is the real one. Or maybe the first try.

Mae: First try at the real one. This is Four Objects, and I'm Mae Fatto.

Ku: And I'm Karuna Scheinfeld, otherwise known as Ku. So we don't know exactly what this is. Mae and I have known each other since we were seventeen years old. We’ve been talking for more than twenty years, and working together on FOUR for more than eight years, so it’s a strange thing to suddenly try to record and edit what feels like a never ending conversation.  

Mae: A lot of people have asked us to reveal more of ourselves behind the brand, and I think we’ve hesitated–maybe at the fear of formalizing or publishing or commercializing our friendship. At the same time, I understand people's desire. There is backstory, and quite a lot of it. 

Ku: It wasn’t until I thought of the name: “a never ending conversation”, that I wanted to try this, to record something important to us. It felt authentic to open a window into this dialogue we’ve been having for years.

Mae: Our conversations are always cyclical. They don't end. It's like our friendship. They just build and grow, like concentric circles or a spiral that just keeps getting wider and wider, and we come back around to a subject we've been talking about since we were teenagers. 

Ku: Now I wish we had a recording of us talking when we were seventeen. We were pretty fascinating. 

Mae:  I like that it only lives in our minds.

Ku (laughing): Maybe the fantasy of who we were is something that should remain intact.

Ku: Let's talk about our upcoming capsule collaboration with Marusya. 

Mae: We both found her work around the same time. I saw her work at the FIT galleries in 2019, when she was collaborating with Puma, upcycling all of this sportswear into incredible couture designs, embellishing and adding beadwork and embroidery and trims. It just completely floored me. It was such a mashup of cultural signifiers that I recognized from around the world and yet they all turned out to be of Russian heritage, and I felt it was really strong and unafraid.

Ku: Powerful. I didn't see that exhibit because I was in Toronto, but I saw it online, and I had an equally visceral response. It felt so creative and joyful and exciting. There's a feeling of intuitive integrity; it felt authentic in a way that didn't make me question any of it. 

Mae: The work held integrity in its objectness. It made and continues to make a lot of sense.

Ku: Fast forward to 2023, we’re walking down Franklin Ave in Crown Heights in Brooklyn, where our home and office is, and we see that this old karate studio had been taken over by Jahnkoy, which was Marusya's brand. It completely changed the dynamic because all of a sudden they were part of our community, in our neighborhood. 

Mae: Yeah. When I saw it as an exhibition, it felt untouchable, unreachable, unattainable. And then all of a sudden the same work was in a storefront, which turned out to be Marusya’s studio. They’re the sort of clothes I want to hang on my wall just as much as I want to wear them, objects of art.

Ku: I think we both spent more money than we could…and no regrets. Okay. So then what happened next?

Mae: I think you reached out to Marusya, and then I went to her studio. She was interested in what we were doing, and wanted to make a mini capsule collection.

Ku: Part of the appeal was having her bring this really ornamental attitude to our clothing. Our clothes are…I wouldn't describe them as minimalist, but part of designing for longevity is not making them as whimsical as we might like, because we want them to be able to be worn over a long period of time. The more novel you create something, the harder it is to wear it often. But we both miss that novelty, and we bring that into our wardrobes through vintage or through other beautiful designers.

Mae: It was such a thrill to invite her, as an artist, to work with our clothes like raw materials. I generally don't apply the word artist to fashion designers, partly because the idea of craft is so central to making clothes, and craft is a loaded term in terms of contemporary art production. So it was such a beautiful opportunity to think how we could apply such a term to what we do.

Ku: We just saw the first pass at the first prototypes and they’re going to be released in May, (out now view here). We’ll be able to show them at our in-person events, which are so important to us precisely because we're an ecomm brand. Online can be such an anaemic experience because it’s just an image, you can’t touch it and wear it. I spend a lot of time thinking about that disconnect because so much of what we do at Four is about the materials. 

Mae: This is also why our Fit Parties have been central, because it’s so important that our clothes fit the widest group of people possible. The only way to really do that on real bodies is to have people come and try them on. And of course, they want to hear how each piece was designed and made, they want to meet us, and the connection becomes much more palpable: they know the actual story of the thing they’re wearing. Most of the time we walk around with no idea who made our clothes or where and how the fabric was made. But for our Collectors the experience is the complete opposite, they come, they ask questions, they try things on and help us alter the design. They leave fit parties with a story and a real connection to their clothing.

Ku: It’s interesting to me that these fit parties feel so different from a brick and mortar shopping experience.

Mae: Do you remember our last Chief event? We had a panel discussion about sustainability, which felt like some next-level conceptual Jenga: our Collectors work in so many sectors from food to education, health to public policy and they asked us such insightful and intelligent questions and our discussion went over time. It was way more than giving “fast fashion” the typical thrashing. We all got to learn, very deliberately, about a more sustainable vision for fashion.

Ku: One of the privileges we have right now is to work so directly with questions we really care about, and to think alongside others who have deep experience in the industry, who are thinking very carefully about how we make things and how we treat people, how we treat the planet.  We had a Sashiko workshop, layering in how we care for clothes, mend clothes–make them more beautiful over time as they age. 

Mae: I don’t think I realized, when we first began FOUR, how satisfying it was going to be to meet the people who were going to wear our clothes. I think you’ve loved this about designing clothes from the start, but I had no connection to having always worked in the concept realm. But talking to intelligent people who have a vested interest in supply chain and doing things right for the future has become a thru-line for both of us. 

Ku: When I worked in other businesses, it really bothered me that internal creative teams could feel the pressure to dumb down things for the customer; there was this notion that they wouldn’t understand.  And that just seems so clearly not the case. 

Mae: Many of the assumptions about women dressing are outmoded; that you need a color and whimsy and trend. That they don't need pockets because they should be carrying huge bags. Even if there is more of an awareness that those things are not true, there are still many brands coasting on those wasteful ideas of how women should live. Many people don't feel that they need more and more new things and would prefer to be spoken to like they're intelligent adults.

Ku: Humans who care about things… 

Mae: Other than, I don't know, a new silhouette…

Ku: Or how big your butt looks in those pants. Behind the scenes at other brands, that conversation has come up way more times than I'd like to admit. It's like, can we just make a functional pocket? 

—

Ku: One item that has taken a really long time to make is the Aran sweater. Let’s talk about that.

Mae: It's really evolved too. It's a really interesting problem.

Ku: The Aran Sweater is our twelfth item out of sixteen and it was supposed to be completed by the end of  2024. It was based on a personal sweater that I bought from a thrift store, so it had a whole other life before I found it, and then I wore it for fifteen more years. It’s a traditional Irish cardigan, made in Ireland, with undyed wool, a natural color, and I liked the way it looked aesthetically, I liked the heritage of it, and I liked its functionality. With a rain shell on top, it always kept me warm, and the cables create these air pockets that are actually really insulating. 

When it finally started to fall apart, I researched the label and found that they were still making them in Ireland. I was so excited I immediately ordered one, and then I asked them if they’d make a version for FOUR, but with a few differences: a slightly different fit, with wool we can trace, and with a different button. The fit was the easiest change, because we just submitted different specifications. The wool was harder. Not only did we want traceable wool, we wanted beautiful extra fine merino. 

Mae: I know from working with Rabbit and the wool issues that we had for the Rabbit jacket: the spinning changes, the coatings change, the mill has to recalibrate the machines, there’s breakage, the quality is not as reliable…

Ku: The materials, the quality, the traceability, are a deal-breaker for us, and it wasn’t easy for them to make these changes. So that was a long process that we had to give up on, sadly.

Mae: We did try other factories on the Aran Islands and in Ireland, but there was nobody who could do it for us. 

Ku: So then we returned to our core partner for sweaters, Art Atlas in Peru, and we restarted the process of sourcing the wool. Instead of importing it from Italy, we actually found a traceable, beautiful extra fine merino in Peru, which worked on multiple levels for everybody. We’ve received our first prototype, and it’s great. I think we’re on our way to deliver it in September, a year later than we wanted. 

Mae: I’m grateful our customers are patient people! It is still being made, and it's still being made responsibly. In every set of four pieces we’ve made, one item has ended up being delayed. For the first set, it was COVID. For the second we had to change the order of product based on the development. We're always responding to the constraints, and instead of forcing a circle through a square, we're like, okay: we need to pause or we need to rethink. We’ve insisted on the luxury of time. Other companies don’t have that–they have to push product through that’s inferior. 

Ku: You just replace it. 

Mae: You use crap materials, whatever is available... When we explain the rationale behind our delays, people get it. I think being honest here is actually our saving grace. 

Ku: The whole point is to make things you can wear for years and years and years. The delay looks different when you think about that time frame.  

—-

Ku: I think we should talk about the date we had this week.

Mae: Ku is not currently living in New York, and so when we see each other, it tends to be very work-focused, but one magical evening, we actually got to relax with each other.  We had dinner at a restaurant called Souen in Manhattan that we used to eat at when we were teenagers. The location has moved a little, but it’s the same smell, the same taste…it was a time machine for us. 

Ku: So satisfying. I mean, delicious, but also satisfying to have a thing you loved thirty years ago taste the same.

Mae: And then we went to see a movie, Baby Girl, which came out, what, at least six months ago?

Ku: Everyone's already talked about it.

Mae: Right. And we loved it. It was such a funny experience. We showed up at this little theater, Cinema Village, and ended up sitting up with a meetup group from Bushwick.

Ku: Well, they were the only other people in the theater, basically. So we kind of became part of their group for the movie.

Mae: We didn't realize that we were sitting with them at first because more and more people kept showing up and sitting all around us, so we ended up sitting in the middle of what turned out to be a polyamorous book club. We were talking to a few of them before the movie started, and I hadn’t read any reviews or watched the trailer, but based on the fact that they were all there, I assumed this was some sort of “polyamory field trip” and that there was going to be polyamory in Baby Girl. I kept expecting it to turn into a thing with Antonio Banderas. I'm like, when are they all gonna start having sex together? And then you enlightened me to the fact that polyamory doesn’t mean a three-or more person sexual relationship (mae laughing), polyamory seems pretty pedestrian now.

Ku (laughing): After thinking about it for a day, I think the thing I really loved about it was how romantic it was. It just captured me emotionally. It wasn't about the concept. It was true. It was about this really romantic story that was also painful. 

Mae: Yeah. It seemed pretty authentic in its uncertainty. Before I went to bed that night I sent my wolf pack the video of Samuel dancing and the text chain kept me up half the night. 

Ku (laughing): I love romance. You know? I want it to feel real. I want it to feel like the experiences I've had in my life of that feeling, that magic spark and the excitement of it. Even if it's complicated. It's such a precious thing.

Mae: Did you see that NYTimes article about young people not believing in romantic love anymore? 

Ku: I didn’t read the article, but I have an opinion anyway. Number one, how sad. Number two, a young person’s gonna be knocked on their ass when they do fall in love. How surprised will they be? 

Mae: Other people's commentary can really interfere with one’s own response to things, I remember keenly my own passions being tempered by my perception of what was acceptable. You might come back around, but it can take a long time to know yourself but i digress…

Ku: My feeling with movies and books is often that I don't need them to be fantastic on all levels. If there's one level that's working for me, it's worth it to me. I can enjoy the extraction of that. 

Mae: There are definitely books where I'm rewriting sentences in my mind as I'm reading, but I won't give them up. I'm in there, I'm in this place, and I am absorbed. It feels so good, I want to stay. 

Ku: I'll do that with films as well, but that doesn't take away from the joy of a beautifully written, incredible story. There are levels, but it's just so rare to come across the best things. Maybe if my culture diet only had those things, I'd somehow reach enlightenment faster. But in the meantime, I’ll take what I can get.

Mae: Is that like giving myself permission to take a nap? 

Ku: Yes, we all need naps...