Northform

I'm Ava Larkin. I started Northform in 2026 out of a converted pattern studio in Providence, Rhode Island.

Before this, I drafted patterns for COS and Theory. I spent ten years watching well-fabricked clothes get ruined by lazy patterning. $400 cashmere sweaters that fell apart at the shoulder seam because the brand had cut corners on the armhole curve. $40 t-shirts from a Portuguese mill that sat beautifully because someone had spent an extra hour on the neckline.

The pattern-making craft is invisible until it's done badly. When it's done well, you notice that one shirt doesn't pull when you reach for a coffee cup. When it's done badly, you spend twenty minutes a day adjusting whichever piece you put on.

Northform was started to invert the standard order: pattern first, fabric second, marketing last. Every Northform piece starts with a fit block, which is the master pattern, and the block is tested on six body types before a single yard of fabric is cut. My bet is that women buy basics over and over because the basics they have don't fit. If I can get fit right, the rest follows.

Where we make things

We don't own factories. We work with four of them.

Têxtil Vale do Ave sits outside Porto. They knit our sweaters, weave our shirting cloth, and run the cotton-linen blends for transitional pieces. They've been at this for three generations; the shoulder fashioning on a Wool Crew Sweater is done on a machine their grandfather bought.

Casa Bandeira in Lisbon makes our tailoring. Half-canvas blazers, single-pleat trousers, the trench. They finish jackets for two well-known European houses and have agreed to take our small runs on the same machines.

Curtumes Alcanena vegetable-tans the leather for our tote and belt. The town of Alcanena has been a Portuguese tannery hub since the 1700s. Vegetable tanning takes three weeks (chrome tanning takes a day). It's the construction reason a Northform leather piece changes color over years instead of cracking.

Algodonera del Norte in northern Peru grows and spins the Supima cotton for the entire Tee Program. Tee Program cotton is the only thing we source outside of Portugal, because Peruvian Supima is structurally better than anything we could find closer to home.

Setas do Porto is a small silk mill that weaves the cloth for our scarves and silk blouses.

The names of every maker sit on the relevant product page. You can look them up on a map.

What we make

Eight product pillars. About forty pieces total. Three weights of tee, five knits, five shirts, six bottoms, four tailoring pieces, four coats, five dresses, four accessories.

There are no seasonal drops. We add pieces when the pattern is ready, not when a calendar tells us to. If a customer buys a Mid-Weight Crew in March, the same crew is on the site in October, in the same colors, at the same price, with the same fit.

What we don't do

We don't put a logo on anything. We don't run sales. We don't do influencer seeding, runway shows, or "limited drops". We don't make trend pieces, statement pieces, or pieces designed to photograph well on Instagram. We don't make anything in a fabric we wouldn't wear ourselves for five years.

If that sounds austere, it isn't meant to. It's meant to be sustainable in the most boring sense of the word: the brand should be here in 2036, in the same colors, with the same shoulder block, and the customer who bought a Mid-Weight Crew in 2026 should still be able to buy the same one in the same size.

Ava.

P.S. Want to write to us? Hello at northform dot studio. We read every note.