Most fabrics are chosen. The Celestial fabric had to be invented.

From first sketch to finished piece, it took us almost a year. Seven or eight failed base fabrics, a machine that kept punching holes where it shouldn't, and months of matching silk and trims to something that hadn't existed before. This is the story of how it was made.

The Idea: a Sky you can Wear

Our name comes from the sky. A parhelion is a halo of light that appears beside the sun, and celestial imagery has run through PARHELA from the start.

With the Celestial collection, we wanted to go further than a print or an embroidered motif. We wanted the sky built into the fabric itself: scattered yarns across a wool ground, like stars on a clear night, part of the cloth rather than sitting on top of it.

How Needle Punching Works

To get there, we turned to needle punching. The machine carries hundreds of fine, barbed needles that drive loose yarns down into a base fabric, again and again, until the fibres lock into it. There's no glue, no stitching and no print. The pattern becomes part of the fabric's structure.

It's a demanding technique. The machinery is complex, every setting affects the result, and the base fabric has to be strong enough to take thousands of needle strikes without giving way. That last part turned out to be the hardest.

Seven or Eight Fabrics before the Right One

Every needle that carries a yarn into the fabric also pierces it. On most base fabrics, those strikes left holes: tiny at first, then visible, then structural. A garment that comes apart where its pattern sits is no use to anyone.

So we kept testing. We worked the machine across seven or eight different base fabrics, adjusting the weave each time, looking for one dense and resilient enough to close around the needles instead of tearing. Each trial meant new samples, new settings and weeks of waiting.

Eventually, we found it: an Italian wool blend, 80% wool and 20% polyamide, at a heavy 445gsm. Tight enough to hold the yarns. Soft enough to wear against the body. It was the first one that let the sky in without letting the holes through.

Then the Silk, then the Trims

Finding the fabric was only half the job. A wool this special needed a lining to match, so every Celestial piece is lined throughout in 100% silk. Developing a silk that sat right against a heavy, needle-punched wool, with the right weight and drape, took its own round of sampling.

Then came the trims. Custom wool ribbing for the cuffs and hems. Plant-based corozo buttons and silk-lined pockets on the overshirt. Embroidered logos rather than printed ones. Each had to be sourced, sampled and matched to a fabric nobody had made before.

Add it all up, from concept to finished piece, and it came to roughly a year.

No Two Pieces alike

The yarns are placed at random, so the constellations fall differently across every length of fabric. Where a pattern lands on a chest, a sleeve or a pocket is never repeated.

That means no two Celestial pieces are the same. Yours will carry a sky that nobody else is wearing, whether it's the sweatshirt, the hoodie, the bottoms or the overcoat.

A Note on the Price

A year of development, a fabric made in tiny runs, a full silk lining and London making would usually put a piece much higher up the luxury price ladder.

We chose not to price it that way. We wanted the Celestial pieces to be worn and lived in, not just admired. That meant accepting margins far thinner than the industry would consider sensible, and we're comfortable with that. Some things are worth making simply because they're special.

The Celestial collection is what happens when there's no deadline, no seasonal drop and no shortcut worth taking. It took a year because that's how long it took to get right.