Kirrin Finch · Brooklyn
The freedom
to feel like
yourself.
Laura Moffat and Kelly Sanders Moffat wanted clothes they could recognize themselves in. The company they built made that wish useful to other people.
JULY
2014
Pittsfield, Vermont
They wanted to look
like themselves.
There are enough decisions to make before a wedding without having to negotiate your way into your own clothes.
Laura Moffat and Kelly Sanders Moffat married on a Vermont farm in July 2014. Both gravitated toward menswear, and neither wanted a dress. They found their wedding suits through Brooklyn tailor Bindle & Keep. The experience helped bring a larger question into focus: where were the clothes they wanted for the rest of their lives?
A wedding can justify an extraordinary amount of planning. An ordinary Wednesday should require considerably less. The founders’ account of Kirrin Finch begins in that space between a solution for one important occasion and the wish for something people could wear every day.
I find the everyday part particularly moving. It is easy to understand why somebody wants to feel right in a wedding photograph. The morning before a meeting matters, too. So does dinner with friends, or an afternoon when a person wants to leave the house without making another compromise.
Clothing occupies a peculiar place in our lives. It is practical, intimate and public all at once. We live inside it while other people read things into it. Getting dressed can become tiring when the available choices keep offering versions of yourself you do not recognize.
The founders took that experience seriously. Their ambition grew from something they knew closely enough to describe in detail.
Two names, one invitation
Kirrin
&
Finch
Characters who helped give a company its name.
There is a little
childhood in the name.
Kirrin Finch takes its name from Georgina Kirrin of The Famous Five and Scout Finch of To Kill a Mockingbird. The British and American characters also connected with the founders’ own backgrounds: Laura grew up in Scotland, Kelly in New Jersey.
In a 2017 oral history recorded by Kelly Reddy-Best, Laura spoke about the freedom she associated with those characters. Kelly added that she had worked as a librarian while teaching. The literary name had a particularly fitting home.
That small detail tells me more than a grand declaration about disrupting fashion ever could. Books had already been part of Kelly’s working life. The name carried something the founders valued before there was a company to explain.
I like the kind of freedom it suggests. A child absorbed in an adventure has more interesting things to think about than whether the clothes are making an acceptable argument about who they are.
Adults deserve some of that ease. There is pleasure in looking put together. There is another pleasure in being able to stop thinking about the outfit and get on with the day.
A belief made practical
The patient work
inside a welcome.
The first collection launched in 2016 with a short-sleeve shirt and a long-sleeve shirt. The company’s account describes more than a year spent developing the shirt, making samples and trying them on the founders and other people.
A year is a substantial answer to the apparently simple problem of a shirt. It gives the founding story a useful weight. There was a wish, and then there was the repeated work of trying to make something that answered it.
Additional buttons helped address gaping across the chest. Removing darts produced a straighter silhouette. The collar was made smaller and more structured. These decisions connected the feeling the founders wanted with the behavior of the garment.
That is where the story becomes most convincing to me. Someone has to decide how far apart the buttons belong. Someone has to look at another sample and admit that it still needs work. A welcome becomes useful when enough people care about its practical details.
Those details also respect the customer’s time. A shirt that lets somebody move through a conversation without constantly adjusting it gives a small part of their attention back. It is a modest thing to ask of clothing, and a meaningful thing to receive.
Clothing Connection
A grandfather
belongs in this story.
One of the most revealing pieces in the company’s journal was written by Kelly’s stepfather, Stuart Sanders. It traces a family connection to Lou Sanders, who ran a menswear shop in Philadelphia.
Stuart remembers the wholehearted way his father welcomed Kelly into the family. Kelly’s own contribution to the piece returns to the importance of being accepted as she was. The shared clothing business is an interesting coincidence. The memory of being welcomed is the part that stays with me.
We often look for a founder’s influence in a previous job, a degree or an early commercial success. A family experience can leave an equally durable impression. Somebody’s generosity becomes part of your understanding of how people ought to be treated.
That does not need to turn into a tidy claim that one childhood moment explains an entire company. It is simply a lovely piece of the human history behind it. Kelly chose to share the memory alongside the work she and Laura were beginning.
It changes the emotional scale of the story. The business serves a community, but the underlying wish is recognizable person by person: to arrive as yourself and be received with warmth.
A person who has felt that kind of welcome may know how much another person could use it. There is something generous about making room for the possibility in the work you choose to do.
Choice has a personal meaning
Leave the
occasion
with its
owner.
Kirrin Finch describes its clothing as menswear-inspired apparel for women, trans and non-binary people. That is a clear account of whom the company seeks to serve. Within it are people with different lives, tastes, bodies and reasons for getting dressed.
The freedom to choose has to leave room for all that variation. Somebody may want a suit for a wedding. Somebody else may want to look sharp at work. Another person may simply enjoy a particular color or the shape of a collar.
I think a thoughtful company honors the importance of an occasion while allowing the wearer to decide how important the clothes are within it. Sometimes an outfit carries a profound personal meaning. Sometimes the great achievement is that it feels right and the person can think about something else.
This is also why a story about clothing should make room for pleasure. The founders liked button-up shirts, bow ties and the look of menswear. Desire was part of the beginning. They wanted options they would enjoy.
A customer can deserve practical care and still have a sense of style, humor and adventure. Making more choices available lets those qualities find their own expression.
The contribution I see
More room
for a life.
What I admire about Laura and Kelly is the decision to keep going past the solution for themselves. Their wedding clothes answered one question. Building Kirrin Finch meant staying with the larger one, through samples, adjustments and the unglamorous work of making an idea available.
That is an ambitious thing to do with a familiar frustration. It asks for the patience to learn, the willingness to listen and the confidence that other people’s ordinary days are worth the effort.
The company’s name remembers fictional characters. Its journal remembers a grandfather. Its first shirts remember the time spent trying to get the details right. Together, those things give the business a character that a description of the product range alone could never explain.
The most generous result might be a person leaving the house feeling ready for their own life.
Rob
A few useful details