The practical impossibility of starting afresh

Don’t we all just wish we could start again sometimes? Don’t we all possess fantasies of disappearing into the ether and opening a teashop in the middle of the Scottish Highlands? Don’t we all just wish sometimes we could start with a blank canvas?

At YEL we start every season with a blank canvas: A white t-shirt stretched into the shape of our longing and positively pregnant with potential; Every season new ideas and images and designs come flooding through our little heads and we take biannual delight in seeing this evolve into the new collection, splashing down with relish upon the softest cottons; Every season we start afresh.

But there are complications. Old lovers don’t simply disappear off the face of the earth. You bump into them looking radiant with their new partners as you’re at the checkout treating yourself to a bumper pack of Kleenex. You enjoy halcyon days thinking you’ve moved on and matured, then suddenly they pop up again to remind you and sundry that you’re still just a hopeless shell stuffed full of incalculable neuroses.

The ghosts of our failures haunt us forever and here at Your Eyes Lie we’ve got a few ghosts.

Our old designs never just disappear. They pop-up on Politician’s old laptops and in un-shredded bags of bank statements, those certain designs that we thought had been smoothly erased from the annals of history like Trotsky from Lenin’s raucous party pictures.

At YourEyesLie we don’t like surprises, and heeding the advice of Sun-Tzu we “Keep our friends close and our enemies closer”. That’s why rather than cutting off our old relationships we keep a special place in our heart and on our website for them: You’ll find our ‘favourite’ older designs in the YEL Classic Gallery.

When somebody knows what a flop you are in bed, it’s probably wiser to stay friends.