Good Good Good’s AW25 Sprouts Collection sees the Cape Town brand developing in various aspects of its identity, sourcing African materials from outside its home-country’s borders and making full use of its in-house manufacturing capabilities. This collection builds on the foundations of the SS25 Roots Collection, in which Good Good Good’s founder and creative director Daniel Sher revisited and strengthened the brand’s core offering. For AW25, Sprouts introduces a handful of new silhouettes to the brand’s core collection, alongside more unique garments made from textiles originating from across the African continent.
For the first time, the brand explored materials from greater Africa, having previously worked exclusively with textile mills and designers within the brand’s native country. While the collection still features textiles sourced from prominent South African homeware textile mill Mungo, the other standout garments in the collection are cut from cloth made in Uganda and Côte d’Ivoire. Using a material created by Mekeka Designs, a textile house based in Uganda, the Cropped Collared Jacket and Balloon Trousers in Lubugo Obutono Cloth feature strips of barkcloth, sourced from the Matuba tree. Barkcloth is a renewable material, harvested from these trees annually for up to 80 years with no impact on their lifespan. The Ivorian Baule cloth used to make up the Collector’s Jacket and Crescent Trousers was sourced from various African traders on Long Street, a rich cultural hub of Cape Town’s city centre. Primarily, the team dealt with a trader named Manan, who Daniel met through taking his two sons to participate in a weekly drum circle hosted at Manan’s Long Street shop. Building on the foundations of Roots, these textiles are cut into the brand’s strengthened contemporary ready-to-wear silhouettes, recontextualising them and giving them new life for the AW25 Sprouts Collection.
Sprouts is also the brand’s first collection to be shown at an international fashion event since Milan Spring/Summer Fashion Week in 2021. Since then, Good Good Good has focused on its relationship with its community through its Cape Town-based flagship store Duck Duck Goose and honed in on the capabilities of its 30-year-old heritage cut, make and trim (CMT) manufacturing facility, Together MFG, which has completed jobs for both local and international clients, most notably Thebe Magugu and Christian Dior. The T-shirt is Good Good Good’s core product, having settled on 5 different silhouettes in 10 sizes in its core offering after more than a decade’s worth of development. Since its beginning, the brand has used the graphic T-shirt as a vehicle for collaboration, often with prominent South African illustrators, artists and fellow independent businesses. Included in the Sprouts collection is Good Good Good’s Heritage Day T-Shirt Capsule, consisting of 3 graphic tees depicting what it means to be South African according to illustrators Amy-Lee Tak, Russel Abrahams (AKA Yay Abe) and Shaun Hill. These stand alongside more subtly branded T-shirts in various colourways, made in 3 of the brand’s core silhouettes.
Through the creative experimentation that an in-house CMT factory affords the brand, Good Good Good also introduces an innovative initiative to curb fabric waste in the Sprouts Collection. The Strip-Stripe T-Shirt is an example of the sustainable method that the brand has developed to use the cotton single-jersey offcuts and deadstock T-shirts left over from Together MFG’s regular production runs. Through rigorous sampling to produce an enduring patchwork garment using waste material, the Strip-Stripe T-Shirt represents a new step in the brand’s continuous and innovative effort to produce the best possible T-shirt. With meticulous attention to detail, offcuts are selected by hand and cut down to strips. The strips are sewn together individually to create a large enough piece of fabric from which to cut the panels of the tee, and finally, the T-shirts are cut, made and trimmed in the shape of the brand’s Heavy T-Shirt silhouette. Other Strip-Stripe garments in the collection include the Strip-Stripe Hoodie and Strip-Stripe Balloon Trousers, which are made from offcuts of fleece. Each of these garments is completely unique, due to their handmade nature and depending on what excess material is available. This process would not be feasible if the brand didn’t have its own manufacturing facility at its disposal.
Good Good Good’s roots and ambitions lie in high manufacturing standards and the discovery and recontextualisation of interesting and innovative African textiles which uplift the continent’s fashion economy. Coming into its 9th year of existence since Good Good Good’s establishment in 2016, the AW25 Sprouts collection sees the brand enter a new phase of growth, both internally through its manufacturing proficiency and externally through its explorative sourcing philosophy and global community-building aims. You can shop the collection exclusively on duckduckgoosestore.com now.
