Designers source inspiration through digital and physical scavenging

Sofia Testino treats her desktop folders as a primary research laboratory, populating them with hundreds of screenshots captured from eBay to inform her upcoming collections (Welcome Magazine). She spends hours scouring the site for historical textiles and vintage garments, treating the platform as a living archive that dictates her production rhythm. Grayson Thornberry follows a more structured path, designing his debut collection of five sweaters and a scarf around three specific yarn blends—organic cotton/cashmere, alpaca/camel hair, and cashmere/silk/wool (Lukas Mauve from Present Forever). He balances this design work with a daily routine that includes visiting his factory on 29th Street and Seventh Avenue during lunch breaks.

The process often relies on the intensive curation of found materials to serve as the starting point for creative output. Atlanta Bartlett collects antique linen sheets from flea markets, valuing their weight and drape to achieve specific historical silhouettes in her interior design work (Atlanta Bartlett). She notes that discovering these hand-spun pieces feels miraculous, as they offer a quality impossible to find in modern mass-produced fabrics. Sarah Soltanowicz similarly uses mundane objects like chipped plates or weathered doors to construct imagined narratives that transport her to other lives (Sarah Soltanowicz). "If these things could speak, what would they tell us?" she asks.