RCI Reserve is short for the REESE COOPER® Reserve Program. A new ongoing project where in simple terms, we up-cycle everything we’ve been keeping in the office for the past few years into new garments. With every season comes sampling & production, where both cycles leave some leftover materials. This can be fabrics, linings, snaps, zippers, ribbing, eyelets, screens, yarns, cording… the list goes on. Over the past 5 or so years we’ve made it a point to not throw anything out with the goal of finding it a home later down the road.
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When designing the first Reserve pieces, we gave ourselves a few rules.
1. A fabric cannot be used for the same purpose it was originally intended for
2. No new patterns can be created
3. All pieces have to find a way to incorporate a patch pocket made of raw natural canvas
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By building out this framework, it becomes surprisingly freeing to have fun with new ideas.
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The leather hooded jacket that was previewed is a great summary of the project. The leather was leftover from our AW22 varsity jacket production run & handbag development. The zipper is from our SS22 sampling time period, the hardware is excess from various production cycles.
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Each piece is finished with the special Reserve label. This gets filled out by hand on the day of completion. There is also a new RC Sleeve Patch for new special projects like this, or anything non “mainline.”
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