The words luxury pet brand have been used for years as a claim. A price set high enough to imply quality is not proof of it.
At Colette et Gastón we work to a plainer standard. It begins with the fibre, not the finish. It is made by hand, and checked on a real dog. In five parts, here is what we mean.
I. The fibre comes first
A garment is the material it is made from, multiplied by everything done to that material afterwards. Get the first part wrong and nothing else recovers.
Our knitwear is made in baby alpaca, alpaca blend and Peruvian cotton, and each piece says which. Baby alpaca is the finest grade of the alpaca fleece, between 20 and 22.5 microns. It holds warm air, so the piece warms without weight. Read more in The Case for Baby Alpaca Over Cashmere.
II. The hand is the work
Our knitwear is made by hand in Huancayo, in the central highlands of Peru, on manual flat looms. A hand slides the carriage across the needle bed, row after row. Nothing in the process is automatic.
The tension of a hand-made stitch varies from one row to the next. That is what a production line does not reproduce.
III. The cut follows the body
A dog is not a small person. A scaled-down pattern pulls somewhere, always.
We check a cut on a body, not on a drawing. Our dachshund sizes are named for back length, 30, 35, 38, 42 and 45 centimetres, and size 35 was validated on a real dachshund, Azur.
IV. Origin is told plainly
The house began in Peru in 2020 and became a French company in 2023. Our knitwear is made in Peru. Our fabric pieces are cut and sewn in our Paris atelier. Both halves of that story are visible in every piece.
V. The restraint is the luxury
Quiet luxury is a phrase used to sell almost anything. Here it means a concealed closure on a shirt, cuffs finished by hand, a colour chosen to age well. The details a person notices when the dog moves, not when the box is opened.
In closing
A pet brand is luxury when it begins with the fibre, when the hand is real, when the cut is checked on the animal who wears it, when the origin is told plainly, and when the piece holds itself back.
For the longer argument, read Luxury Is Not the Price Tag. To see the work, visit the knitwear collection.