After collaborating with Hai this season, we took the chance to get to know the founder Tessa Vermeulen a little better. Tessa embodies everything we look for when choosing a creative to collaborate with; as well as being committed to her craft, she’s warm, ambitious and ready to embrace new ideas.

We visited her partner’s gallery and store, Studio Leone, to photograph her and talk about how the brand was born, her intrigue in style over fashion, sourcing natural fabrics and the power of accessories.

‘Hai’ is the Mandarin word for sea. If you think of the character of the sea; the grace and fluidity in the way waves move but the strength of that body of water, that really mirrors silk for me. The first silks we were using were crafted in China too, so I wanted to reference that and my own memories of Shanghai. As the brand has grown we’ve moved beyond just using silk but I still love the ambiguity of Hai as a name and even just the way it looks as a word.

As I’ve mentioned it’s always about style over fashion for me. I can’t really remember a time when I wasn’t in love with clothing and the whole process of getting dressed. I was the little girl who loved getting the dressing up box out and I would always be staging mini-photoshoots and plays. I also had a phase of creating imaginary clothing brands. I’d sketch designs, cut up old clothes and customise what I already owned; embroidering T-shirts and jeans by hand. I think I always loved the craft behind clothes and that’s why Hai is so led by materials today.

I think balancing keeping the brand as accessible from a price point perspective with the fact that fine fabrics like silk tend to be more expensive. In terms of using silk as a fabric, I never feel that limited by it with design and production because we’ve worked hard to source different versions that work for different clothing. By using douppioni silk, for instance, we’re able to create solid, structured dresses, which couldn’t be made from finer, satin silk. It’s a surprisingly fluid fabric.

Happy. We are a small team of four people including myself in London, plus our wider team in Seoul. It’s very much a team effort; no one has one specific role and everyone’s opinion is valuable. That collaborative way of working really works for us right now. Everybody brings something to the table but there’s a lovely overlap of skills and perspectives, and I think that’s why it works so well.

In terms of our community, the Hai Society section on our website is a tribute to just some of the women who’ve supported Hai from the beginning. They have become muses of the brand but I like repurposing that word ‘muse,’ which has of course so often been used about male artists and their ‘subjects’. The Hai muses are creative women with a lot of personality and agency, and they have great style too.

Our design ethos is very much ‘what do we want to wear?’ and most designs stem from a gap in our own wardrobes or an ideal of an item we’ve long been searching for. We would never create something we wouldn’t wear ourselves and we test designs on friends of Hai.

In terms of the actual process, we’ll all come up with ideas together as a team, make sketches and refer back to vintage pieces we’ve owned for ages. Mathilde our designer and product developer will then synthesise these sessions into the final designs, and these will get sent off to our sampling team.

We usually go through two or three rounds of samples and once the first is finished we’ll keep amending it until it’s perfect. By the time a bag or garment goes into final production I might have been carrying it around or wearing it for a year already. For us it’s so important the pieces have been really tried and tested to make sure they’re functional and durable, as well as look good.

Accessories are such an integral part of any outfit and I do think they’re where personality can come through the most. You could be wearing something as simple as a classic jeans and white T-shirt combo, and if you add a colourful bag or a string of pearls it becomes a totally different look. I also always think that accessories help make an outfit ‘finished’, not polished, but just complete.

I lean towards classic simplicity. I don’t like flashy things and I don’t shop often – instead I tend to buy pieces that I know I’ll have for a long time. I love hunting for vintage treasures and I look out for garments that are well-made or crafted from luxurious fabrics. I do lean on accessories a lot too. I tend to wear the same core pieces then use bags and jewellery to dress them up or down, or to move through seasons.

If you tend to default to black and white clothing, playing with colour can be a good way to embrace summer. I think bags in particular are a great low-key way of doing this. You don’t have to worry too much about whether you ‘suit’ the colour, so you can be a little experimental or bold with your pick. I love a classic white vest made more unique with jewellery for summer too.

Bold and playful. We wanted to really explore using colour, so vivid too. These are clothes for day and night but there’s definitely a celebratory, party feeling to them. I think we’d all been riding the high of that period of lockdowns ending, and Hai reaching some milestones, so that celebratory feeling comes through in the collection.

For me it’s the Florence dress. It’s been a Hai favourite since we launched it and I’m always delighted by how different it looks when we try making it in new colours. It’s long so it can be worn for special occasions but it’s also light and floaty, so you can throw it on with flats or boots for a surprisingly casual look. It can be tucked into a skirt and worn as a silky top, or it can be belted for more structure. It’s the dress I keep returning to.

I really look mostly to vintage designs and classic pieces for inspiration. I have a big love for Miuccia Prada of course and for me, she is one of the most stylish women.

Soft delicate silk dresses.

I have to admit I don’t find it that easy to switch off. It’s rare I’d spend a day not doing something Hai-related and I like to balance that with a pretty active social life, as well as a lot of travel. That’s not to say I don’t spend the odd Sunday relaxing at home and I do love to read.

I love to travel and I feel very lucky that through Hai I’ve been able to travel so much this year. And definitely music, I worked in music for years and I appreciate it even more now I’m not in the industry.

It’s a very exciting time for Hai right now, we have moved to a new studio in Canonbury, which will also function as a showroom for press and private appointments.

We also opened a store in Seoul, South Korea, a few months ago and I’ve been delighted by the interest in it. Long-term or in the next year, I’m hoping we’ll be able to launch another store for our Asian markets too.

We’re also working on our Spring Summer ‘23 collection and as with all our previous collections, we’ll be expanding the Hai wardrobe. I love the trial and experimentation phase, so this is a really exciting time for me as we see how Hai grows.