OLLI HULL: EPIGRAPH - Debut Accessories Collection

We’ve seen the bags, the suits, the repurposed bridal gowns and hand-painted shirts, and now, Olli Hull’s debut accessories collection, Epigraph, has finally arrived, as the London-based artist and designer offers up a series of wearable relics that seem to exist in the liminal space between artefact and adornment. Leaf cuffs that coil instinctively around the arm, siren collars that shift with the body, nightcaps and reclaimed ties that carry the ghost of another life. Nothing here is merely decorative. Everything hums with intent.

The title itself is a kind of soft thesis. These pieces don’t explain themselves; they suggest, they imply, they linger. They feel like fragments pulled from a larger mythology, one that has been quietly unfolding across Hull’s multidisciplinary practice for nearly a decade, spanning painting, garment-making, and an ongoing act of world-building that resists neat categorisation.

There’s a sense, throughout, of the natural world pressing insistently against imposed structure. Roots splintering concrete, thorns threading through suiting, softness edged with something sharper. The body, in Hull’s universe, is not a blank canvas to decorate but a terrain to navigate, something layered, storied, and alive. Epigraph distils this philosophy into objects that feel intimate yet charged, smaller in scale but no less weighty in meaning.

The leaf cuffs, perhaps the most immediately striking, wrap the forearm with a kind of uncanny precision. They evoke something anatomical, almost surgical, laced closures that recall both Victorian binding and medical suturing, while their forms nod to darker mythologies, reimagined through Hull’s lens. There is a tension here between exposure and concealment, between what is shown and what is usually kept politely hidden. They do not so much accessorise the body as reveal something about it.

In contrast, the siren collars move with a quieter fluidity. Drawing on folkloric water spirits, elusive, dual-natured, impossible to fully possess, these pieces exist in two mirrored states: White Water and Black Water. One glimmers with a washed-ashore luminosity, all pale canvas and delicate lace; the other sinks into shadow, rendered in dark satin and inky textures. Designed to be worn multiple ways, at the throat, in the hair, and around the waist, they resist singular definition. They adapt, shift, and transform depending on the wearer, suggesting identity as something equally unfixed.

Then there are the ties. Perhaps the collection’s most subversive gesture. Once symbols of conformity and performed respectability, they arrive here reclaimed and reworked, sourced from charity shops and wardrobes of a previous life. Hull paints over them entirely: thorns creeping across silk, watchful eyes, root systems spreading quietly beneath the surface. The silhouette remains familiar, almost corporate, but its meaning has been thoroughly undone. What once signified control now feels unruly, even ceremonial. By day, a uniform; by night, something closer to ritual.

The nightcaps extend this language further, slipping suiting codes into a more private, after-hours register, the moment when the performance of the day dissolves, and something softer, stranger, and more honest emerges.

What grounds the collection, beyond its rich symbolism, is a deeply considered approach to craft and material. Each piece is hand-painted by Hull in their London studio, ensuring no two are identical. Fabrics are sourced with equal care: deadstock textiles, donated garments, vintage ties given new life. The process is as much about reclamation as it is about creation, a quiet insistence on continuity, on the idea that objects can carry histories without being bound by them.

There is, ultimately, a kind of intimacy to Epigraph that feels increasingly rare. These are not accessories designed to complete an outfit in the conventional sense. They ask something of the wearer: attention, curiosity, a willingness to exist slightly outside the expected script.

Or, as Hull suggests, perhaps they offer something simpler and more necessary, a retreat. Not an escape, exactly, but a soft refusal. A way to step, however briefly, out of the relentless choreography of being seen, and into something quieter, stranger, and entirely your own.

Shop the Epigraph accessories collection in full at ollihull.com