By last summer, Dryrobes had appeared in Vogue, newspaper style pages and on Rita Ora. In 2012, production moved to China, and in 2016 the brand partnered with Adidas to produce Team GB Dryrobes for Olympic swimmers and divers. Years later, he improved on the prototype in his shed, selling the first official Dryrobe in December 2010. Bright is a 54-year-old dad from north Devon who has surfed from a young age – when he was 16, his mum made him a waterproof robe with a towel lining and a hood so he could stay warm and change more easily on the beach. It started, the tidy marketing story goes, when Bright’s mum sewed him a cape. Photograph: Paul Simpson has taken 12 years for Dryrobe to reach this point. When another sign sprang up in nearby Blackrock, warning to “beware of Dryrobe wankers”, a counter-revolution began, with “types” creating the “I am Spartacus”-esque solidarity hashtag #dryrobewankers. How and why did a speciality surfing robe become a fashion statement, and how did it come to inspire, if not an all-out culture war, at least a culture tiff? In November 2020, a laminated sign appeared on a lamppost in Sandycove, Ireland: “By order” read big bold letters: “No Dryrobe or Dryrobe types!!!”. They don’t just stand out – Sloman thinks that people wearing them want to stand out. While company founder Gideon Bright says sales are even across each colour (and customers in general are “an equal split of men and women”), the camo-pink combo is the Dryrobe that most often gets papped on Instagram pages such as Sloman’s. You can get them in blue, black, red and purple, but the most eyecatching is a camo number with a hot-pink fluffy interior. One particular Dryrobe may have played a part. Grazia magazine has branded Dryrobes “the must-have, all-season coat” – while Amy de Klerk, digital fashion editor of Harper’s Bazaar, says Dryrobes remind her of the “comically oversized Balenciaga coats” that hit the runway in 2018. “Oh my God! I can’t afford it!” Like the Ugg and the Croc before it, the Dryrobe is divisive, inspiring ire but continuing to grow in popularityīeyond Brighton, the fashion world has also taken notice of the robe. Though she swims herself, Wilkins laughs when asked if she’d ever get one. Elise Wilkins, a 28-year-old Brighton resident who runs the similar page, believes Dryrobes are favoured by the middle-aged and the middle class. There’s the woman in the supermarket the mum on the school run the man in the cafe Russell Brand in a field of sheep. On his Instagram page Sloman has spent the last year documenting Dryrobes where Dryrobes were not designed to be. Slowly but surely though, as we spent more time not simply in cold ponds but outdoors in general, Dryrobes began migrating inland. Dryrobes have been spotted everywhere from the pub to the bus stop.
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