Emily’s years in commercial fashion had exposed her to the machinery of mass production — the volume, the disposability, the environmental blind spots. “I’d go on buying trips and come back with massive suitcases of samples, only to cut through them with scissors before I even left the airport, just to avoid customs duties. It started to feel so wrong.” Emily has seen the factories in China, and knows the exact playbook to drive profit. “I know the recipe to make money,” she admits. “I feel a calling to bring it back to South Africa and to bring the fashion I wanted to create back to more of an art form.”
That calling now shapes every element of her brand — from small-run production to an insistence on care, craft and local connection. “It’s not the most sustainable business model. I’m not growing exponentially or wholesaling large volumes, but I’ve thought a lot about what I want to stand for. You can’t just churn out endless styles, waste materials and be thoughtless about where things come from. There has to be care — about the materials, about the hands making them. I’m very insistent that everything I create has a purpose.”
Emily King Universe may still be in its early phase, but its creative world is deeply considered and intimately constructed. Emily’s approach to building her range is intuitive, personal, and tactile — worlds apart from the fast-paced, trend-chasing cycles of commercial fashion she left behind. “I usually start by thinking about something I wear a lot,” she explains. “Especially for the ready-to-wear clothing, it’s about staple pieces I’d want in my own wardrobe.” Each garment emerges from Emily’s own style instincts, and then gets filtered through a process of careful refinement.
Some of the most distinctive pieces come from what Emily calls a “crazy design week” with her mother and grandmother — a now-annual ritual that birthed the upcycled range, ‘Universal Legacy Line’ (I’m obsessed); “it’s happened three times now. My mom’s collected vintage jewellery and doilies,” she says. “Weirdly, it all circles back to my Fedisa graduate collection, which was made out of doilies — I actually won the Foschini Design Award with it, like 10 or 11 years ago.” Their design process is chaotic in the best way. “We lay everything out — the house looks like a bomb’s gone off. I’ll pin on the mannequin, my gran will machine sew, my mom does the handwork. It’s a full collaboration.” Her grandmother, ever the punk traditionalist in her own way, might insist the edges stay raw. “She’s so ahead of it,” Emily laughs.
While trends like crochet and upcycling are having a resurgence, Emily notes that these practices have been part of her process for years. “I’ve spent so much time trying to find the right hands to make the crochet pieces,” she says. “I literally found people’s aunties, mums, nannies, grannies. I’ve got three phenomenal suppliers right now.” These include a young woman and her sister who crochet together, a woman named Patricia who handles sampling and production, and even “an incredible guy in the Drakensberg mountains who has a vintage loom and makes scarves for me.”
Across each category — whether it’s a raw-edged hoodie influenced by her gran, a tracksuit in locally made fleece, or her screen-printed t-shirts that she refused to cheapen for margin’s sake — the thread running through is uncompromising craft. “I wasn’t willing to compromise,” Emily says simply. While she continues to develop the clothing side, her heart is increasingly pulled toward accessories. “I’m looking into doing a lost wax course to make more silver jewellery, and hopefully cast my own pendants and charms.” Emily makes her jewellery by hand, and I’m currently obsessed with the wild siren-esque glamour of the Ethereal Collection.
At its core, Emily King Universe is about connection — to materials, to makers, to memory. “I’m still figuring out what categories to grow and where to put more energy,” she says. “Building this little network has been such a dream.”
At its heart, Emily King Universe is a vivid antidote against fashion’s greyscale minimalism — a kaleidoscopic world built from emotion and generational synergy. In an industry often obsessed with polish and polish alone, Emily’s pieces are charged with feeling. “What really inspires me is a feeling,” she says. “Like an emotion you get when you put something on. Maybe it makes you feel childlike or cheeky or confident. I’ve always been drawn to items that evoke mood.”
This intuitive, emotive approach sits at the core of Emily’s design philosophy, and her personal wardrobe reflects it completely. “My cupboard looks like a dress-up box — if it’s a t-shirt, it has piercings or something weird on it. I like people doing a double take.” Creating space for that kind of expression in the real world comes with nuance, and I feel that Emily’s mastery is inviting her customers to take risks and play; “sometimes it takes a festival for someone to wear a colourful necklace,” she reflects. “So it’s a dance — figuring out how to stay relevant and commercial in such a niche space.” Personally, I think our world is longing for the fantastical expression of fashion as escapism. In this, Emily couldn’t be better situated.
Emily’s ultimate vision is fashion as a celebration — of self, of life, of the everyday, and “for fashion to slow down. For people to feel confident and excited to express themselves. I don’t want people to wait for a special occasion to wear something amazing — we should all dress like life’s the party.” This philosophy is a reminder that conscious fashion needn’t be flat or neutral. On dopamine-dressing, Emily muses, “If I’m having a bad day, it’s probably because I’m in a tracksuit,” she laughs. “I always feel better if I’ve got lip gloss on or a cute top. Clothing and accessories are such an amazing way to feel great and to have a colourful, beautiful life.”
In an era of overproduction and overexposure, in which culture appears to be algorithmically flattened, Emily King’s Universe offers a compelling alternative; if fashion is to have a future worth believing in, I reckon it might just look something like this.
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