https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1Gw7fdhK0WM
LYPH is a contemporary brand based in North West England under the Creative Direction
of Founder Frederick Edmondson. LYPH stands for Live Young Play Hard which is the guiding
philosophy of the brand. Living Young is an attitude and mindset that builds energy and
dynamism to support creativity, curiosity, progressive thoughts, and openness to new ways of
doing things and experiences.
For Frederick Edmondson, Playing Hard is about making your work your play, aligning your
passions and doing the things you love. LYPH was created for the here and now, in keeping
with culture and context. While respect for the past is important, recreating the past is not and it is
this outside-of-the-box novel thinking that underpins the brand’s design philosophy.
LYPH is not just about clothes, it is a physical manifestation and expression of Edmondson’s values on life.
For Spring Summer 2022, LYPH established itself as a lifestyle for the artistic, brave, and downright daring, a collection that remains a defining chapter in the brand’s evolving story…
For SS22 LYPH went back in to its past and reflected on what got Edmondson onto the arts in the first place.
Poetry, Freedom and a medium to express yourself.
Still in some sort of lock down, cannot travel, world’s in what feels like a crazy mess, figuring out a new way
to express, live and play. Edmondson went back to teenage movies that inspired, music tours that pushed
boundaries and art direction that paved away for him to create.
The bigger aspect is to design a collection for a brave new world with a desire to be cleaner and more
sustainable.
The base ideas and themes of the collection were built around Dylans 1975 tour Rolling Thunder
(MEANING: To Speak The Truth). We teamed this with a longing to travel back to Japan and the US. To merge
traditional with western, Komono with Cowboy and pop cultures.
Direction came from cult films such as, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, True Romance, David Lynch movies,
The strange meets the pretty. Post Punk New Wave meets the LA pretty boy…
Up-cycled Surplus layered with animal print and recycled polyester track suits. Penny loafers next to kids
recycled beads…
An idea of chaos for that new forward thinking society.
The result is a brand embracing the now in a sophisticated manor.
To Live Young and Play Hard.
In 2026, LYPH's ethos of upcycled surplus and recycled materials aligns directly with the global fashion industry's accelerating shift toward circular design, a movement now central to New York's most forward-thinking retail and wholesale conversations.
The Rolling Thunder Influence: Bob Dylan, Truth, and Fashion as Protest
The Rolling Thunder Revue of 1975 was not simply a concert tour. It was a radical act of artistic reclamation, a traveling spectacle in which Bob Dylan gathered poets, musicians, and visual artists to move across North America in a spirit of spontaneity and raw expression. The tour’s name carried a precise meaning: to speak the truth. For Frederick Edmondson, that mandate translated directly into garment design.
At a moment when the global fashion industry was still navigating the psychological and economic aftermath of the pandemic, LYPH’s SS22 collection chose confrontation over comfort. Rather than retreating into nostalgic minimalism or safe commercial silhouettes, Edmondson used the Rolling Thunder ethos as a structural framework for the collection’s identity. Truth-telling in fashion means refusing to disguise the origins of a material, the purpose of a silhouette, or the cultural reference being invoked.
This approach positions LYPH within a broader lineage of designers who treat clothing as a form of manifesto. From Vivienne Westwood’s punk provocations to Rei Kawakubo’s conceptual deconstructions, the most enduring fashion statements have always been rooted in a clear point of view. For LYPH, that point of view is grounded in Dylan’s conviction that authenticity, however chaotic its outward form, is always the most sophisticated choice a creative person can make.
East Meets West: The Cultural Collision at the Heart of SS22
One of the most compelling design tensions running through LYPH’s SS22 collection is the deliberate collision of Japanese and American visual cultures. Edmondson’s longing to return to Japan and the United States during a period when international travel remained severely restricted produced something unexpected: a collection that conjures both destinations simultaneously, without flattening the specificity of either.
The pairing of the kimono with the cowboy aesthetic is not a superficial styling exercise. In Japanese fashion history, the kimono represents centuries of textile refinement, restraint, and the precise articulation of social identity through fabric and silhouette. The American cowboy, by contrast, is a figure built from practicality, open landscape, and a certain mythologized independence. Placing these two archetypes in conversation produces a genuine visual and conceptual friction, one that mirrors the broader cultural hybridity defining contemporary global style.
New York, as a city that has long served as the world’s most productive collision point for cultural influences, understands this language instinctively. The city’s fashion community has consistently rewarded designers who can hold contradiction with confidence rather than resolving it too quickly into something legible and comfortable. LYPH’s East-West synthesis fits naturally into that tradition, offering a collection that rewards close attention and resists easy categorization.
- Kimono-inspired layering structures over surplus outerwear
- Penny loafers referencing mid-century American prep culture alongside beaded accessories drawn from childhood and craft traditions
- Animal print used not as decoration but as a disruptive surface against utilitarian base garments
Circular Design and the Future of LYPH in a Sustainability-Driven Market
In 2026, the conversation LYPH was already having in SS22 has become the central preoccupation of the global fashion industry. Upcycled surplus, recycled polyester, and circular design principles have moved from the margins of independent fashion into the mainstream of retail strategy, investment decisions, and consumer expectation. LYPH’s early commitment to these materials was not a marketing gesture. It was a logical extension of the brand’s founding philosophy: living and playing in ways that do not consume the future to fund the present.
The use of upcycled surplus in particular carries a resonance that goes beyond environmental responsibility. Surplus fabric and garments arrive with history embedded in them, with previous lives, previous purposes, and previous cultural contexts. For a brand built around the idea that recreating the past is less interesting than engaging with the present, surplus material offers a productive paradox: it is simultaneously old and entirely new in its application.
New York’s most progressive wholesale and retail buyers are now actively seeking brands that can demonstrate circularity not as an add-on feature but as a design methodology. LYPH’s position, established several years before this demand became commercially mainstream, gives the brand an authenticity that newly converted sustainability-focused labels cannot easily replicate. The Rolling Thunder mandate to speak the truth extends, in this context, to speaking honestly about where materials come from, where they are going, and what they cost the world to produce.
