Meet Blue Nude: the London label painting slow fashion in colour
The Gatherer · Sustainable Womenswear
Most sustainable fashion brands reach for neutrals. Katarina Protsack reached for a paintbrush.
Blue Nude takes its name from Matisse's Blue Nudes — the cut-paper collages he made near the end of his life, when he swapped the brush for scissors and let colour do the work of line. It's a fitting reference for a brand built entirely around the collision of art and clothing, and around the belief that sustainable fashion doesn't have to mean muted.
Katarina moved to London from rural Canada over a decade ago, drawn in by a semester abroad that never quite ended. She spent years working as a fashion buyer, watching the industry from the inside, before frustration with its indifference to ethics and waste pushed her to start something of her own. The gap she saw wasn't just ethical — it was aesthetic. "I used to wear mostly black," she's said. "There was a lack of brands at accessible price points that had intellectually minded colours and prints. I was a fashion buyer previously, so if I couldn't find it, I knew I had to make it myself."
Blue Nude launched in 2021. Five years on, it has shown at London Fashion Week, completed the British Fashion Council's Low Carbon Transition Programme, and built a reputation as one of the few brands willing to argue that a considered wardrobe and a colourful one aren't mutually exclusive.
The collaborations
Every Blue Nude collection begins with sound. Katarina builds a mood board from music before she touches fabric or colour — an auditory first draft that she then translates into photography and Pantone references, mapping out the palette, silhouettes and feel of the season ahead.
Then comes the artist. Each collection is developed in partnership with a different visual artist, chosen to bring their own perspective into the mix. Sometimes that means paintings matched to garments piece by piece, as with Vida Privada, the collection inspired by architect Luis Barragán and painter James Watkins' response to Mexico's earth tones and sensual undercurrent. Sometimes it means something stranger — the Tarantula collection paired Katarina's designs with a wearable sculpture by artist Lea Rose Kara. By the end of the process, the pieces belong to both of them equally: part designer, part collaborator, entirely Blue Nude.
The craft
Everything is designed out of Katarina's studio in East London, and as of the Vida Privada collection, everything is made in the UK — by small manufacturers paying fair, living wages. Among them: Fabrika, a female-led studio in South London; Adamley, a GOTS-certified silk manufacturer drawing water from its own reservoir; and Manusa, an Italian social cooperative that trains and employs socially vulnerable workers.
Production runs are small and made to sell, not to warehouse. Fabrics are prioritised for their story as much as their softness — deadstock, recycled, organic and waste-sourced materials, chosen specifically to avoid the "neutral equals sustainable" trap Katarina has spent years pushing back against. Offcuts are kept and reused. Packaging is compostable, printed with soy-based inks, wrapped in FSC-certified tissue.
Why it matters
In March 2025, Blue Nude completed its work with the British Fashion Council's Low Carbon Transition Programme, contributing data to an SME carbon policy report presented at the House of Lords and setting a plan to cut emissions against its 2024 baseline. The brand is also a proud supporter of Drip by Drip, a Berlin-based non-profit installing water filtration systems and mobile medical units for garment workers in Bangladesh.
"My dream is that no brand calls itself 'sustainable' anymore — that it just becomes a crucial part of running a business, whether reinforced societally or by law. At that point it would be a way of life, of doing business."
That's the quiet ambition underneath all the colour: a brand that treats ethics as infrastructure, not marketing, while still making the case — loudly, brightly — that considered fashion can be joyful too.
