Meet the Maker - Marie Willey & Will Brown, Old Town
Ahead of exciting second event with Old Town, or as we’re referring to it at Labour and Wait HQ - Workwear the Sequel, we sat down with Will and Marie, the well loved founders of Old Town, to learn of their experiences designing and making in an ever-changing clothing landscape.
Old Town is an independent British clothing maker renowned for its timeless, hard-wearing garments, designed and made entirely in England. Founded by Marie Willey and Will Brown, the brand creates small-batch collections using British cottons, woollens and linens wherever possible. With regard to the design, the aim is for simplicity and restraint with minimal styling, letting the construction influence the look. References are made to costume of the past but the intention is for contemporary relevance. Old Town has cultivated a loyal following among those who value quality, authenticity and the beauty of well-made everyday clothing.
Read on for our full conversation -
For those who are unfamiliar with Old Town, can you tell us the story of Old Town’s origins? How it came to life and what it represents?
Will: As a partnership, we've been Old Town since 1992. So that's quite a long time, isn't it? 30 something years. But the name existed before that. During the 1980s I worked for a boutique in Soho, called Demob.And they had a spare shop, called Demobilisation over the road in James Street. The guy who had Demob said I could use it for whatever I wanted and even change the name. They had these fantastic, fabricated steel letters, saying ‘DEMOBILISATION’. So, scrambling the letters and turning the M upside down, I came up with Old Town. So that's where the name came from. But this was some years before Marie and I worked together as a partnership -
Marie: Sort of mid 80s, wasn't it?
Will: Yes, this was sort of mid 80s.
Marie: But before that, you were making clothes.
Will: Yes - I had a shop in Shoreditch in the late 1970s, rather pretentiously called ‘Modern Classics’. It only lasted about 18 months, in Rivington Street. There was nothing in Shoreditch at the time, other than buddleia, corrugated iron townscapes and the odd newspapers blowing in the wind, basically. It wasn't very successful, but that's where I started, and went on to work for Demob in the '80s, and then with Marie from the early ‘90s. We moved to Norfolk, Norwich, in particular in 1992. Old Town wasn’t really going to be clothes it was going to be, enamelware, kitchen bits and pieces. Not nearly on the same scale as Labour and Wait.
Marie: It was a mixture, though.It was old and new. It was a lot of old enamelware, kitchenware, furniture mixed in with new things like blankets, shaker boxes, shakers seem to be quite popular at the time, didn't It?
Will: It was sort of lifestyle.
Marie: It was lifestyle.
Will: But people didn't really know what it was about. It didn't really work in Norwich, did it? It was dreadful.We were selling balls of string and candles, things like that, which wasn’t necessarily at the top of the trend list in Norwich, 1992.
Marie: Oh, yes, we used to spend a lot of time wrapping up bundles of candles tied with bits of string. But it didn't work. It just did not work.And so we decided to do the shirt in a box, the workwear.
Will: Yes.
Marie: The same design box that we still use today.And I suppose, more significantly, we got some press.
Will: So this is obviously pre-internet. Marie used to work in styling for magazines and knew pretty well how to get press, so, if you sent magazines transparencies, as we called them at the time, the chances were, they'd use it because they had pages to fill for the weekend supplements and that was the sort of thing they would go for. So we got some press like that - the sort of lifestyle thing where people would want to come and have a look at your house, rather than what you were doing, and the way that you lived.
Marie: They would include our clothes, our products, but people were pretty much more interested in our home. At the time we did have quite an unusual house because it was corrugated iron.It was called ‘the tin house’, and so we would get a feature on the house and then they would talk about what you did. And, I mean, to be fair, it worked. It started our mail order and we built from there. Then we’d get people coming to visit because they were curious, they wanted to see the clothes in the flesh, so they’d get on the train, and, you know, Norwich isn’t a difficult journey, so people would come on a sort of pilgrimage. We used to do printed catalogues, as well didn't we? In the early days, before the internet, we did a lot of printed catalogues.
Will: And then the internet came along and made it possible to run a business from a small place. By this point we'd moved to a town called Holt, which is a market town in Norfolk, and the exposure of the internet it made it quite doable, didn't it?
Marie: Yes! So, we were in Norwich for 8 years and Holt since 2000, so 25 years.
Why workwear? Where did you get your inspiration?
Marie: Well, I think we could identify at that time that it was very, very difficult to buy simple plain clothes in cottons. There was a shop in Canterbury called Deakins. And we bought some -
Will: A very trad outfitters.
Marie: We bought a drill shirt, which I’ve still got, a three button pull on work shirt. The shop was closing down so we bought a couple of them.And then Will did a version of that, which became our shirt in a box.And from that - well, we had an interest in workwear at the time we've got lots and lots of ephemera, old postcards of railway workers, rural work, rural scenes and we were quite inspired by that. We got quite into the rural life, which was partly when we decided to move out of London. We got totally, totally sucked into gardens, growing vegetables doing all of that. Which was absolutely fine, but after a few years, it sort of got a bit boring, to be perfectly honest.
I suppose you perfect your garden, get that going all throughout the season.
Marie: But then you change it, and then you do another type of garden, and you do another type of garden, and then you realise, actually, I'd rather be talking to people than vegetables. But glad that we did it. What would you say, Will, about why you did workwear? What’s your take on it?
Will: Well, like the Labour and Wait aesthetic, it's the sort of durable, functional, it's got a nice purposefulness to it. I think that's was it.
Not just clothes for clothes' sake, but with an actual purpose.
Marie: Although how many people wear it as workwear - not many.
Will: I think someone described our clothes at the time as ‘workwear for men who sit, looking at a computer all day.‘
Marie: Oh, there was a better one than that, Adam Nicholson said it was ‘working class clothes for middle class people’,which I thought was a very good way of describing it, and totally how it was.
Will: Well, whether the customers would want to be nailed in that ways another matter - it’s become sort of an anti-luxury.
Marie: The best description was, though, the prison clothes. Somebody was looking through the window when we had the shop in Norwich, they were with some friends looking through the window, and we heard them say, ‘this is the shop that sells prison clothes'. We took it as a compliment, I have to say, though it was the time of our striped shirts.
What was the first garment you ever made?
Will: Well, as a teenager, I was starting to make clothes. I had some terrible disasters. An example of that was - Ok so, think of David Bowie and his pomp, early 70’s - I would have been 16 or something like that, I got this royal blue towelling fabric and some elastic that you would find on cuffs of a bomber jacket. So, I made these towelling trousers, with the elastic around the waist, and round the cuffs. The cuffs! So, towelling is, pretty heavy as a material and once you sat down and stood up a few times, the bits of towelling would pull off so your backside would look like the rear end of a sheep.That wasn't a great idea. But, it was a start.
What is your favourite material to work with?
Will: The very first roll of material I bought rather than just little lengths here and there was at a fabric supplies in Great Titchfield Street, when there used to be wholesalers there, and bought 100 metres of black cotton drill. So, cotton drill has always been my fabric really.
And do you have a favourite designer at all?
Will: Do you know, I know very little about designers. I was greatly inspired back when I was a teenager by Vivian Westwood and Malcolm McLaren. They had a shop called ‘Let It Rock’. This was pre-punk, ’50s revival. The '50s were very big in the 1970s. That was a brilliant, brilliant shop in the King's Road.
Marie: I like Margaret Howell but again, probably because they're incredibly simple by design.
How do you go about naming your clothing?
Marie: That’s interesting, we were just thinking about this.
Will: Yes, because of this new style of trousers. That takes the longest time, coming up with a name that feels sort of right. What you want to do, ideally, is to get people using your language. If they're using your words for the clothes, then you're winning. Do you know what I mean? So, these new trousers that we're doing for the autumn event, we think we're going to call them ‘Metros’, no apostrophe or anything, just ‘Metros’.
Marie: I think when we started off with the ‘Borough’, the ‘Marshalsea’, the ‘Vauxhall’ it was part of our London obsession. When we did the ‘Stanley’, we wanted something northern and industrial and there’s a town called Stanley.Then I think we moved to ‘Ida’ who was a character from Graham Greene’s ‘Brighton Rock’. There'll be something happening at the time, something that we've read, something that we've heard about that’ll seem right for the time and for the character of the piece. But the dress, the ‘Limehouse’. We'd already done a dress called the ‘Limehouse’.
Will: We’ve recycled that name.
Marie: That, again, must have been our obsession with London.
Will: Yes, that's got a long association with laundries. It sort of fitted the look of the garment - the wrap around nature.
The Spring event with Labour and Wait was filled with loyal customers, most dressed head to toe in Old Town, becoming a living archive of your work, how did that feel for you as makers? Were there any garments, or indeed faces, that you were surprised to have seen?
Marie: There was a few faces that I haven't seen for a very long time. There was one guy in particular who I recognised, who had a very, very nice, very old, navy drill worn suit that looked absolutely lovely.
Will: It was a really nice event. I mean, for 35 years, I hid upstairs. I was never in the shop. I was too nervous to be with the customers. So I was having a great time there.
Marie: I realised how much I miss, talking to people, because they're all, they're all pretty interesting people.And they were very, very pleased to see Will, because, like he said,he would never come downstairs so they were very pleased to see that Will actually existed. That he wasn't a hologram.
Is there a particular garment that holds a special place in your memory or something in your catalogue that you are always drawn to?
Marie: The thing is because we're quite, I would say, slightly irreverent to our clothes - I know people keep things for years and years, they wear them and then they go a bit shabby so they wear them as gardening clothes and then they patch them and keep them alive - I suppose because Will can make anything at the drop of a hat we don't really hang on to things.
Will: In ones affections you want to move things along, that’s the thing. I think it's quite healthy to just be slightly bored and then you just move on, wondering what the next thing is. That comes along quite naturally, it’s not a struggle, it’s nice to do.
Marie: There’ll be things that you don't fit into anymore, there'll be styles of clothes - the skirt that we used to do that had quite a demanding waist band, if you don't mind me saying so, and a side button - I just wouldn't wear that anymore because, you know, things change. I mean, some of the things that we've done, we've done for a very long time, but you do have to tweak them because people change - you have to move with them.
Will: Just as an example of that. The workshirt in a box that we were doing, if you saw it now, it would look, really quite big and we’ve tweaked it more recently, as a slimmer cut. But essentially you've got to keep working on something, to keep it looking the same because one's view on things changes, obviously.
Marie: I mean, recently you've changed that one shirt (The one Will is wearing). You've changed the proportions on that to bring it more into line with the Unity Jacket fit because people are wearing things bigger, looser.You have to be mindful of that.
Will: It’s if it feels right. If something starts to feel not quite right, then you can improve it.
Old Town has gained a huge customer base with events, exhibitions and articles throughout your tenure - is there a particular event/platform, or maybe even a particular customer, that resonates with you today?
Marie: I think a pivotal moment for us was, when did we do the unity suit?
Will: That was 2013.
Marie: Up until 2013 we were doing corduroy and tweed. We had started to feel it was becoming quite mainstream. So we stopped doing that and made the ‘Unity Suit’, which was a big departure from what we were doing. It was such a different look. We want to try and do things that were unisex.
Will: More to do with modernism, I suppose.
Marie: More to do with modernism. By then, I think we were starting to get a little bit bored with where we were physically, with the rural thing.It sounds awful because it sounds like you're just thinking, ‘right, finish with that, trash that’ but the thing is, you do move on.And you know for a fact that if we’re getting bored with it then other people are going to start getting bored. If they don’t know at the time, it’ll happen in the near future. So Will came up with the brilliant ‘Unity Suit’ and we made a few things that were more unisex.That, I think, was quite a significant change for us. We got a lot of grief for it.We knew people were going to go mad, and they did.
Will: It is difficult because people decide what you are and what you’re about and if you suddenly tell them, well, I'm not really about that, it’s difficult.
Marie: We still get pigeonholed with the nostalgia, the 1940s.And you have to be quite firm about what you're going to do and stick with it.
You want to stay ahead of the curve. You’re in a very unique position where you’ve spent so much time considering styles before they even reach your customers, so you’ve got a good idea of what their future appetite might be.
Marie: That’s all Will thinks about! He’s very, very good at having a sense of when it's time to stop doing on thing and move on to the next. Like with the new GP jacket,some of the people who received it were existing customers and a few of them said that this jacket is the best one yet, and they’ll have a whole collection of our previous jackets. But Will suddenly thought ‘this is what I want to do’. I remember him coming into the house wearing it and it was absolutely brilliant, that’s what designers do, they have a feel for it. You’ve got to stick to your guns, just do it. I think the worst thing must be is if you haven't got an idea and you're just following other people.
Will: There have been a couple of occasions over the many years, where someone's asked me to do something specific, and it hasn’t worked, has it? I can't deliberately set out to please somebody.
Tell us a bit about the Unity Suit; was there anything in its naming and the thought behind creating a two piece boiler suit?
Will: That is a really good question. It’s quite important. the naming of it because not only is it the two pieces that go together to form the whole, but it's also for male and female, completely unisex.
Marie: It was united.
Will: Yes.
Marie: It was the thought of uniting the top and the bottom.
Will: And it seems right for the current times, when there was so much identity politics and division, that it’s what pulls us together, I think, is the important thing.
Marie: But quite often it gets called a utility suit because people see ‘U’, and then they think workwear, and then the next thing, step is utility.That’s not it - it’s unity. It’s united.
So, you made the decision to close the shop?
Marie: June of 2025. We made the decision two years before that, believe it or not. The process took about 2 years - letting customers know, receiving the most phenomenal amount of orders in excess - like 15 shirts, 15 pairs of trousers. It took us nearly 2 years to get through those orders alone, people had always said, ‘please, please, please, let me know if you're ever going to stop’. So we sent an email with our intentions and then it went crazy.
Will: It's not a trick you can keep doing - a closing down sale but you never close.
Marie: Yes, that’s a one trick pony.
What led you to decide to close and what are you hopes for the future of Old Town?
Marie: There was various reasons why we decided to scale back and not retire, number one being finding and maintaining machinists.
Will: We started to lose a couple, didn't we?
Marie: More than a couple. At one time we had ten machinists, latterly, we were down to four and it was not possible to operate with that many machinists. We tried to find machinists, we couldn't find them. That was one factor. Number two, the building that we were in desperately needed work doing to it. And to do the work, we would have had to move out, find somewhere to go, and then move back in. And you know, we're seventy, we didn't want to do that. Then number three, I think tiredness, utter exhaustion.
Will: The sheer quantity of work,
Marie: The way that we've worked, which has been brilliant, when you're young. When you get to our age, lumping a hundred metres of fabric up a rickety staircase, rolling it off, washing all the fabric. It’s physically exhausting. Yes, we had help, absolutely brilliant help, but in the end, it all devolved us. You can't get a young person to carry up a roll of fabric like that up the stairs, so it was down to us to do it. We were utterly, utterly exhausted. And, although it is a nice idea make the clothes in the way that we were making it and everyone knew the effort that went into it, in the end, I think that caught us out. Physically, we just couldn't keep on doing it. I'm a bit sad about the shop. It was a very nice way of connecting with customers, we had customers who you'd seen for 30 odd years. We've had some of the same customers that came in with small children and the small children are now all grown up. You know, it was a very, very nice connection, but at the end of the day - exhausting.
We still are doing a bit, the clothes that haven't gone into the factory, the lines for the events - we’re still making them, but not at the same scale as we used to be.
Will: But the great thing is, by teaming up with Labour and Wait, having found this fantastic factory, which is really brilliant, finding that, is the direction we're quite happy for it to go in, isn't it?
Marie: Oh, yes, absolutely. And the more events the better!
Will and Marie will be at our Covent Garden shop from the 5th - 6th September. Accompanying them will be; a limited run of the newly designed GP Jacket, available in both navy wool and khaki canvas, the debut of the new Limehouse Dress, crafted in black drill, a special edition Standard Shirt in a classic hickory stripe and a brand new trouser, the ‘Metros’ designed to sit between the width of the Plains and HMB styles, alongside the existing styles that Labour and Wait are pleased to be producing on behalf of Old Town.
Pop by for the opportunity to say hello to the Old Town duo and add to your collection of workwear!
Pop Up Shop
12 Dryden Street
Covent Garden
London
WC2E 9NA
11.00am to 7.00pm
Saturday 5th - Sunday 6th September 2026
