Coastal Edit: Notes from Crovie

For Spring / Summer ‘26 we ventured to the North East coast of Scotland to a tiny fishing village called Crovie, or ‘Crivvie’ as the locals call it, a location so famously hard to reach that a courier company once built an entire television advert around it. The premise being that if their drivers could deliver here, they could deliver anywhere. Standing halfway up the path with a damp cardboard box, the storyline more or less writes itself.

Crovie was built in the late 18th century by families displaced from the inland estates during the Highland Clearances. Pushed off their crofts to make room for sheep, then sponsored into fishing by the same landlords who had moved them. Lovely stuff.

There’s a single row of houses, a footpath running in front of them and then the North Sea. Cars are left up at the top of the cliff. Anything you need, from groceries to furniture, is carried down the steep path on foot. Some residents use a wheelbarrow, the kind of detail that sounds romantic until you’re halfway down the hill in the horizontal rain with a week’s shopping.

Man in cream pinstripe heritage shirt walking across rocks at low tide on the Aberdeenshire coast

Man in beige patchwork seersucker hoody and matching cargo shorts leaning against a yellow rendered cottage wall

Man in navy raglan zip through knit and patchwork seersucker shorts sat on the harbour wall looking out toward the cliffs

We’d been talking about Crovie for a while before we actually went. The collection had been pulling toward the coast through the design process and fabrication choices. Lighter cottons, washed linens, soft layers built for early starts and weather you cannot quite predict. We wanted to shoot it somewhere that did not have to perform for the camera and Crovie was never going to.

Everything from the stone cottages to the lichen on the rocks has been weathered into something honest and that’s the spirit we wanted the collection to carry. Pieces built for early starts, long walks and the occasional wrong turn down a footpath that ends in the sea.

We walked the path down and back up more times than we would like to admit. We spoke to half of the residents. We watched the tide quietly cover the pier, the way it has done twice a day for two and a half centuries. Then we packed up the gear, climbed back up the hill one last time and drove south.