More than two decades ago, Cary Vaughan and Jenna Wilson were working together in New York City in the fashion industry, quickly becoming disillusioned with how garments were made and sold.
“The way things typically worked was you made a bunch of things, they felt really disposable, they weren’t made ethically, and it isn’t great for the earth,” Wilson said. “We thought, let’s do something different.”
So the duo began making their own yarn-dye woven textiles, creating boldly colorful garments designed to be timeless and worn for generations. In 2009, they founded Ace & Jig, which specializes in women’s clothing known for bright, cheerful colors, eye-popping pattern mixing and a level of handmade quality designed to remain in a wearer’s wardrobe for years to come.
As Ace & Jig became a go-to brand for women seeking stylish clothing made sustainably, Vaughan and Wilson began thinking about the next steps for their brand.
“We were interested in the interiors world and thought this could be another evolution of the brand,” Vaughan said. “People were always asking us for home items and things like that.”
Vaughan grew up with Lee Childers, design director for Valdese Weavers’ Inside Out performance fabric brand, so she gave her longtime friend a call.
“Valdese Weavers was so fascinating to us because it has been around for 100 years, it’s employee-owned and they shared a lot of our values and ethics,” Vaughan said.
Pretty soon, Vaughan and Wilson began working with Childers on what an Ace & Jig-Inside Out collaboration might look like.
“It was really easy to come together because they are woven, so we were just translating their wovens into upholstery-grade fabric,” Childers said. “It was cool for our team to dive into that and see it come to life in this other way.”
Childers said the biggest challenge in creating a performance fabric collection with Ace & Jig was deciding which of the brand’s seemingly endless library of patterns to select for upholstery.
“We knew we wanted a stripe, a feature stripe and a cordelette stripe, and we just went from there,” Childers said. “Once we figured that out, it was easy to translate a woven into a woven. We were just trying to make them as close as we could to the original fabrics.”
Ace & Jig releases around 50 to 60 new textiles each year for its women’s clothing collection, with many of the patterns being retired at the end of their run. The Inside Out collection resurrects some of those designs from the archive, which Vaughan said will appeal to their clothing customers.
“A lot of our customers collect the textiles, so they will be excited to see some of them return,” she said. “It was really fun for Jen and me because we got to go through our history and bring back stuff, which we’ve never done before.”
Though the patterns are existing in Ace & Jig’s archive, Childers and her team reinterpreted the motifs in a fresh palette ideal for both indoor and outdoor spaces.
“Seeing them in the colors unique to Inside Out was really exciting,” Wilson said. “These guys have an amazing sense of color, so it was cool to see the rollouts of the neutrals, the brights. We only ever do one or maybe two colorways of one fabric, but now we’re like, ‘We have to have all of these!’ It’s so fun.”
Childers said this is the most colorful collection Inside Out has ever done, allowing the company’s dye operation to experiment with saturation and shades.
“We dyed eight colors and two yarn pellets to be able to achieve the brightness that Ace & Jig does,” Childers said. “We had so much fun with that.”
Valdese Weavers introduced the Ace & Jig x Inside Out collection in May at the Interwoven textile fair to rave reviews, and Vaughan and Wilson said they’re excited to see the fabrics finding homes on patios and poolsides soon.
“Our clothing is functional and fun,” Vaughan said. “So for us to create a fabric that can be by your pool is just really cool.”
