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HERESY AW26. Tale of the Six Fingered Hand. Two illustrators, South London, 2012. Green men, hill giants, now a sixth finger.
HERESY is still the project Dominic Owen and Jasper Dunk started after art school: two friends from their teens, both illustrators, printing drawings onto cloth so they could keep working together. South London. 2012. Folklore as the research brief. AW26 is titled Tale of the Six Fingered Hand. The collection is on the site now. USA and EU duties sit inside the listed price.
They have said the method out loud for years. Pick a pocket of folklore. Read. Collect pictures. Make sure the graphics and the cut-and-sew talk to each other. Green men. Hill figures at Cerne Abbas and the Long Man of Wilmington. Hermits. Alpine dances. River goblins. Jack in the Green in Deptford. British identity excavated when “Britishness” is a sour word. Intarsia and jacquard so the figure lives in the knit, not only on a screen.
Signal. What happened: HERESY rel AW26 Tale of the Six Fingered Hand. Exact product: seasonal folklore collection on heresy.ltd. When and where: site, now. Source: brand site and LFW designer note. Why it matters: the sixth finger is another research title from the same two-person studio.
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stir
Owen and Dunk met at fourteen. Foundation together. Illustration together. Collide work through university. After graduation they wanted to stay illustrators. Commission work was thin. Selling prints was a small room. Printing the drawings onto clothing gave the drawings a body and a sale that did not wait on a magazine art desk. HERESY began as that practical continuation. Then seasons. Then Peckham as the studio address people use when they write the house down.
Rupert Dunk, Jasper’s brother, built the site and the type. The three of them have described art direction as a blur: who said it first is less important than the house hand that appeared when the drawings started to merge.
Early years were screen print, monochrome, band collars, pocket tees. The line thickened into mohair and jacquard knits, cord and fleece outerwear, embroidered tees, objects, small-press, nights, a music program. London Fashion Week put them on the designer roster. Idea ran to breweries, museums, galleries, musicians. An Arktis chapter put moths on Exeter ripstop. None of that replaced the first sentence: two illustrators using clothes as the page.
They were not fashion graduates. They have said that. The garment became the place the research could live at full size.
how
The process is research first. An area, a character, a theme. Reading and image-hoarding until a graphic and a sil can share a thought. They have used Alpine folklore and the American South as scouting trips, then come back to Britain as the relevant field. Hermits. Old growth forest. Harvest. Black dogs. Moss and iron. Each title is a pamphlet the knit has to answer.
Intarsia is the expensive habit. A green man worked into the row is slower than a print. Fewer hue per pass. The figure becomes structure. That is why the sweaters carry the reputation. Tees and fleeces carry the faster drawings. Ceramics and candle holders sit beside them because the studio still makes objects the way it made prints: narrative you can hold.
Custom jersey, pre-washed, heavyweight, own last. One small factory in Asia they say they have visited. Pay described as aligned with European work so the finish has to match. Ethics as floor. Folklore as the subject. They wrote that down so it would not become a slogan season.
Britain as material is the other half. Not pageantry. The odd local rite, the hill giant cut into chalk, the goblin in the river, the thing a Deptford society still meets to talk about. Presenting that in contempo cloth is the experiment they named on the LFW page.
flow
Tale of the Six Fingered Hand does not need a plot invented here. Six digits in British story can be omen, gift, giant blood, a hand that does other work. Owen and Dunk did not publish a glossary with the title. They published a season name in the same grammar as Chaos and the Ballad of the Black Dog, Growing, Old Growth, HÆRFEST.
Current pieces on the site sit in that grammar: Green Man knits and zips, Celtic track, Barrow outerwear, Tor knit, Tatter shirts, Sludge, Pisky, The Stones, Motley, Malva, Alga, Loop, Trellis, Ornament, Barbarian, Arch Pocket, Wrought. Field notes as product names. Vessels and a stick holder in the same list so the studio practice stay.
sum
USA and EU carts include duty in the ticket. That is operations, not folklore. It is how a South London site talks to a foreign order in 2026.
The sixth finger is the new pamphlet. The method is the old one. Two illustrators. A research title. Cloth that has to keep up.
