Meet Buddy, the New Zealand label making conscious wardrobe basics from hemp
PHOTOGRAPHY BY NICOLE BRANNEN FOR BUDDY
WORDS BY IZZY WIGHT
“In a nutshell, I’m nerdy about T-shirts, how they feel and what makes them sentimental.”
Auckland-based designer Helen Young-Loveridge started her label, Buddy, in the simplest of places – with a high-quality, perfectly soft T-shirt. “[It’s] the item most of us wear most frequently in our closets,” she explains. “Provide one classic that fits the best, [and] it is reached for again and again.”
For more fashion news, shoots, articles and features, head to our Fashion section.
But instead of opting for a synthetic blend or all-cotton tee, Buddy’s range of colourful basics champions ‘the ecological, functional and aesthetic benefits of hemp’. Helen saw a gap in the market for contemporary, well-cut hemp basics and Buddy was born back in 2016. Below, she tells the story of the label so far.
Tell us about you. What’s your fashion background?
View this post on Instagram
Kia ora FJ! My name is Helen Young-Loveridge and I currently reside in Tāmaki Makaurau (Auckland), Aotearoa. I have been working in the industry in one way or another for about 13 years. I studied fashion design but career-wise, I have spent most of my time involved in retail and working as a stylist in both fashion and costume spheres.
In addition to Buddy, I work as a stylist and I own a vintage clothing store called Waves, which operated as a brick-and-mortar store here for three years. Waves offers predominately internationally-sourced vintage, hand-picked and curated by me. I’m focusing more on Buddy now, so Waves operates online and for special pop-ups around NZ.
View this post on Instagram
Like many, I’ve been interested for a long time in how we can approach fashion in a more sustainable way… the conclusion I always come to is how we can keep garments being worn and treasured for as long as possible. In my mind, clothing gains value through living a life, and extending that life is a key component for the future.
How did the label get started? Talk us through the process and the challenges.
The conversation started in 2016 when I had just moved back to NZ after a few years of living in New York. I had been interested in hemp as a textile for many years, and I saw a gap in the market locally for well-cut basics, especially in the space of wholesale for people wanting to make merch for their projects.
View this post on Instagram
I also saw the industrial hemp industry as a particularly exciting space in New Zealand. It still very much is and is really ramping up (despite the setbacks from the failed 2020 cannabis referendum). I’m excited to see where it goes and how I can be part of that. The dream would be to be working with NZ-grown hemp.
I’ve been collecting vintage for many years, and have always been particularly obsessive about T-shirts – how the cuts differ… and suit different bodies, how there is nothing better than a perfectly worn-in tee, and how your favourite T-shirts become special talismans. There is no better… feeling than that first wear out of the wash of your favourite tee. It is a nostalgic and sensorial experience… at least for me! In a nutshell, I’m nerdy about T-shirts, how they feel and what makes them sentimental.
View this post on Instagram
I banded with two others and we got to work, the main challenges being nailing the cut, hitting the right fit for all sizes in the range, and finding the best fabric and manufacturing processes. I designed the fit of the original Classic Tee pretty painstakingly, taking measurements from a stack of vintage tees I had collected, and tweaking aspects here and there so that each size would be as close to the perfect proportions for the body that was going to inhabit it as possible. It’s not an even grade between sizes.
Length was really important, not too long or cropped, and it has a slightly shrunken feeling around the shoulders and sleeve length. The final tee is a pretty ’70s and ’80s mix… the XS and S are cut-off vintage youth boy’s tees, my personal favourite finds… I was sick of only having weird ‘femme-cut’ tees with a nipped waist and usually some whack v-neck on the table for women (my answer to a more femme style became The Mini Tee, released in 2022).
View this post on Instagram
We ended up finding a vertically-integrated manufacturer, which handles the entire production process from growing to sewing and garment dyeing for us. This all took a while to get right, and we launched the brand in 2018. From 2018 to 2022 we only sold our Classic Hemp Tee, in a multitude of colours. I took over the reins fully in 2020 and now sail the ship solo.
What were you trying to achieve from the project at the time? How has this evolved and what are you trying to communicate through the brand now?
The starting points for Buddy were:
- A focus on using and promoting wearable hemp products.
- Making the best-cut T-shirt that would be reached for, again and again.
- Providing an alternative to currently available bulk blank T-shirts for merch making.
- To operate the brand outside of the usual seasonal model.
Buddy stemmed from a place of fascination with using hemp for clothing, first and foremost. As a crop, it has an endless list of ecological benefits. It uses one-third of the water that cotton needs to grow, is naturally organic (it’s a weed!), and enriches the soil it grows in with nitrogen. As a wearable textile, the fibre is super strong (four times stronger than cotton), so it lasts and lasts, and gets softer with age.
View this post on Instagram
Similarly to merino wool, hemp is antimicrobial, meaning that it doesn’t hold odour from sweat. This is one of my favourite aspects of hemp, as it means you need to wash it far less than 100 per cent cotton garments. It is also hypoallergenic, UV and salt resistant, and both breathable and insulating.
Hemp has been cultivated as a crop for textiles since 770AD… but fell out of favour in the early 20th century because it was lumped in with marijuana and suffered from the decades-long ‘war on drugs’ in many Western countries… it blew my mind (and still does!) that more fashion brands weren’t working with hemp, and that it wasn’t more present in the conversation around sustainability. At the time, it felt like it was relegated to the realm of vegan-adjacent ‘crunchy’ hemp stores. No shade there, but the fits weren’t what I was looking for, and everything seemed to be earth-toned.
View this post on Instagram
… Educating people about hemp as a plant and fabric has been an interesting journey… five years later, I think that hemp has really entered the dialogue in a major way, so there can be more focus on developing the brand and product offering.
How would you describe Buddy to someone who’s never seen it before?
Pretty simple really – as it stands, Buddy is your new favourite T-shirt (and shorts, socks and sneakers), cut right, in good colours. It’ll stick around for a long time – unless someone steals it, which oddly enough I get many reports of… it’s that good.
Who do you think is most exciting in Australian/NZ fashion right now?
View this post on Instagram
There are so many incredible minds on the go at the moment, too many to name. But I love the creators [who are] locally hand-making and dyeing one-off pieces like Emma Jing and Paige Jansen – their garments are works of art. Mary Hutchinson is a beautiful new Australian label and is as interested in hemp as I am.
I’m always excited to see what’s popping through the doors at Sully’s in Wellington, and That Looks in Auckland (I was lucky enough to do pop-ups for Waves at both recently). I’m a sucker for a great in-person shopping experience and a lifer retail girl at heart… both are such lovely spaces to find and try things you wouldn’t find elsewhere.
Go-to dinner party playlist?
View this post on Instagram
I made one special for you!
Who is in your wardrobe right now?
Unsurprisingly a lot of Buddy and a lot of vintage! [I] just picked up an amazing made-in-NZ leather jacket from Hunters and Collectors in Wellington… I feel like a bouncer in it. I’ve been thrashing this ’80s made-in-France Sonia Rykiel dress lately, it’s a patchwork purple velour muumuu… I call it my Grimace dress.
View this post on Instagram
It’s giving the purple blob (allegedly it was supposed to be a tastebud) from ’90s McDonald’s lore. And the one silver lining to winter is that I can wear my sporty new Frisson Knits jumper.
How can we buy one of your pieces?
You can find it all at buddybuddy.world and my stockists in NZ. Hold tight to buy IRL in Australia – [I am] working on it!
You can browse the Buddy collection here.
Liked this? You’ll love these...
