INTERVIEW_ Pia of Loutre talks to Charlie Newman

Talking to Pia of Loutre clothing over the phone during lockdown is like having a long chat with the mentor you always wish you had. Finding your feet in the world, surpassing dreams over reality and learning what you stand for is part and parcel of life's course and inevitably growing up; which is where Pia’s secret to life lies. Like James Barrie’s ‘Peter Pan’ she too is the exception to the rule, “all children, except one, grow up”, but unlike Peter Pan trapped in Neverland, Pia has unleashed her relentless curiosity and unwavering braveness into the real world. Whilst the rest of us were dwindling hours away drinking tinnies, blurring the boundaries between weekends and week days in our youth, only waking up to find ourselves chained to a mortgage and grey suit with the brown, patent shoes that (don’t) match, Pia was examining her work and most importantly its worth, “‘Is this enough?’, ‘Am I doing the right thing?’, ‘Am I being creative enough?’, ‘Am I combining all of my skills?’”. The majority of us fight the aforementioned stereotype but fall into it all too easily, choosing soft, padding over sharp and tight-from careers, to clothing, to shoes, to body, all in that order.

Pia is an example of someone who is defying the system and is making it work with her sustainable skate clothing brand, Loutre. We’re all advised “to earn your money by something you love doing” but only a handful actually master this. If I do so flatter myself, send this piece on to any of your nieces, nephews, friends or even your very own ‘lost boys’ to inspire them in how to do just that.

What I enjoyed most about chatting with Pia is that she’s more than happy to discuss the hard graft she put in to reach where she is today, “when I was younger I was so jealous of a friend who had set up their own restaurant. I was working there and was always thinking ‘fuck I wish I had this thing, if I could just know what I could do.’” All too often we are faced with the success stories but never the gruelling route it took to get there. So where did Pia’s path begin and where does it end?

Pia’s journey began in her home country Germany where her mantra for life first struck, “I already had this idea even when I was really young that I wanted my life to be my work. I just couldn’t really get my head around this idea of having a job and not really caring, choosing to be safe rather than living for what I stand for.” Pushing her own boundaries as quickly and as far as she she could, Pia moved to Australia aged 18 in order to improve her English and learn how to surf, “it’s always felt important for me to improve on things I’m bad at and to learn. It’s very addictive for me to get more information on something I’m not so clued up on.” Unlike her friends who slowly started (the most dreaded word of all) ‘settling’ back home, Pia continued on her adventure. At her parents behest, Pia returned to Germany to study Photography and Design, which she recommends “for people like me who didn’t really know what to do.” Looking for guidance whilst studying Pia would read “so many books about peoples tipping points and when they finally found their life flow, and I always thought ‘why the fuck isn’t this happening to me?’ I was trying so hard and doing so many different jobs but it just wasn’t happening for me. I was so obsessed with finding this and it’s funny now to realise that I’ve just stumbled upon it.” With the help of hindsight and a pinch of self professed “endless optimism”, Pia can now see that whilst she “didn’t like my course…it opened lots of doors. Even though I didn’t really love uni it was there I really got into skating, so I’m really glad I did it as that’s how I found my people now. I definitely thought uni was a waste of time at the time, but now I realise it’s lead me to the work I’m doing now. It’s funny how these things sometimes work.”

From Sydney’s warm waters she braved Cornwall’s brisk surf for three years (her maximum time to stay put) but by her “third winter I was standing in this car park with my bare butt out trying to get my wetsuit on in the howling wind and I was thinking, is this even fun anymore?” Off she packed her bags to the Big Smoke where she landed her first full time job as a Product Designer, which she humbly admits to only getting because (take note the supposed ‘snowflake’ generation) she was “average at a lot of things” which turns out “to be quite useful, it’s important to be adaptable. Maybe you’re not the most amazing person in one thing, but you can be ok at ten things, you don’t need a specialist in each of them.” Whilst Pia found 9 to 5 life surprisingly easy to slip into, it was the after work hours that started to grate, “I thought I would move to London and swap surfing for skating, but I was just really busy and forgot about it for a while.” 

Off the treadmill she stepped and quit her job, fleeing to Panama where she “had a bit of mental breakdown about the whole thing. I realised out there that the whole urban thing wasn’t so bad after all and that I just wasn’t doing it the right way. I wasn’t living my life the way I wanted to and was lost, so I decided when I went back I would make sure I had balance in my life this time.” Pia switched evening pints at the pub for skating in London’s “really friendly” skateparks where she found her community and eventually her sustainable brand identity, “when I skate with kids, I’m always pleasantly surprised about how much they do know and how much they really care. I think we underestimate them. They have a different mindset, they’re angry! The Greta Thunberg movement is everywhere, news spreads so fast now, especially on Instagram so kids are really getting it now.” The brands name, Otter in French, was born out of her nickname and christened spirit animal; like an Otter, Pia is energetic, nimble, and loyal-her friends were spot on.

Forever challenging convention, Loutre was born out of saving a pair of her Nan’s “beautiful curtains”.

Pia had no use for curtains but did for skate clothes, so she decided to upcycle them. The polar opposite to the fast fashion generation she grew up in, Loutre is “all about preserving memories.” She reflects on how her mother “didn’t have much, they would save for quite a long time to buy this one thing, they would then value this item forever and my mum still uses them!

The mindset then was very, very different. Everything was valued very, very highly. Nobody had anything in excess but then this revolution of fast fashion happened and everyone wanted everything. It’s fucked up the whole generation around it, now we’re the children of that generation and we think it’s ok to buy a new t shirt every two weeks, and if it gets broken then that’s ok, it’s only a fiver, you can just get another, it doesn’t really matter. I’ve still got friends now who shop at Primark for example and they always argue that they don’t earn much money, that fashion changes so quickly, people think they can’t wear the same dress more than two times. Some fucked up shit like that! There’s no need for this excess. If we pay more money for each garment that’s made, this means the person thats made it has good human rights and the material was sourced well etc.

“” Like the rest of the sustainable sphere, it’s not enough just to be green, but to keep moving forward, challenging yourself and other peoples mindsets, “the research is there, there are people being very productive about all of this but if the consumer doesn’t ask for it, it won’t go further.””

How is Pia challenging herself I wonder? “I’d like to reach to a bigger crowd but without losing my touch and morals. I know I can do this as I’ve seen a designer in New York called Emily Bode who has achieved this. To reach a global market without sacrificing the morals you have is always the aim for me. A circular economy is the end game

It’s not often you interview a designer who openly praises another, but like the skating crowd, the sustainability crew are a friendly bunch “because unlike other designers, we all have the same end goal, we want the best for our planet so we’re happy to share information with one another.” What information is Pia willing to share with us? Apart from the occasional memory piece, the majority of her collection at the moment is in fact not made from upcycled fabric but from dead stock sourced from warehouses,

“Fabric that is too small of a quantity for large productions. They have 50 metres of a fabric say and they think that’s rubbish, whereas 50 metres is enough to last me a year. It’s a scale thing. There’s a niche for smaller brands like mine, there are a lot of resources that are untouched that we should be using. This is a really good thing but effectively if we’re using dead stock material but not questioning what this material actually is, where it comes from and how it’s produced, then we’re giving these big corporate companies a free pass to continue doing what they’re doing. It’s kind of green washing it - I highly disagree with this. I understand I’m using dead stock right now but it’s a good way of raising awareness of the amounts of materials that’s there.
”

Dead stock may not be the most glamorous of terms but nevertheless it’s still desirable.

At Loutre you’ll find roomy, oversized silhouettes swathed in check, florals, patchwork or stripes, so whether you prescribe to minimalism or maximalism, you’re bound to find your perfect pairing. You’ll be in good company too, from a distance the idea of Loutre may feel quite quaint, with a whiff of ‘make do and mend’ about it, when in reality she is part of the ‘Converse Spark Progress’, a platform that aims to spotlight and support young females creatives in London. Pia extends this support further herself in collaboration with female artists such as Solene Riffs, one project is simply not enough for her.

You might be wondering how this free spirit has dealt with the lockdown. Apart from not being able to skate, you guessed it, she’s adapted well and is using the time to work day and night on the next collection. Loutre only launches capsule collections, refusing to conform to the fashion industries never ending cycle of churning out collections. All of the garments are unisex to make the line more sustainable “because it means I don’t need to make a girls and a guys shape for each piece. It also means I don’t have too much stock of something.” Indeed Pia doesn't have too much of anything except a thirsty curiosity, a beautiful quality mostly found in children, “I was speaking to my housemate about this the other day and I said to her, ‘Do you feel like we’ve aged, like mindset wise since we were teenagers?’ And I was thinking, I wonder if this is ever going to happen to me? Because it really feels like nothing has changed.” And yet, the self confessed commitment phobe has done the one thing she’s vowed never to do, declaring “I want to do this job for 40 years.” Four decades of memories woven into clothes-a remarkable long term goal in a short term industry. I look forward to catching up with Pia then to hear more of her words of wisdom, but until then, shrug on your own beautifully crafted memories with pride and remember to always accessorise with a youthful grin at https://www.loutre.co