HOW ROMEE BUILDS A CAPSULE RIDING WARDROBE

Nothing I design becomes a FOUR piece until all four of us say yes.

That rule sounds simple. In practice, it was the hardest and best part of building our very first collection.

A collection begins with a question I carry around for weeks: what's missing? Not what would sell what a rider actually reaches for and can never quite find. For our first capsule, the answer was ease. We chose cotton light, soft, made to move with you. Pieces you can wear in the saddle in the morning and keep on into the rest of your day, without ever stopping to change. We designed unisex pieces too, so the men in our community are part of it from the start. And everything carries our logo and our pattern, so there's no mistaking it: this is FOUR.

Before anything takes shape, I build a moodboard a picture of where we want to go. From there I sketch. And I begin to take things away. My first job on any piece is deciding what to leave out a seam that adds nothing, a detail that only exists to be noticed. I keep subtracting until the piece feels quiet and sure of itself.

If it were only up to me, that's where it would end. But at FOUR, my sketch is just the opening line of a longer conversation. Because then it goes to the other three. And this was new for all of us. We had grown up together in the saddle, but we had never designed together never sat across a table judging each other's instincts, piece by piece.

Each of them looks at a piece in a way I can't.

Zoé holds it up against real life: does this still work on a Tuesday, off the horse, in the city? Emilie checks how a piece feels the moment you put it on. Laurence catches what the rest of us miss the weight of a fabric, the exact tone, the way a hem falls.

Four people. Four strengths. Four different ways of saying no.

It wasn't always comfortable. But anything that survived all four of us came out stronger than I could have made alone.

And somewhere in the middle of it, the work started pointing forward. A silk collection chicer, more elegant, made for the life around the horse as much as the sport itself. We built it in our own FOUR colours, and together with a colleague who brings my ideas to life, I designed a new print for it so the lifestyle world could feel the link back to where we come from: the horse. It arrives at the end of August.

When you wear a FOUR piece, you're not wearing my taste alone. You're wearing something four riders looked at, questioned, and finally agreed on. Together, or not at all.

With Love, 

Romée ♡