Wright + Doyle makes the chicest gardening clothes around
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It’s early September in Dorset, and fashion designer Izabella Doyle’s hands are berry-stained. The hedgerows in the field outside the converted milking parlour she shares with her partner, Matt Wright, a landscape gardener, are bursting with hawthorn berries, blackberries, rosehips and sloes. Doyle has been gathering fruit to make blackberry and bay leaf jam with her two young sons. She’s simultaneously talking to the Portuguese factory that makes the garments for Wright + Doyle, the clothing label the couple founded in 2015, and organising an event taking place during London Fashion Week.
Wright + Doyle initially launched with gardening-wear. Wright, 42, is a former artist who spent 15 years creating gardens for, among others, designer Simone Rocha, activist Samantha Roddick and creative director Christopher Simmonds. Doyle, 40, is a tailoring nerd and pattern cutter who studied fashion design at Dublin’s Grafton Academy, later moving to London to work for Gareth Pugh, Giles Deacon, Roksanda and Studio Nicholson. “The first season, I designed a working unisex uniform: a jacket and trousers, with pockets specifically designed to hold gardening tools. I tried to make everything casual,” says Doyle. “But after 18 years working in luxury fashion that began to feel like a waste of my skills.”
A taste for refinement runs in Doyle’s blood. She is from County Kildare, Ireland: thoroughbred country. Her father, who died when she was young, was a 6ft 6in racehorse trainer and bloodstock agent who wore handmade suits and shirts and Gucci shoes. “It was the 1970s and ’80s. He looked incredible,” she remembers. No surprise, then, that shirting in various weights of cotton and silk, and tailoring in wool, slowly started creeping into Wright + Doyle collections. “When I was working for other designers I always put a blue striped shirt into every collection, whether they liked it or not,” says Doyle. “Because I am most comfortable wearing a men’s shirt and a beautifully cut pair of trousers.”
Today the label’s twice-yearly offering of unisex shirting, tailoring and outerwear, and some dress and skirt styles, is loaded with artful details: double belt loops on trousers; oversized pockets; multi-functional shirt plackets; fine cotton jacket linings; and swaggering volumes of fabric – predominantly Italian-made but also English wool and Japanese cloth. “Two point two metres [of fabric] is what you’d get in a standard coat. Mine are more like five. There’s a generosity to the cut,” says Doyle. This season’s Stanhope jacket (£630) is made in a soft cacao-coloured single-stitched pinstripe Italian wool (also available in a yak-wool and nettle-fibre blend handwoven in India), with skirts and trousers in matching fabrics. Prices start at £330 for a shirt and go up to £995 for a coat. “It’s become quite a luxury product, but there’s a real ease and flow to it,” says Doyle. “We like things that you can just throw on and wear with no fuss.”
While Wright isn’t directly involved in the design process, Doyle continues to construct the collection with both of them in mind. “Matt’s always with us when we sell in the showroom in Paris, so when store buyers and clients come in they can see something on him, a size four, and something on me, a size one, so they get the whole arc of our range.” (It’s a strategy that appeals: each season, clients Sam Thorne, director general and CEO of Japan House London, and his wife, Eva Kellenberger, founder of a graphic design studio, buy two suits and a coat to share between them.)
Sold via its website and in select stores across the world, Wright + Doyle takes an unconventional approach to showcasing its collections, creating site-specific films and installations with artists and dancers, and exhibitions at the handmade California estate of the late artist JB Blunk since 2023. As a result, they have attracted a creative clientele that includes the Italian artist Enrico David, the film director Sally Potter, the singer Jessie Ware and her husband Sam Burrows, as well as architects, gallerists and foodies. (“People who care about food tend to also really care about what they wear,” says Doyle.) Garments are made in Portugal in limited numbers. When styles sell out they can be made to order by their English tailor.
A slow approach to fashion sits well with the rural lives of its once urbanite founders. In 2019, they moved with their sons, now aged six and nine, from a barge moored in east London to a 12-acre plot between a dairy and a beef farm five miles from the town of Sherborne. “Everybody, including the postie, is surprised that we’re living at the end of this beaten track. The place is so tucked away,” says Doyle. At breakfast in summertime they watch swallows swooping around the yard; in the winter, a lone barn owl.
Bought at auction, the milking parlour came with Class Q planning permission, which allows certain agricultural buildings to be converted into residential dwellings. “We had a year to develop it into something that was mortgageable,” says Wright. The single-storey house is now clad in cedar from a neighbouring farm with heating from an air-source heat pump. “It was fortuitous that half a mile down the road there’s a metal fabricator and in the other direction, a timber mill,” says Wright. Inside, the house has a pared-back rusticity, with hand-built shelving designed with Dean Edmonds, wood-panelled walls and collections of earthy ceramics.
Wright is best known for gardens that marry painterly planting with organic hardscaping materials. Now he is well into establishing a wild, ethereal garden of their own. The old concrete milking yard is filled with metal troughs collected at auctions, acting as a holding pen for trialling plants and growing others destined for clients. “It’s not a nursery as such but it gives me an opportunity to curate plants in different combinations, see how they grow and sit next to each other, before I consider them for a project,” he says.
Further from the house, a wide border has been densely planted with perennials; umbels of bronze fennel; Selinum wallichianum and Achillea “Credo”; wiry stems of sanguisorba and cephalaria; the native Cirsium tuberosum with its rich pink-purplish thistle flowers; various grasses; and the long flowering family of mulvaceae, Althaea cannabina and Anisodontea “El Rayo” all bringing a sense of movement to the landscape and a pleasing contrast to the industrial materials of the agricultural buildings.
After three years of hosting a flock of 30 Castlemilk Moorit sheep for wool and meat – their determination to jump any obstacle eventually proved too challenging both for their owners and the neighbouring farmers – their field is now home to the vegetable patch, where the family grows beans, salad leaves, courgettes, radishes, berries, rhubarb, beetroot and herbs. “We also keep some peripheral weeds – mugwort and others – that I like to use medicinally,” says Doyle. “We make tinctures, jellies, jams and oxymels [herbal extractions using vinegar and honey, traditionally used to protect against sore throats] to get us through the winter.” Doyle has culinary training and briefly worked as a cook; Wright enjoys cooking too. “Food is a big part of how we communicate,” says Doyle.
Wright plans to bring polytunnels onto the field in the near future for year-round salad and vegetables and a constant stock of plants. In years to come, they can imagine sharing some of the land with market gardeners. “We’ve got the privilege of all this space,” says Doyle. “The plan has always been to bring a community of people here.”
In the meantime, there’s a fashion business to run. And one loyal client hasn’t entirely forgotten its original intention. “Matt put on this season’s suit trousers to wear to a garden fair the other day,” says Doyle. “I said, ‘Maybe you should keep one thing out of the garden?’” Wright shrugs. “I put on Bella’s clothes,” he says, “and I’m instantly very happy and comfortable.”
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