Camille Osei

Camille Osei is Fashion Editor at Ruvyne, working from Copenhagen. She spent fifteen years buying for independent stockists across northern Europe before moving into journalism, and writes chiefly on construction, longevity and the economics of the trade.

Osei began on the shop floor of a two room stockist in Antwerp and stayed in buying for fifteen years, latterly running the womenswear budget for a group of four independent shops. The work meant sitting in showrooms in January deciding what a customer would want the following winter, negotiating minimums with mills, and living with the consequences of those decisions on a markdown sheet six months later. It also meant handling several thousand garments a season, which is the only reliable way to learn what a well made seam feels like in the hand. She moved into writing in 2019, initially covering the wholesale calendar for trade titles and then more widely on how clothing is specified, costed and sold. Her preoccupations are consistent: the gap between what a garment costs to make and what it is priced at, the industrial reasons a colour arrives in a shop when it does, and the slow erosion of allowances, linings and interlinings that makes so much mid market clothing unrepairable. She is unconvinced by the language of investment pieces and more interested in whether a coat can be let out at the side seam. At Ruvyne she covers fashion across reporting, criticism and the monthly buying columns, and appears on the podcast, where she is usually the one asking what something weighs. She lives in Norrebro, cycles to most assignments in weather that tests her arguments, and keeps a working relationship with two alteration tailors who have repaired more of her wardrobe than any brand has replaced.