Friends First
Three women, two brands, and one Sporty Top
Over a handful of conversations this spring Emma and Claire from Fireside Pilates and Anne from Next Season sat down with me to discuss the collaboration between their brands. The sweater is great. The worlds they're building are even better.
Emma and Claire have built Fireside Pilates around the premise that you already have what you need — your body, the work of showing up, the discipline of building from what is present and repairing what calls out. No reformer, no studio lease, little or no equipment. Pilates as something substantial and accessible simultaneously, two deeply qualified and certified teachers, close friends who teach each other while you join them. Their singular joy filled format started as a way to keep them connected when life landed them in cities a few thousand miles apart, and became Fireside when they decided to invite us all into the room with them.
Anne Warren, an MIT & Cambridge educated mechanical engineer turned circular fashion designer started Next Season from the same foundation — what already exists and how that can take new forms. Preowned sweaters, deadstock yarn, mill scraps with years of life still in them. She takes what is already in the world and gives it another life knitting by machine in her Brooklyn studio. When Claire walked into one of Anne's knitting workshops there was a meeting of the minds. The collaboration that followed feels like it was meant to be, because they were already building in similar ways.
The result of the three women coming together to build? "The Sporty Top" — bespoke-knitted from deadstock fine merino, eight hours per piece, strategic vertical rib so it functions in parity with petroleum based activewear, the option to pick your color-way à la Nike By You, the first drop landed with no two the same, meeting the taste of the buyer, an unplanned one-of-a-kind series. Function and form – wear the top for pilates and for almost anything else, repair it if it needs it, and eventually years from now when its life as a top is finished unravel and reknit into something else – because it was designed to be circular. Drop one sold out in a week. Drop two orders are open now.
On its face, this is a story about a sweater. Underneath, it is a story about three women who are quietly redefining what luxury and ambition look like in 2026, while building inside a growing community that is showing up in ways that lead you to think they've been patiently waiting for someone to meet them where they want to be.
Fireside Pilates, two co-founders co-teaching, through their online subscription platform and select in person pop ups in cities where the people they want to be with happen to be — New York, San Francisco, Barcelona. Select gratis YouTube classes that are so good strangers on Reddit recommend them to other strangers. The brand looks like a movement business and runs like a friendship that decided to make room for everyone else. Fireside is inclusive rather than exclusive, sessions that challenge, fundamentals that are deeply principled. Claire was clear with me about what Fireside is deliberately countering — the stuffy, intimidating, hyper-feminine Pilates environment that has dominated the category. She put the cultural shift directly: "There's also an interesting moment right now where people are swinging away from what we've seen the last...five, seven years...the idea of the Pilates princess and the matching sets..." Fireside is the version that takes the work seriously and yet refuses to take itself too seriously.
Anne has developed an aligned practice, solo, with different tools. She trained as a mechanical engineer, spent a decade in tech — Accenture, Chase, Jetblack, Alexander Wang — pivoting to circular fashion in 2024 by way of a knitting habit that became a Substack that became Next Season. She designs small run seasonal collections, teaches workshops at her studio, and other locations in NYC, consults in circular-fashion tech for sector leaders like Alternew. And, like Fireside, Anne told me she's "taking an atypical approach to scaling. I don't expect Next Season to become a 'big' fashion brand, selling large quantities of any given SKU. My vision for scale is more of a 'studio' model — specifically working with existing brands to co-create products using existing materials, in limited drops. I view Next Season as a platform for inspiration and education around circularity and reuse." The studio, the Substack, the workshops, the consulting, the clothes — all of it is one thing, expressed through a modern omnichannel world.
The collaboration with Fireside fits cleanly inside that frame. So does the launch event Anne, Emma, and Claire threw for drop one, where, as Anne wrote on Substack a few weeks ago in passing, "one of Claire's crazy ideas (now I just say yes before she even tells me what she's thinking) was to kick the party off with a knitting workshop."
The Material: Merino
Wool is one of the most misunderstood fibers in your closet — most modern consumers know a lot about cheap cashmere and very little about the greatness of wool. Specifically Merino — it is one of few natural fibers that genuinely deserves the attribute of performance fiber. Years later, with regular wear, a piece made out of Merino is still wearable, still repairable, outlasting almost every other knit you own — then there's the performance side the temperature regulation, the wicking, the biodegradability, the structural reasons a fiber that evolved on a sheep that thrives between 5°F and 95°F gives you a top that performs similarly on a body. Their Sporty Top is a lasting way to get the plastic out of what you sweat in. Most synthetic activewear is engineered to be worn seven to ten times before it looks tired and gets thrown out. Wool can be worn and reworn for years. The math is mathing. Why is anyone still spending serious money on plastic clothing?
The commitment to sourcing high quality deadstock is a key factor in why this collaboration exists as it does. Anne sources from Colourmart, a UK-based deadstock supplier — cones of mill overrun, dye-lot remainders, surplus that brands ordered too much of and would otherwise downcycle or throw away. High quality 100% merino. Anne builds her palette around what is on tap, and once a color is gone, that edition is finished. This is both a structural feature of the supply chain and a planned constraint in her design process. Each Sporty Top takes eight hours of machine time and isn't meant to be competing with fast athleisure brands, it's meeting the specialized gear world that may cost you more up front but over the long run has a very attractive cost per wear factor. I pressed on this since we live in what seems to be a race to the bottom with pricing for “performance gear”.
The answer: "The element of choice and participation in how their piece comes together," Claire told me, "seems to shift how people think about the price. It becomes less about the cost and more about actively participating in the craftsmanship element." Most direct-to-consumer activewear sells you a uniform and tries to make you feel like you chose it. The Sporty Top inverts that. The wearer is genuinely a participant because the material requires choice, and the piece you receive is, in a real sense, yours alone.
Drop two is up now, and their audiences are leaning in. Which raises a question: do they want to scale?
"We are not that interested in feeding the algorithm," Anne said. "The social stuff of it all. I believe that if something is gonna be successful, and consumers want it, that'll come in its own time. You don't necessarily need the whole social engine part of it. You're either really leaning, or you don't really. Those are different audiences."
What is unusual about all three women, and what I think the rest of us watching are quietly recognizing, is how they define success.
Claire's version: "We've had the luxury of building Fireside exactly how we want to — at a pace that works for our lives, our friendship, and our values. Emma and I have been able to do this part-time, which means we haven't had the financial pressure to compromise on what Fireside is or how we run it. The typical path to scaling online requires constant social media presence and, to some extent, displaying your body in ways we're not comfortable with or interested in doing. If scaling requires us to do things that contradict who we are or how we want to work, then honestly, we don't want to scale."
Anne's version, the same shape in different language: "For me, that's how I think about Next Season — wanting to build a different system of doing things, but it has to be consumer led. Consumers have to buy in, and then other people can take it seriously from there too." Neither of these approaches seed a unicorn-or-bust path. They both describe a working life that is supposed to keep being a life. The friendship continuing to be a friendship. The studio continuing to be a studio. The customer continuing to be a person. Anything that requires breaking those continuities, by their own definition, is not success.
For now the journey and their community are the destination.
Log on, show up at an in person event, buy a Sporty Top — they're all worth it.
Claire, Emma, and Anne at the launch party for Sporty Top 1.0 - all three in their own one of one.
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