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.

AUGUST 26TH 2025

Take 2: A Neverending Conversation

Ku This is part two, our second attempt at our ongoing Neverending Conversation. We are currently recording July 31, from Red Pine Lake, which is in the Algonquin Highlands in Ontario Canada, and Mae is visiting me here for the week with both of her children and we might get interrupted,

Mae (laughing) I’m expecting it.

Ku It's been really nice. My partner's away so the children are amusing themselves. A lot of exciting games and make believe, which is beautiful. In our last conversation we talked about the Aran sweater, and I'm looking at you wearing it right now, which is really exciting. We have the final prototypes in, and the factory is knitting production as we speak. How does it feel?

Mae It feels much nicer than a normal Aran sweater, it's much softer. I have two traditional Aran sweaters at home that I share with my partner.  You have the cardigan, we have crews. We only really wear them in the winter because they're very heavy. I always wear them as a top layer because they're a bit coarse. This, however, is against my bare skin over a tank and it feels very, very soft and cozy but not overly hot while I sit in this cabin in the shade, it's rather buttery.

I look forward to wearing it around the island all week for our cool mornings and evenings around the fire. We’ll take them for a spin in the canoe, make some s’mores…

Ku (laughing): Sounds like critical testing. I’m really excited to have this sweater, it's been a long journey, but in the end we're getting our beautiful Leather Working Group Certified handmade buttons from Italy by the time the factory closes in August. If you buy this sweater, check out the buttons, because they were a labor of love in addition to the rest of it. This piece completes our Third Four, and now we're embarking on our Final Four. 

Mae: Maybe we should explain the “Fours”, a quick review of the total concept…

Ku: So the idea that we started with was, what if we made four things a year for four years and constrained ourselves to a collection of 16 pieces that we would wear and love and be interested in keeping forever.

Mae (laughing) That was seven years ago,

Ku (laughing) yeah, but that's still the design filter, and we're in the final phase. And every year or other year, depending on what we've been challenged with, we've pre-sold the next four items. So the Aran sweater completes the THIRD FOUR and we'll be talking in a moment about the first item in the Final Four, which is our Seamless Layering Tee. We didn't want to make a capsule collection that looked like it only worked with itself. The idea was that these were all individual pieces that could be styled together, but more that they dovetail into the wardrobe you own and have, and were based off of pieces that just stayed in our lives for decades. So the goal is not so much to have an isolated group of clothing, but something that works into your life, that merges with everything else you wear and love, that you're actually going to keep and enjoy and really get a lot of pleasure out of. Personally, I find the most satisfaction by the things we make becoming part of somebody's story. It's those emotional ties with your clothing where you end up wearing something at really important moments of your life, or moments of sadness, moments of joy, and somehow that experience and emotion absorbs into the pieces. These are all items we wanted to have with us in our lives, and share so that they’d become part of yours.

Mae I also like that some of our pieces are led more by one of us than the other. You know, because in our original review of things we covet in our own closets, and have the urge to perfect and remake, the Aran Sweater was definitely one of your items, and I'm excited about just wearing it and feeling like it's like one of your favorite things. It’s like I borrowed my best friend's sweater and every time I put it on I feel cared for and happy and I never want to give it back and now I don’t have to. (laughing, don’t go looking through my clothes or you might discover a few things I borrowed when we were 20 that still make me feel that way...) After I put it on I remembered this person walking down the street in the Village years ago wearing a skinny leather jacket with a thick cardigan sweater over it. And that works for me, cardigan with an edge. And I love the idea of a sweater as a coat, maybe over a blazer, I don’t know, I just love really big shapes.

Ku I think it's cool too. Part of what we’ve been saying all along, is that size is just a style. You figure out how you want to wear the thing, and then that's the size you need, because you want to wear it over something, or you want to wear it under something else.

So, we're moving into our Final Four, which is really exciting. I think this has been a long journey, and we've modified the Collection. We've actually stuck closer to it than I thought we might, but as we've been developing it, what we realize is, even though we want to maintain this core collection, each object will have a lifespan. So if there's an item in our collection that feels like it's reached the end of it’s time, or it's ready for an update, we change. We just do it way slower than other brands. A different fashion brand may update something every season or every year, where we may do it every three years or five years or 10 years. In my experience, iconic products sometimes don't change for a decade or longer, and I'm really interested in discovering which of our 16 items are going to have a really long lifespan as is, versus evolve and change. Neither one is better or worse. It's just fascinating how that happens. We'll take it slow, and we'll do it with feedback and information coming in from all of you who are wearing these pieces everyday.

Mae it's interesting because I think we've given ourselves more room to change things in some products than others. Like the Black Alpaca being such a limited yarn was one such item. In the first iteration we used the Foundation Sweater pattern because we felt like it went off concept to alter it just because the yarn was different. But this is a classic materials issue, it didn’t want to be that pattern, the yarn has its own needs. It took us a minute to get over that hump and realize we have an opportunity to take in the feedback and make another attempt to achieve the perfect balance of what the yarn is capable of and what the design needs to be. And actually this fall people will get a chance to view the third iteration of Black Alpaca which I think is our most successful yet. The fact that we can only get our hands on such limited quantities gives us permission to try something else. 

Ku Yeah, and that gives us these temporary items, whether it's vestiges or limited edition or special edition, as the other space where we can experiment while our core collection stays a bit slower. We’re able to give those core pieces years to figure out what they want to be, what the perfect version is.

So one of the pieces we're working on now that we're prototyping in September, is called the Seamless Layering Tee, Object 13, the first item in our Final Four pieces. This is our second tee shirt;  we have our Best Friends Tee that's been around for a few years now, but for the SLT the idea is to actually create a zero waste knitted fine gauge, seamless tee. There are  incredible machines now called whole garment machines that can knit a whole garment with essentially one cone of yarn and have no unused yarn left over, no waste at all. You have to design into the way it knits, you see a lot of these items in athletic wear, an engineered sport aesthetic, but we wanted to use the technology to make like the perfect long sleeve layering tee. We're both big collectors of merino tees, but the outdoor ones are a bit too sporty to wear everywhere, and then the fine gauge sweaters that you get from designer brands are maybe a bit too fancy or delicate to wear as a tee shirt. So we're working on this design challenge of walking the line between what looks like a beautiful, fine gauge sweater, which it is technically, but can also kind of can be worn with the casual ease and care of a tee shirt.

Mae I feel like it’s a space we're trying to inhabit between other things. On the one hand, I wear the men's technical sport versions of these because I don’t like fitted shapes and I share them with my partner, but they’re very plain, very work horsey and they do the job well, I wear and layer them all year round. On the other end I have designer versions in cashmere that are so fine they’re see through. I’ve worn them to near rags because they feel so good, but they’ve all got runs in them now and I can’t find any in recycled cashmere or RWS wools so I’m excited to have a beautiful and functional one that can be layered or worn as a top that’s also not a cut & sew.

Ku Yeah, me too. We're knitting this in Brooklyn. We're importing beautiful Italian ultrafine merino yarn from our favorite mill, Tollegno, who has all the traceability and certification that we we are looking for, and have been great partners to us. That gets imported from Italy to New York to Tailored Industries, the knitter down in the Navy Yards in Brooklyn. It's really exciting to be working on this locally as well. We’ll be preselling the SLT in September, once we have our approved prototype done. So stay tuned for that. It's really exciting, and that will kick off the Final Four pieces.

Mae Yes. I feel like we could give a little preview of what those Final Four are gonna be.

Ku Sure, with the caveat that they'll evolve. So just the top headlines.

Mae One we've been talking about since the beginning is the raincoat. It's the most challenging to make because of our commitments to sustainability. I feel like we've been putting this one off just so we can make it at the height of our sustainability options as a brand.

Ku And the real tension is between performance and sustainability. This is something that people in the outdoor industry are struggling with a lot because they have some really incredible performance technology that's not in natural fibers, so then you're creating more plastic. Gore-Tex, and then all of its successors, is a great example of an incredible technology, but it doesn't biodegrade, which is great if it's a stint in your heart, but not so much if it's your clothes. So we're experimenting with two separate fabrics. One that's a very traditional cotton that's technical, purely because of its weave called Ventile, and then the other is one of the best Japanese waterproof, breathable makers in the world. We're developing one that's about 60% bio based, so we would still have 40% nylon in that option, but it would be extremely high performance. So we're testing those two paths, and we'll see which one we think walks the line between performance and sustainability. We want to wear this for many, many years. That's always the most important thing, yeah. 

Mae Yeah, you can get a trench coat, but they're weak on performance. You can get a technical jacket, but they're usually hip length or mid thigh and shaped in a way that makes them look cheap or too sport. Not to mention that your legs are completely soaked. In my mind this is a garment for people who aren’t just going car to door. For me it’s critical that this raincoat works when you’re outside, walking in the elements NOT getting soaked from the thighs down from the subway to your house 10 blocks away and that’s after you’ve run your errands… .

Ku A raincoat for the walkers. This also speaks to something that we haven't really talked about that you and I share, which is that we both love being outside and moving and having functional clothing. We also both love beautifully made designer clothing. Living between those worlds is hard. They don't really meet often.  I feel I've been trying to merge those spaces at different brands for so long, and now we're doing it in our own way. We're sitting in this very rustic, off grid island right now as we record, playing with these sweaters that also can be worn in New York City or Paris or London, it just depends on how you wear it. There's something very satisfying to me about that. I think it's also exhibited by people buying multiples of our items to wear in these different contexts, like your country or outdoor space and your more professional or urban space. 

Mae And frankly, that's always been the brief, I mean, from the beginning.

Ku After the Seamless Layering Tee and before the Raincoat, we have two other items: the Up and Down Pant and our lightweight down jacket. So the pant. The pant has been a really long journey. The original concept was inspired by the fact that neither of us really like to wear leggings, but we can't really find a viable replacement. We started by talking about a yoga pant that you could wear out of the house, but wasn't a legging, Then that became a conversation about how to make the leg shape so that you can put your legs up a wall, or be in Downward Dog, or be cross-legged, meditating.  Then that became a metaphor for life: what's the pant you can put on if you're feeling good or feeling terrible? So that name stuck, Up and Down Pant. It looks good if you want to dress it up and throw our blazer over it, but it’s got to be really comfortable. The Up and Down Pant has a lot of pressure on it.

Mae There were so many visions of this pant in my mind, you know, because, I studied at the Shivananda Center in India many years ago. And everybody wore loose cotton pants. And they were really great. And the only thing about them that I didn't like was the drawstring because when you were doing supine asanas the knot was always digging into your stomach pulling attention away from practice and frankly just uncomfortable. And then I think one thing you wouldn't like is that when your legs are inverted, they gather around your knee and get caught on your calf when you change position. So that’s going to be an issue for most people. And then I was thinking of all the amazing engineered sports garments, with the shaping done in the knitting, and I think it's really beautiful, but I don't like tight form fitting pants. So then I think we tried to engineer a loose version. And I don’t know the prototypes have been a real challenge..

Ku We tried some interesting things. This pant is strangely elusive, although it is the one that's going to be our most comfortable go-to pant. We've had some interesting debates about our sweatshirt, and whether we're going to have a matching set or not, and how we feel about that. So this is very much in process, but this is we're going to be really digging into this once we're back in Brooklyn together. 

The Down Jacket is the last piece, and this is going to be a 3-season layering item. I've been obsessed with military layering pieces for a long time, and they've been done in many versions over the past century. There are some amazing vintage ones, I’ve made expensive ones and lower price ones in my past, but there's some magic in how versatile they are. The lightweight down that you can wear as an interior layer in cold weather, that you can wear as an outer layer in shoulder weather. A jacket that has many functional features, but also works into outfits. It should layer under our rabbit jacket, should layer under our Raincoat, and then also under and over our sweaters, but it's a real workhorse. I've done so much down outerwear in my career, and lived through a few versions of these jackets that I have worn for years, and I still don't feel like I have the perfect one. So I'm excited for this one.. 

Mae Yeah, I'm shocked that you want to do this, actually. This is well honed territory, you’ve designed it for the best of the best. So I'm like, if you see a hole here, I can't wait to see us fill it.

Ku There's some beautiful ones I've seen at the designer level, but either they're not actually very functional or versatile, or they're so expensive, $2000-$3,000. I got close with some of the stuff we did at Canada Goose, but I think this will be one of those things that even if you have never worn something like this, if you try it, you'll realize how amazing it is. 

So we have a few challenges ahead of us, but it's going to be great, and it's going to all play out by the end of 2026.

Mae Barring any global disasters, but we're not going to get into that. And of course, we're trying to make as much as we possibly can in the US with US materials while continuing to upgrade our materials as supply chains open up or shift. So, yeah, stay tuned. 

Ku You and I have been living in some different spaces this summer, which is part of a bigger, expanded life experiment that we have of wanting the freedom to work from different spaces. This is a revolution that the whole world has gone through since Covid, but tell me about working from Maine.

Mae I still have very young children that require my undivided attention and my partner is an artist who has been away on a residency in Portugal for a month while I'm trying to maintain a decent level of work which has led to us spending the summer with extended family in Central Maine. There has been a beautiful development of organic childcare just by living in concert as a large family with multiple elders as it were. It’s also a very welcoming community with a lot of children and a local pool that’s widely attended by all ages. I’ve been enjoying the more mellow country life and the beautiful clean air, but it's also been an interesting self-organization challenge. The only way I can keep myself from feeling overwhelmed is to have a daily check in on my top priorities and be more mellow about the rest. It’s been working. We’re a screenfree family so it’s all about nature, crafts, music, books, cooking, you know we're hands on. My 9 year old is off and running. My 5 year old needs more companion play. But I can acknowledge breaks are good for me too. (laughing) For a while there I thought I might be becoming incontinent but then I realized I just don’t like to take a break until I’ve finished a thing. So I’m basically like an 8 year old who doesn’t want to stop playing and would rather pee their pants than stop the game. So I use timers on my phone A LOT, to make sure I stop every so often to be with my littles, stretch, walk, snuggle, read a chapter aloud from a book, drink water, make a snack, help transition them to a new activity, whatever. I can be an intense compartmentalizer, and I'm trying not to do that this summer, you know and it turns out I can do things differently. 

What about you? You’ve been in a deep transition since last winter. 

Ku Yeah. 
I'm doing a lot of things I've never done before and learning how much time the things I want to do really take. 
I think that things are taking longer because I no longer want to do them without being thoughtful about it. It just makes me tired to do things in a crappy way at this point. It also feels like a waste of time, actually. I don't want to spend another minute of my life doing something that I think is subpar. 
I'd rather just not do it at all. So I'm retraining myself to go a lot slower, and I think this is what we're facing with this collection too. I'm used to creating thousands of skus a year, which I think is ridiculous, but it's a different kind of challenge to create four or eight or 10. 
It seems like it should just be easier, but it's not, it's just different. I see that mirrored in my life. One thing that's been reinforced for weeks at this point, every single week, is that I do not want more stuff in my life. 
I want less stuff in my life. I want to be surrounded by things that are beautiful, high quality, functional. I am doubling and tripling down on that in every aspect of my life. 
In the quality of my time, the quality of the objects we make, the quality of the things I use, the things I put in my body. But it's often not that simple. I don't have access to those things all the time, or I still have a bunch of crap that I want to get rid of, but I'm not going to go through another major purging anytime soon. With all of this stuff that I still have, I want to find a good way to use it or give it away. I think you're more advanced than I am in terms of purging. 
You've been doing it for longer, but I might just be giving things away to people who come to my house for the next five years. Be warned. If you show up at my house, you might be going home with something, but it'll be beautiful and useful. 
My tendency, and you've known me for so long, you know this to be true, is that when I get an idea and I see clearly what I want, then I want it to just happen. And I'm willing to do the work, but I'm learning to be more patient now and let things happen over years as opposed to just pushing to get them done, which is hopefully part of me ageing and becoming more mature. Also, if you push, then you have to choose the best of what's available at the moment. So sometimes there's a good option there, and sometimes there's not. That's where we've been pulling back with our brand. If we’ve reached the best option and it’s still not good enough, we table that for now, we don’t force it. That's the kind of discipline that some people have always had, but I didn't start with because I was more concerned with how to get from A to B, even if you have to compromise. I think you pay for that ultimately, though. I don't think it's right or wrong so much as this is what I'm ready for now. This is the simpler thing. Living on an island every summer is a real exercise in constraint because we have a certain amount of space in the boat, depending on how many people are coming and going. 
You can't just bring a bunch of crap everywhere. We also inherited this amazing place, but it has 70 or 80 years of stuff that I'm still sorting through. 

Mae (laughing) 
I can't believe you take the boat out of dock without a full load of things you want to remove every time. 

Ku (laughing) Yeah, it's just that I have other things to do, unfortunately, then to sort through four cans of one and a half inch ring bolts every day, which, if anybody needs some, come on by. No, there's also a meditative quality in just slowing down.It's going to be really interesting if three years from now, 10 years from now, I'll have completed the purge to the extent that it's part of my normal process. 
I like the discipline and the simplicity and what happens on this island is that everything becomes very present. This is what I was missing when I was in that hyper corporate environment, I was hardly ever able to be completely present. Everything was about the next thing, the future thing, the planning. 
So when I felt like my life was just passing by and I was always living in the future, I realized I don't want to spend the next half of my life that way. So I'm trying to shift gears a little bit. 

Part of what's come up in that process is this idea of the archetype of the entrepreneur that we have now. There's a part of me that doesn't believe we can have a viable company and live life in a reasonable way. That if we're not working all the time, like crazy people, this company will never make it, you know, and that might be true. 
We'll see. But that narrative is a strong narrative: you've got to be 25 and neurodivergent and work 24 hours a day to be successful as an entrepreneur. 
So, I think part of this whole journey is also figuring out how to run a company the way we want to run a company, how to structure things for ourselves and the people who work with us that really reflect our values, not just in how we make product, but how we're living as humans while we do it. 
This whole thing could be said to be an experiment in how to build a present, responsible, enduring life. A life that we are happy with because of the things we care about and want and need. I recently listened to a really long form deep dive into Hermès and their whole history that I found extremely inspiring. 
The only catch there is that they spent, you know, a few hundred years doing this and we're…

Mae (laughing) Ku, I'd like to see what we can do in the next 10 years, not 200 years!

Ku But part of it is that you think about the values that would last that long, right? I think we both believe in that. I've no idea whether Four Objects will exist, or be something different, or be gone in 100 years, but I don't have an agenda for that. It's more just really trying to do things the right way and figuring out what that actually means and what's actually possible in this, this crazy world we live in. 

Mae As we’ve grown we've talked about accessories and home and soft goods and home goods and sustainable housing, and I feel like there is a lot of room in the trajectory to build a good sized company, we're so tiny now we're just a blip on the horizon. But I think that the isolation around thinking we could do it all on our own is what makes me feel like it's not possible. But I can’t help feeling like there are other small companies who are trying to do the same thing, there are other markets that we want to entwine with, so why not find ways to grow a sustainable market together? I think there is something happening in tech, and there is something happening in the middle where it's actually going to get harder and harder for small companies to to bridge that gap. So maybe finding a way to band together is a way to get over these million dollar hurdles.

Ku Absolutely. I think there's been a major cultural shift in business, and I do think it's related to more women in leadership, around mutual support, and all boats rising. There's so many people that we can work with, and there's room for all of us. In other words, I don't think we have to be protective of our space in that way, and I've seen that attitude change. In fashion 20 years ago, you couldn't talk to anybody about anything because everything was proprietary, but it's all so fast at this point and copied so quickly that it doesn't matter anymore. You’ve got to have something deeper that you're creating or making that is unique and not easily copyable, or it'll be copied tomorrow. I think that opens up an interesting space for collaboration and mutual support and that really fits with the way we want to be living our lives anyway,

So is there anything recently that you've been particularly enjoying lately? Food, music, books that have been inspiring you?

Mae Well, I’m really into my current book, it’s a very elegant read. Perfect for dreamy weather, it’s Baldwin’s Just Abvoe My Head. I read parts of it aloud to my little one at night. It has a clear lyrical voice I hear in my head. So much music, so much love, so much sadness. It’s a beautiful exploration of deep care, loss and joy intertwined with the politics of pain. America, god damn! And Lucas just sent me a record by Adrián de Alfonso called Viator that I can’t stop listening to in the dark or when I’m alone, it's magic. When I first heard it I thought it was a lost Tindersticks record. So much feeling. What about you?

Ku I'm continuing my obsession with Tove Jansson, who is a Finnish-Swedish writer and artist, but she's really famous because of the Moomins, which you just started reading to your kids, which I actually haven't read.

I was introduced to her kind of obliquely through a friend, through one of her novels, which there are very few of, but I really liked it. And then I found out that she and her partner had been living on islands off the coast of Finland for most of her life, so I became obsessed with that because of this place, Red Pine. I read The Summer Book, which is just so beautiful, and started reading it to the kids the other night. It's lovely, it's humorous, it's sparse, not heavy, but profound at the same time. 

There's another book called Notes From an Island, where she chronicles how her and her partner actually built their home on their island, so that was just kind of nerdy, I don't know how interesting it would be other people. Then I just saw this great design story about her studio in Helsinki, and that was also so beautiful, and the sculptures from her father. So I've just been really drawn to every image and story that appears from her life, outside of the whole thing she was famous for. I find really intriguing and beautiful. We'll add links to all of these things in the transcript of this, but yeah, I couldn't be more grateful for having this time on this island, and I'm hoping that we can have it every year as part of our work life.

I meant to say earlier, when we were talking about collaboration that we have, starting next week, our newest brand partner, Byron’s Bee Co. We'll be shipping out gifts to all of our collectors of Byron's candles, he's been so fun to learn about and work with. The work he's doing with bees in California is really wonderful. He makes these gorgeous, beautiful little candles that we love that are hand poured. 

Mae We'll link directly to the story because he does a lot of fascinating rescue bee work all over Southern California, which is incredible and necessary. He also takes care of private hives including Flamingo Estate. The work he does is lovely for the honey, but really it’s for the bees and the pollinators in Southern California which is critical for the stability of our food supply and that’s no small thing. It's super special that we were able to work with him and get our Collectors one of these candles.

Ku Yeah. So anybody who is a collector and receives an order in August, September and October, or anybody who becomes a collector during that time frame will get one of these candles as a gift. This is part of the brand partnership work we're developing so that we can bring one of these discoveries of another brand or person or company that we really love to  all of you every quarter. I'm excited to send these gifts and have it be a little surprise, though it's hard to not just hoard them. 

Mae (laughing) You don't have space for that!

Ku (laughing) All right, all right, until next time. 

JUNE 17TH 2025

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...