Charlie Hedin kept moving, Paris to Amsterdam to Los Angeles, and kept buying new sheets. In 2017 he decided to produce his own that would last and started Tekla in Copenhagen. Before that he had been assistant to the CEO of Acne Studios in his early twenties, co-founded the footwear label Eytys and sailed for Sweden’s youth national team, which he credits for the rule that everything must function. As a boy he named all his boats Tekla.
Ryota Iwai grew up in Kobe and spent four years, starting in high school, working at a secondhand shop stocked with clothes from around Seattle. He studied business in Osaka, took night classes at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo and worked at Norikoike, a knitwear label that made its own fabrics, before starting Auralee in Tokyo in 2015. “What I’m passionate about is creating materials,” he says, and the brand still builds its collections on fabrics it develops, with trips to Mongolia for cashmere and to New Zealand for wool. He unwinds at a sento, a public bath, up to six days a week.
Their first collaboration, in October 2024, was about onsen bathing: towels, poplin sleepwear and a robe coat, photographed in hot springs. The second, out October 28 through both brands’ stores and limited stockists, goes to Tekla’s side of the world. Tekla calls the theme wintering, and Auralee’s notes describe dressing for a cold day and the pieces people return to at home, with the line “no bad weather, only bad clothing.”
The home pieces are pale yellow shearling slippers, deep brown percale bedding and striped lambswool blankets, plus cotton socks in deep blue and grey. The clothing is cashmere and merino knitwear in Forest Green and Soil Brown and brushed organic cotton flannel sleepwear in Dawn Checks, a check inspired by the colors of the sky before sunrise.
Tekla’s bed has had a lot of visitors. Jacquemus made sleepwear and home pieces with the brand in late 2022, JJJJound did a bedding set, and Stüssy is on its fourth collection. The fashion-brand bedding collaboration is now a format, and many of them amount to a logo on a pillowcase. We think this one is different in kind, because Auralee is a fabric house first, so it reads as two textile companies agreeing on a palette rather than a label renting a bedroom. Stone Island and FRAMA did something similar in 2023 with a room inside Stone Island’s New York flagship.
Tekla’s percale is stonewashed organic cotton. The percale, the flannel and the slippers are made in Portugal, and the lambswool blanket, 80 percent virgin and 20 percent recycled wool, is made in Lithuania. In the US the slippers and the blanket are $540 each, the duvet cover $230 to $455 and pillowcases $55 to $85; the sweaters and cardigans run $600 to $790, and the flannel pajama shirt is $400. The slippers are the piece to buy on day one. Brown percale is hard to judge from a catalog photo and will look best in February.
The first collaboration was about getting out of the water. This one is about not getting out of bed.
