The Makers: Vol. 01 - Sean Tran of Shhorn
- Iggy Van Reesema
- 4 days ago
- 3 min read
Updated: 3 days ago
The Makers: Vol. 01
Sean Tran — Shhorn
Today we speak with Sean Tran — designer and founder of shhorn — and the creative force behind the capybara team’s uniforms. Approaching garment design with a deep sensitivity to material and longevity. His pieces aren’t just worn, they’re lived in. Through natural fibres, hand-cut construction, and a practice grounded in drawing and intuition, Sean creates uniforms that are functional, beautiful, and built to age with character.
Sean’s story begins with the quiet intelligence of materials - how they live, age, resist, and respond. With shhorn, Sean has built a practice that treats fabric, metal, leather, horn, and natural dyes not as passive matter, but as collaborators. As participants in a conversation spoken through touch.
His studio holds less of the ritual of steam, and more of the ritual of process. It begins with graphite: lines drawn across large sheets of paper, where ideas shift scale - tiny garment sketches drifting beside full-scale silhouettes, collar curves wandering next to sleeve seams. Even the final cutting patterns retain these ghosts of ideation through traces of thought made visible.
The priority for me is beautiful and well produced materials, and most of the time, the people who are making this have a deep level of knowledge and respect for their materials. But it takes a long time (even generations) to achieve this, and it has taken me many years to know what is a well made material and what is not.
Sean’s education in architecture sharpened his respect for craft — for the way time, knowledge, and labour accumulate inside a material. He is less interested in where a fibre comes from historically, and more in how it has been formed — how yarns are twisted, how alloys are composed, how structures are coaxed into shape. Because for him, every material has a memory — and every memory influences behaviour.
His studio is a site of constant physical negotiation: weight, grain, rigidity, softness, elasticity. The body is attuned — fingers learning before the mind. The stitch spacing slightly tightening to strengthen a pocket opening. A fold shifting to become structure rather than decoration. A button moved three millimetres because the garment asked.
“For our pieces, we feel a strong responsibility for them to hold longevity, which in my eyes is true sustainability.”
Sustainability is not a marketing layer — it is embedded in the method. Everything is made-to-order. Every garment is cut by hand. Every offcut is kept, archived for future use. Longevity isn’t a trend — it’s an ethic.
Sean’s skepticism of certification culture — the paid stamps and marketing assurances — comes from experience rather than cynicism. He trusts the practiced hands of true material artisans: the dyer who has spent decades apprenticed to indigo; the spinner who understands tension by feel alone. Authenticity is not purchased — it is inherited, practiced, felt.
Constraints, rather than inhibiting creativity, expand his design process. He knows the limits of materials intimately — where the point of failure is — but creativity is found when we dare to unlearn this, and rediscover new ways of building.
And the garments that emerge — whether crisp as paper or weighted with wool — are made to be lived into. To develop memory and patina. To soften, crease, and shape to the wearer.
“I want people to feel both protected and empowered in my garments.”
In Sean’s world, craft is not the execution of a predetermined idea. It is the unfolding of a relationship. The hand learns as it works. The material speaks as it ages. And the finished garment is not an endpoint but a beginning - a vessel for future stories, carried on the body, shaped by time.
