03 Jul 2026
WORKING brings together William Kroll of Tender Co. and Robert Newman of Middle Distance, two designers whose work has always sat a little outside ...
WORKING brings together William Kroll of Tender Co. and Robert Newman of Middle Distance, two designers whose work has always sat a little outside the usual categories of menswear. William’s work with Tender has been part of PPHH for years. His clothes are practical, colourful and often strange in the best sense: deeply considered pieces that change with wear and seem to have their own internal logic. Robert’s work through Middle Distance follows a similarly inquisitive path, with a focus on materials, processes and garment systems that feel experimental without losing their connection to use.
The brand feels like a natural meeting point between the two. The clothes have recognisable starting points: workwear, utility, everyday dressing, but they are gently pushed out of shape. Details are reconsidered, fabrics are treated with curiosity, and familiar garments are given enough of a shift to feel new without becoming difficult.It is not quite workwear, and not quite fashion, though it draws from both. What makes it interesting is the sense of two designers thinking through clothing in real time, with humour, rigour and a willingness to let things get a little odd.
With the latest collection from the brand now out on the shop floor, Ben sat down with Robert Newman to talk through the project, the thinking behind it, and what has been going on inside their heads lately.
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William and Robert, Paris 2025
Until I met you both around nine months ago, no one in the company had ever met either of you, and no one I’d ever spoken to had either. So, as well as being a delightful surprise, it is probably a testament to you both that we’d been buying Tender for a number of years, and are now about to become three seasons deep into WORKING, despite never trying on or feeling a garment first-hand.
Did you set out to be enigmas, or was that just circumstantial? With that in mind, how does it feel to be travelling and showing in 2026?
I don’t think either of us means to be particularly enigmatic. It’s more that we’re both just a bit shy, and squirrelled away in slightly out-of-the-way places as far as the global fashion industry goes: Glasgow, Scotland, and Phoenixville, Pennsylvania.
It’s really refreshing to bring the collection to Paris to show. For us, it recontextualises it within the wider landscape. It shifts our perspectives too, seeing different people trying it on, and seeing what people from different parts of the world go for. In the past two seasons, we’ve come home with a slightly adjusted perspective on the clothes we make, which is super valuable and keeps it interesting and reciprocal with our customers.
From our last meeting, I gleaned that you, Robert, were a student of William’s years ago. Is that right?
It is. Fifteen years ago now. William taught me on the denim and shirt projects in first year at Westminster, when he was in the early days of Tender.
How did that develop into something more personal and collaborative?
We’ve stayed in touch over the years, often as sounding boards for each other’s ideas. I’ve dotted around designing quite technical product for various companies and, while mostly working as an external consultant, I have often gone to William for advice, especially since setting up Middle Distance in 2020. In late 2023, just as William’s move to the US was solidifying, it began to make sense to start designing together.
Robert's solo project, Middle Distance
Good teachers are worth their weight in gold. What was he like as a practitioner, and how did that dynamic shift when you started collaborating?
I had gone into fashion school not really knowing what I was after, and seeing something like Tender flourishing helped give shape to my interest in taking things apart and putting them together, and seeing how stuff works.
From an actual teaching perspective, it’s funny looking back on that. I taught at Westminster for a few years after graduating, to pay for my MA while my design work was getting going. I remember wondering at that point what the hell William thought he was doing teaching when he wasn’t that much older than the students, but maybe that’s part of the point. As a teacher, he was pretty much the same sounding board as he is today.
Sketches and fabrics for WORKING development
Obviously, both of your respective roles as designers have put you into constant partnerships of some sort, whether that be with factories, producers or other makers. What made you choose something more permanent, like creating a brand, and what has been the biggest compromise in your own process in doing so?
We don’t see it as a compromise. In both of our respective other work, we’re relatively solo and strict, so by contrast, our design process on WORKING has made us both hold ideas a little less tightly, pending interrogation, and sometimes destruction, by the other.
Both Tender and Middle Distance, which have their own esoteric sets of rules, have become stronger and more focused since the inception of WORKING. The process allows us to hold mirrors up to each other’s ideas and perspectives, which is incredibly freeing, and clarifies what we do and don’t need to do with the collection. We were kind of doing this reciprocally already before WORKING, and it seemed natural, when the opportunity came along, to turn it into a cohesive body of work.
Trials, tribulations and technologies of working on different continents
Just in terms of practicality, how does the process of making a collection work? Are you spending hours on Zoom, other platforms exist, or emails, or both? And how does the germ of an idea flesh out into something cohesive? Furthermore, how do you keep the momentum until you’re ready to show the collection, especially with pitfalls and the like?
We both have pretty extensive vaults of unused work, stretching back as far as art foundation, aged 18 or 19. A lot of the initial ideas in a WORKING collection are things that we’ve had floating around for a while, either between us or separately. These usually get chewed over between us through calls on WhatsApp and FaceTime, and a stream-of-consciousness text message thread that we each contribute to over the other’s night, with the time difference between us. They often end up unrecognisable, or cancelled in place of a less convoluted idea we’ve cobbled together in two minutes.
The momentum kind of fixes itself. We only see each other three or four times a year, two of those in Paris, so we have these focal points where everything transforms itself in the space of a week spent driving around between factories.
Pitfalls? There aren’t any. Everything goes exactly to plan and works perfectly as we first envisioned it.
WORKING Book 3
We’re honoured to be one of the handful of global stockists out there. Thanks for choosing us. It was a no-brainer even before we saw the first collection. In my mind’s eye, it was the raw nature of what William does, seamlessly, every pun intended, clashing with the almost futuristic and technical state of Robert’s work that set my mind racing. We haven’t been disappointed.
I actually found viewing the Middle Distance collection adjacent to Tender in the showroom fascinating, and it helped me understand WORKING even more.
That’s a joy to hear. It’s a privilege to work with you guys.
Is there a person or brand you’ve ever wanted to work with that hasn’t come to fruition for whatever reason yet?
Not really. I don’t think either of us really views it like that. Increasingly, it’s just exciting to work with the stores we have, our suppliers, and the people who contribute at the end: photography, styling and so on.
That said, for Robert, the fantasy collaborators list would be Richard Torry, Bonnie Cashin and Moreno Ferrari. For William, it’d be Patience Grey, Wharton Esherick and Norah Waugh.
WORKING x The Ouze 2026
Weird question, but is there a substance or material that you’ve ever wanted to use but couldn’t, and why? Similarly, who do you admire in the industry, and who do you think is doing something that excites you right now?
The materials list is longer than both of our arms. We’ve both done a lot with experimental materials. Middle Distance has a sort of guiding-light project that’s had multiple iterations, developing living, growing textiles that adapt seasonally and change with the wearer. We’ve made jackets with living turf, elaborate sniper suits harvested in specific locations, and three-layer fabrics with live leaves and grass as the outermost laminate layer. They’ve all been shots at something not quite possible.
We both really admire the jewellery brand The Ouze, with whom we’ve recently collaborated. It’s easy, when you make clothing, to feel like you’ve seen through the eye of the needle, and that nothing can feel magical or mysterious again. Enter jewellery. Toby, who started the brand, was a few years below me at university. There are photos of him wearing my MA collection somewhere, also made from live grass and partly handwoven by Robert and Ben’s mutual friend, Hollie Ward. They make hand-carved, lost-wax pieces, which feels like alchemy. For the same reasons, we’re both also really into perfumes, another baffling art that’s best kept mysterious.
Hollie Ward, Andrew Groves' Essay, Robert's MA collection
We both have a lot of time for Professor Andrew Groves also, who was head of fashion at Westminster and founded the Westminster Menswear Archive. He’s taken a more academic turn of late and writes a newsletter about menswear, totally dissecting things in a really concise and forensic way. His essay on the Pet Shop Boys art director Mark Farrow is amazing.
What lies ahead, and would you ever travel to Australia? We’ll only be slightly offended if you say no.
I’m sure we’ll make it to Australia one way or the other. I have friends in Melbourne, and we hear so much about the music scene there. We’d love to visit. As for WORKING, we’ll just keep building and see what happens.
The full collection from WORKING is available in-store and online.
