Conner Ives (Q2832)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Conner Ives is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Conner Ives |
Conner Ives is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Among many other things, Conner Ives is an excellent storyteller. As he talked through his latest collection, titled Camelot, the designer spun a rip-roaring yarn of a journey from the medieval lords and ladies of Arthurian legend to the invocation of Camelot by Jackie O to describe the Kennedy administration, all the way to the winking subversion of American history employed by Cole Escola in the Broadway hitOh, Mary!Though for Ives, who was born and raised in upstate New York before moving to London to study at Central Saint Martins, it was less a case of storytelling per se and more about exploring the rich American tradition of mythmaking. “It was recently the 10-year anniversary of me moving to the UK, which is insane,” he said. “I started thinking about that unwavering entrepreneurial spirit of being American, and how a lot of my work is in pursuit of identifying traits of Americana that aren’t just, you know, the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ and red, white, and blue.”Where Ives’s first few collections saw him scroll through a rogue’s gallery of American female archetypes (from Swans to Y2K Hollywood starlets, Chelsea Girls to Real Housewives), he has changed tack slightly over the past few seasons, homing in with anthropological intensity on a tighter pool of inspirations. And this time around, the layering of centuries—medieval England, 1960s Americana, the international It girl of today—made for a surprisingly effective sartorial palimpsest. Slinky knit dresses with trumpet skirts were inspired by cotehardies, a kind of medieval underlayer here reinterpreted as something resembling a Henley top, while jacquard knitwear took its cues from the elaborate motifs found on 17th-century clocked stockings. A sleek and very ’90s striped white mini dress featured a playful tulle bustle. A motif of what appeared to be a magician on horseback cropped up across spaghetti strap tops and as a panel on striped boxing shorts that were trimmed with lace.There were a handful of new riffs on some of Ives’s signatures too: notably his elastic-thread shirred technique, which appeared in the form of painterly floral tops and mini dresses as well as a pair of blazing red pedal pushers. Oh, and plenty of fabulous dresses for the loyal coterie of glamorous party girls that surround him, from a swishy mauve pink dress hand-painted with wonky polka dots to his final “bridal” look, a silk jersey column dress with a dramatic vintage fox-fur collar.
(The ever-resourceful Ives whizzed it up from offcuts of a custom look he recently created for Rihanna.) “Everything is kind of an assemblage of different centuries and different dress codes and different cultures coming together, which I think also reflects that sense of American mythmaking at play,” he said, “this idea that these things could be constantly taken apart and collaged back together—that you could take a bustle and put it on a polo shirt.”
26 September 2024
With Ryan Murphy’s new, Truman Capote–focused series,Feud, taking over TV right now, it’s the season of the Swan—and if anyone is poised to translate the spirit of that glamorous coterie of women into something worthy of a socialite of today, it’s Conner Ives. (In fact, it’s territory he’s previously touched on: Hisfall 2023collection was centered around the Shiny Set—including C.Z. Guest—as featured in magazine veteran Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir,The Glossy Years.) The designer couldn’t have picked a more appropriate location than the duck-egg blue Rococo interiors and chandeliers of The Savoy’s Lancaster Ballroom, arguably London’s closest parallel to the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York, in which Capote’s famousBlack and White Ballwas held.First out was Ives’s regular muse, Alex Consani, in a floaty spaghetti-strap LBD paired with a black stretchy headband, looking as if she were halfway through the process of getting dolled up for a night out. Soon after, subversive Ives-isms began to appear in wardrobe staples: a T-shirt and skirt decorated with mirror-work embroideries; a bias-cut gown with silvery florals (made of safety pins) crawling across it; another upcycled T-shirt-and-skirt combo, this time with Schiffli lace embroidery that trimmed Art Nouveau–ish curved cutouts. Some of the pieces, like a faux-shearling trapper hat, deliberately flirted with bad taste. Of a shiny upcycled faux-python textile, Ives said it’s “kinda yucky, but I love it.” But taken as a whole, this lineup was a reflection of the designer leaning further into craftsmanship. “I feel like this is probably the most aspirational collection I’ve made,” he said at a preview in his north London studio.In a notable shift, Ives moved away from the archetypes of American women he explored in previous seasons, where each look arrived with a backstory or a character from popular culture that inspired it. Instead, this collection was about turning the spotlight to the real women who surround and inspire him—and Ives was keen to add that part of his fascination with the debutantes also lies in how his career has been propelled forward by the well-to-do women who have taken him under his wing. (His first big breakout moment, lest we forget, was whenAdwoa Aboah wore a dress of his to the Met Galawhile Ives was still a student at Central Saint Martins—which, in a full-circle moment, was appliquéd with a dozen ivory satin swans.
) “I owe a lot to these women, so in some ways this collection is really a tribute to them,” Ives said.
18 February 2024
As a designer born on the cusp of the millennial-Gen Z divide, Conner Ives has an acute understanding of what makes the internet tick. So it tracks that the starting point for his latest collection was a TikTok video he stumbled across a few months ago of a girl live-blogging her experience queuing for a fashion sample sale in New York as smoke from the Canadian wildfires bathed the city in an ominous orange glow. “As much as it felt like the end of days, there was also a dark humor to it,” Ives said at a preview. “It’s the beginning of the end of the world, and we’re waiting in line at a sample sale.”Thus, Ives decided to title the collection “Late Capitalism”—though he was keen to reiterate this wasn’t intended as something provocative, but an invitation to talk more openly about the economic realities of what keeps the fashion world moving. “It’s a subject that makes me uncomfortable, which made me feel like it was something worth talking about,” he said. Ives is one of a generation of designers for whom sustainability is something of a given, meaning he hasn’t telegraphed his eco-credentials all that loudly in the past (although with his signature approach of lending deadstock and upcycled vintage clothes a glamorous new life, you didn’t have to dig very deep to notice it). But he now feels a greater urgency to share the various methods by which he’s carved out his own, more responsible lane.“I think part of me didn’t want to get up on my soapbox, as I wasn’t sure if anyone really cared,” Ives said, noting that in his few years of doing production at scale, he’s repurposed nearly 15,000 T-shirts destined for scrap yards, while a new partnership with Depop will see him use the platform to source bulk raw material for production. And he’s open to talking about the fact that the system still isn’t perfect. Sure, he’s made a firm commitment to only staging a runway show once a year, but he still needs to produce lookbooks in between to allow him to sell year-round and keep his business afloat. “I’m very aware there’s an irony to the ‘Late Capitalism’ collection being an answer to getting more items into stores,” he acknowledged.
19 September 2023
Three days before his second runway show, Conner Ives was feeling impressively cool-headed. “The last show was a bit of a lesson in what a type A control freak I can be with my own work,” Ives said. “But I know that at some point in the process, I’ll have to accept that this is what we’re showing—and then a lot of those jitters and stress and feelings of impostor syndrome will go.” Ives’s self-possession is partly the result of his decision (made firmly before his inaugural show last year) to show only every second season. The impetus for doing so was partly financial, partly to allow him time to recharge his creative batteries. “It might sound a little crass, but if we’re going to throw all this cash at it, then let’s make it ashow,”he added.While last season’s eclectic ’90s extravaganza proved Ives can do more than just the spliced T-shirt dresses that earned him a following while still a student at Central Saint Martins, the 26-year-old designer explained that he wanted to mature things with this collection. (Just a little.) Titled “Magnolia” after Paul Thomas Anderson’s sprawling 1999 film charting the lives and loves of a disparate group of Angelenos, it contained all of the greatest hits of Ives’s collections thus far: slinky fringed skirts made from upcycled piano scarves; diaphanous Lilith Fair slip dresses with sheer ruffles; and yes, those vintage T-shirts, here transformed into a bias-cut camisole dress trimmed with black lace. To Ives’s point, there were a few more grown-up tricks in the mix too, including a handful of retro silk button-downs and tailored trousers, along with Ally McBeal-core minimalist tailoring in muted shades of green and gray. “I love the pieces that keep my lights on, but I wanted to show a little more of what I can do,” he said.There was also fun to be had: not least in the dizzying soundtrack, which cycled relentlessly through everything from Lil Mama’s “Lip Gloss” to the opening theme ofPsycho.And as with last season’s smorgasbord of winking references to everything from reality TV to film history, part of the thrill was engaging with Ives’sGuess Who?game of pop culture icons from across the decades. The second look was a Kate Moss-inspired “Glasto girl” trudging through the mud in a fur gilet and Hunter wellies, while other looks paid homage to the “shiny set” of New York society women who would descend on the Paris couture shows each season, such as C.Z. Guest and Nan Kempner.
Most bonkers of all was the bridal look at the end: a tongue-in-cheek nod to a wedding dress from the Lindsay Lohan remake ofThe Parent Trap(as well as the highly questionable top hat-veil hybrid that remains seared onto the retinas of all who have seen it). “That was really something where I was like: This is so fucking ridiculous,” Ives added, with a grin.
17 February 2023
“It sounds really cheesy,” Conner Ives blurted out before his London runway debut. “But honestly, this is something I’ve dreamed about doing since I was five years old.” It was a big rite of passage indeed for the young American alum of Central Saint Martins—a boy who grew up in Bedford, New York, secretly logging onto Style.com (the former internet site of Vogue Runway’s fashion reporting since the millennium) and watching Tim Blanks’s Fashion File interviews. “I heard then about Alexander McQueen and John Galliano going to Central Saint Martins, and I always knew I had to study there in London.”Ives hasn’t exactly waited around to manifest his ambitions; so impatient was he to get going that he started to sell his “reconstituted” vintage scarf dresses from Instagrammed photos shot in the B.A. CSM studio in his first year at college, at age 21. In 2021, he graduated—in the misery year when no student was able to have a final runway show. Though that proved no barrier to (1) being able to build up a retail market for his reclaimed patchwork T-shirt dresses, (2) getting picked out by Andrew Bolton for a purchase that put a design of his in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute and getting invited to the Met gala, and (3) being selected as a runner-up in last year’s LVMH Prize competition.Well, if Central Saint Martins teaches one bottom-line rule, it’s always the individualistic insistence on students being true to their identities. That’s a lesson that Ives—even if he went against teachers’ disapproval when it was discovered that he was selling while studying—has patently taken as gospel. His show said that in every look, each one systematically named—for what he called “American archetypes”—after Y2K pop movie/reality show actors, actual girl clique leaders he knew in high school, hero-worshipped female relatives, and American women he has always fantasized about knowing.Starting in reverse runway order, there was Ives’s vision of Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy as a bride in a sleeveless, bias-cut dress and matching headscarf-cum-train. He had a “Madam Vice President” look: a dream pitch for Kamala Harris to wear a Conner Ives cream and brown patchwork scarf dress. There was a cowgirl, representing an influential aunt in Santa Fe, wearing laser-printed denim and turquoise jewelry.
And “The Editor,” an Ives fan note to Anna Wintour, thrown back to an evening in the 2000s when she wore a white tank and a red flounced flamenco-ish skirt designed by Oscar de la Renta for Balmain. Near the finale, Jackie Kennedy came out in a simple cream Watteau-back gown with a huge quilted patchwork star planted in its midsection.A second lesson Ives has seriously taken to heart—as part of his Gen Z worldview, even more than schooling—is upcycling and repurposing. The sexy-skimpy glam and funny identifiable references might be the primary attractions of his kick-flares; leisure suits; and silk-fringed, piano-scarf dresses and skirts, but Ives sources all of it from deadstock and vintage garments and materials.In other words, here was the first public outing of a very modern designer—fun and good times on the one hand, and on the other as much of a stickler as he can be about his production process. Rarely do those two things go together in contemporary fashion. Ives also intends to forgo the waste of showing every season. He plans to do a runway show only once a year. That’s smart. Why do more when his following is already so happily flocking?
19 February 2022
Here’s Conner Ives, Central Saint Martins class of 2020, the boy from Bedford, New York, who saw no reason not to start selling his “reconstituted” clothes from school when he was 20. “I’m in my fourth season,” he declares from his flat in London, where he’s unveiling The American Dream, the lineup that is also his graduation collection from CSM’s four-year fashion design womenswear B.A. The course has a year in industry built into it, which Ives spent working at Fenty, after Rihanna spotted Adwoa Aboah wearing a dress of his to the Met Ball in 2017.This is the first Conner Ives fully-fledged collection as an indie designer, then—a handmade tribute to the girls and women who surrounded him growing up in the U.S. in the 2000s. Each look is a precociously skilled portrait painted from his school days—many of the now 24- and 25-year-old cohort that graduated Fox Lane High in Bedford in 2014 will recognize a lot of what they were up to, in and out of school. “I collected pictures from high school,” Ives says with a laugh. “I thought of putting all these girls with their different styles together. The High Schooler in the collection is my best friend Tatiana. There was this kind of uniform where girls would wear yoga pants and crop tops from Brandy Melville. And I consulted friends who were on the dance team.”His Valedictorian has a green and brown bias-cut dress with a flippy hem and carries a matching Case-it—classy fabric made from deadstock donated by Carolina Herrera. “Case-its were really our It bags at school! We all rushed out to Staples to buy them in our favorite colors to stand out in class at the start of eighth grade,” says Ives. There’s a Horse Girl, who reminds Ives of Jackie O, whose dress is made of patchwork vintage scarves. Ingeniously, “the train comes all the way up and forms her head scarf.”The collection begins with an extraordinary suit with a rising sun landscape Ives painted, which is felted into it—a love letter to his mom and an homage to the American folk art he found stashed away in the attic. “Mom had been collecting it, and then put it all away sometime before I was born. It was like discovering a lost city—how I found out from her about Grandma Moses and all that traditional Americana I’ve loved ever since,” he says. That’s plain to see—in a spot-on chic way—with his patchwork dresses, cut and pieced to patterns inspired by the paintings of “the tantric Indian painter Ghulam Rasool Santosh.
I really wanted to lean into that New Age spiritual-awakening, L.A.-crunchy thing, because a lot of friends I had growing up were into that.”
27 February 2021