Harris Reed (Q4243)
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Harris Reed is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Harris Reed |
Harris Reed is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Seven months ago, Harris Reed began setting alerts on second-hand resale sites online, from Depop to Etsy, and eBay to Textile Trunk, in a bid to source vintage interiors fabrics for his spring 2025 collection. His search for materials—including an Art Nouveau lace appliqué drape, a 19th century cherub-motif golden silk damask that once upholstered a headboard, and confectionery-hued striped vintage curtain panels in duchesse satin—took his small team from British car boots to specialist online sellers across Europe as he “got the itch” for sourcing far and wide. Reed’s inspirations are usually rooted in a storytelling narrative—like paper dolls, debutante balls, and Shakespearean costume—but this season he let fabrication fuel his collection concept. While you wouldn’t expect it of his ostentatious designs, he said, “I love working within limitations.”Reed took these design cues from his fall 2024 collaboration with wallcovering specialist Fromental—who provided him with scraps of hand-painted silk wallpaper—and the experience of decorating the new London home he moved into in July. “I went very maximalist and regal with tons of velvet, and reupholstered lots of things,” he said. “I almost wanted the pieces in this collection to stand up on their own like furniture.” Take a fishtail bias-cut skirt and jacket, featuring a structured lapel that swoops like a headpiece around the body, crafted using three 200-year-old Point de Venise lace tablecloths and shawls, color-matched and crocheted together. Or a white silk organza mini-dress, appliqued with black 3D flowers made from old haberdashery fabrics, with dramatic hip panniers, that resemble “the arms of chair.” For Reed’s evolving client list in Texas (in addition to a strong custom-order market in Asia and the Middle East), the bolder the design, the better. “The more we push maximalism and over-the-top elegance, the more clients we get,” he explained. “I’ve never had to expand my label into t-shirts and jeans.”Dreamlike design aside, Reed is not immune to the financial and creative quagmire in which the London fashion industry has found itself in recent months, fueled in part by the implosion of luxury retailer Matchesfashion. His response? “Put on a real show,” he enthused, of his decision to return to the subterranean tanks of the Tate Modern, with a theatrical caged show set, that nodded to the winged corsets and crinolines in his collection.
As part of his seasonal research, Reed visited the archives of the V&A Museum, studying the architectural construction of corsets handled by white-gloved women. Like last season, the designer decided against a live catwalk performance by the likes of Florence Pugh or Sam Smith, because he knows that his clothes deliver more than enough drama. “I don’t know how not to be a showman,” he said.
12 September 2024
Power ballads are out, and paper dolls are in at Harris Reed for fall 2024. Instead of booking Sam Smith or Adam Lambert to entertain his salon-style show guests, the designer let his work, inspired by the dolls he fashioned from stacks ofVoguesandNational Geographicsas a child, do the talking. Set in his dream venue of the Tate Britain—which he has been obsessed with since Jonathan Anderson staged an imaginative Loewe show in the Duveen Galleries—Reed stripped back the theatrics and hunkered down on his craft. Ten looks, which took three toiles each and five months to perfect, drifted around the museum’s hallowed halls as “moving art.”Adding to the number of hours each piece racked up (fashion loves the anatomy of a look) are the swathes of wallpaper sourced from Fromental—Harris’s seasonal twist on sustainability. He fell for the elaborate wallcovering specialist as soon as the team started waxing lyrical about their exquisite hand-painted, hand-embroidered naturescapes. “The way they look at wallpaper is the way that I look at clothing,” he noted of his new collaborator, who might have only supplied enough scraps to make say, a bustier or a hat, but fueled Reed’s imagination and brought the paper theme full circle. The interesting part will be how he adapts these chintzy prints for his clients, who use Harris’s show collections as a barometer for their own custom commissions.As his audience broadens, particularly in Asia, Reed is pivoting accordingly. Yes, there are still ballgowns, but so too, shorter confections, corset and skirt pairings, and less look-at-me headwear. “I’m thinking more about what someone is wearing to a cocktail party, maybe less than, you know, Vogue covers,” he smiled. “Whether it’s Harry Styles on stage in front of 30,000 people, or a woman at her 50th birthday party with her girlfriends in Gloucestershire, they want the same level of detail and drama.” Even his LBDs come speared with feathered arrows. While Reed’s Victoriana references—such as the corsetry that fashion is currently coveting (cc: Maison Margiela)—might be lost on the Gloucestershire cohort, Harris’s personal narrative ensures he comes out of London Fashion Week (even on his off-schedule slot) swinging. “I look at things with this childlike enthusiasm,” he shared, taking us back to the kid who shadow cast fairytale beings on his bedroom wall and who now daydreams on the Eurostar to and from Paris, where he creative-directs for Nina Ricci.
Reed is prone to looking back at how far he has come—the exaggerated round lapels and curved sleeves on that new blazer dress hark back to the first rotund hat he made for Solange as a Central Saint Martins graduate—but this collection was a step forwards for an eveningwear brand where less is more. As Harris said himself, he lets his vulnerability shine here.
16 February 2024
At a preview just days before his show, Harris Reed was quick-witted as he elaborated on the thinking behind his spring collection. His new atelier at 180 The Strand was buzzing with his small team diligently cutting and hand stitching champagne-hued micro beads. “While I was packing and moving, I stumbled upon some of my childhood drawings—I was struck by the lines and dramatic silhouettes, which resonates with my current work,” he reflected. “Then, I found vintage corset patterns at Ladbroke Grove market and wanted to combine that with the structures I was dreaming up.”Skipping ahead to the show, set within Tate Modern’s Brutalist basement gallery space, the designer opted for a straightforward runway format. Still, in keeping with his larger-than-life persona—he boasts a devoted Instagram following of 1 million and counting—there was indeed a performance element. This time, British singer Cosima took the stage, captivating the audience with a haunting rendition of Radiohead’s 1993 cult-favorite “Creep.”The spectacle commenced with model Ashley Graham slowly gliding down the runway in a figure-hugging black velvet dress adorned with those aforementioned micro beads, shimmering as a corset bustier. As the show unfolded, a series of monochromatic ensembles in varying silhouettes crafted from black velvet and ivory duchesse satin, embellished with micro beads, made their appearance. Reed’s choice of stretching satin for the more expansive designs could be unforgiving in the light at times, particularly when factoring in movement. The magnified boning details applied onto the same fabric added a substantial sense of elevation, though.Across all ten looks, the designer’s signatures were evident, from cinched waists and dramatic fishtail hems to architectural elements extending away from the body. Notably absent, however, were the hats for which he has gained fame, with one exception: An exaggerated bowler resplendent with black feathers.The show’s climax featured a tantalizing peekaboo dress that left the audience gasping as the model turned around, revealing a daring low-rise back—a ‘bumster’ moment, if you will. Reed explained the piece backstage, saying, “We had to have a little nod to McQueen, because I feel like London is a little sad lately, and the world is getting intense, so I wanted to reference one of the greats that was here before us.”
14 September 2023
“In a sometimes judgmental world, our costumes can change who we want to be seen as, and who we are destined to be.” Florence Pugh, spotlit in a giant glittering silver-and-black halo hat, nailed the essence of the Harris Reed phenomenon in her introductory speech at his show at Tate Modern.As the entire fashion world knows, Harris is destined for Paris—he’ll be debuting at Nina Ricci imminently. So with this, only his fourth own-name collection since graduating from Central Saint Martins, and a Hollywood actor added to his growing fold of performer friends, he had a lot to celebrate—and a lot still to prove. He did it with a cinematically-lit circular procession of 10 black, gold, and silver, draped and swagged looks, and a theme centered on theatricality itself.“All the world’s a stage,” he’d declared, earlier, quoting from Shakespeare’s As You Like It. “I’m someone who likes to play with grandeur and performative clothing. So I loved how in William Shakespeare, back in the day—even though it was different—men are dressing like women. This constant gender play for me felt very aligned with the brand.”The American side of his consciousness, he added, also locked onto the idea of beauty pageants. In a further plot-twist, the swathes of gold lame, used to create panniers, wired stoles, and domed crinolines, were actually made from reclaimed theater curtains from all over London. They glimmered glamorously alongside the glinting silver sequins of the harlequin bodysuits.The lookbook photos provided for Vogue Runway capture all the drama and the detail of the silhouettes, but not the fact that this was the first Harris Reed show which successfully broke the mold of his early tableaux presentations, and allowed the models to walk. That was, literally, a step forward—although, in these days of ever more wildly competitive event dressing, the willingness of celebrities to carry the vast and vertiginous on their bodies makes practicality and comfort almost cease to matter.Harris Reed as a custom business makes total sense when he has loyal friends and is working in a zeitgeist where entertainment and fashion have fused. Up next, we’ll be seeing what he brings to Paris, in what is traditionally a more ready-to-wear environment. Harry Styles already famously walked out the first Harris Reed for Nina Ricci tuxedo suit—a preview that already broke with the womenswear tradition of the brand.
Whatever happens, the excitement around that launch is guaranteed to blow up Paris fashion week.
17 February 2023
The somber events of fate—the death of Queen Elizabeth—couldn’t help but have overtaken Harris Reed’s chosen position as one of the first designers to show off-schedule on the eve of London Fashion Week. The plan was to stage his joyfully glam, celebratory queer show as a move-on, literally, from the high-drama static tableaux he’s worked on for a couple of seasons. It was a performance which was to have acted as a kind of ta-da curtain-raiser for all the fizzy anticipation people had been feeling about the first full comeback of shows since the end of the pandemic.Conscious of the very different load of responsibility that his massively sculptural looks were now going to carry on their scaffolded shoulders, Reed spoke up. During the days when there were heart-searching discussions about whether the week should be canceled altogether, he posted a respectfully-toned text pleading for the survival of the fragile ecosystem of young brands—his friends—for whom canceling could’ve spelled financial ruin, with no hope of recouping insurance on money already spent.“It has been a challenging two years... in these two years I have been absolutely blown away by how incredibly supportive the fashion community is in London. When put through massive challenges, designers, models, movement directors, casting directors, nail artists, [and] writers have supported one another, lifting one another up,” he wrote. “London is a place where community, creativity, and cultivation should always be in the forefront of what we support and nurture.” And he tagged all the names of the designers and friends he is “honored to be showing alongside.”It was a generous, much-shared gesture, illustrating something of how Reed’s popularity as an optimistic personality-about-fashion has been a contributory factor in the massive amounts of attention, celebrity-wears, and magazine covers he’s managed to magnetize at an almost absurdly early stage of his career. So: it was on with the Debutante Ball-themed show, the hysteria generated by the appearance of Adam Lambert singing “Nessun Dorma” only slightly dialed back, given the circumstances. While the audience absorbed the weird coincidence that we were now being sung to by a representative of the group Queen, Reed’s models proved that it was indeed possible to glide along in creations involving hobble skirts and 10-foot wide cartwheel head pieces.
Earlier, in his studio atop the London Standard Hotel, Reed related how his inspiration was a cross between Victorian crinolines and the great glittering days of drag clubs in New York. He has a bold sense of unputdownable optimism, which he attributes to his American upbringing. It shows in the scale of his ambition to make clothes which aspire to haute couture, or at least, the look of it. Fitting clothes to the body to be inspected in movement and in the round presented a technical hurdle, not quite a leap, if one was being Paris-picky. But then again, Reed’s can-do, let’s-pull-together American cheerleading has been a great asset to have around London in a time of crisis. That halo of goodwill-creation around Reed had fans applauding to the rafters.
16 September 2022
Back from Christmas in Bora Bora, Harris Reed was tanned to the nines the night before his show. “I’m into bronzing lately,” he revealed, surrounded by the glitz of what he calls his “demi-couture” in a makeshift studio suite at The Standard. This season marked the 26-year-old designer’s sophomore fashion show, but the exposure he has been cultivating during the pandemic—as an extraordinarily well-connected creative—has already turned him into a brand, now with the kind of super-tan historically favored by other flamboyant createurs.Everything about Harris Reed is unheard of. At his second-ever show, held in the Saint John the Evangelist Church, the singer Sam Smith performed Desirée’s “Kissing You” in an elaborate set of paper clouds and models wearing creations made from repurposed fabrics, which wouldn’t be so strange if those fabrics hadn’t come from the home of the heir to the Bussandri upholstery empire, who Reed happened to meet in a café in Northern Italy where his mother lives. “She looked like Donatella Versace’s twin sister. I said, ‘I love your bag.’ She said, ‘Oh, it’s actually from our villa…” And the rest is history.Three of the repurposed wedding dresses he made for his first show last season sold for extortionate amounts: one for £10,000 to benefit Oxfam, Emma Watson bought another for a red carpet appearance, and a third was acquired by a Middle Eastern client. Reed—the son of a Hollywood film producer—plans to continue his bespoke business through partnerships with retailers. “I’m talking to Claridge’s and The Standard about creating fittings with champagne sponsored by Veuve Clicquot, who have been very generous to me. Selling two dresses a season pays for the show,” he said.Titled60 Years a Queenafter Sir Herbert Maxwell’s 1897 book about Queen Victoria, Reed’s collection investigated Victoriana through a “Yas, queen!” club kid lens. “I love how queer culture took on this regal fabulousness,” he explained, gesturing at a gender-nonbinary house model wearing an elongated plush golden suit repurposed from those Bussandri fabrics. (This season, Reed noted, someone who had trained on Savile Row had helped him with his tailoring. The quality of his millinery had improved as well.)As for the rest of the young designer’s silhouettes, they weren’t exemplary of a collection created to explore a specific design idea.
Rather, they were DIY-esque explorations of the language of haute couture, and, to a larger degree, testament to the fact that the Harris Reed brand isn’t necessarily about design, anyway. It’s about him as a performative phenomenon rooted in the generational values expressed through his genderless creations and the nonbinary people he puts them in. This season, he re-evoked the dress he made with Dolce & Gabbana for Iman at last year’s Met Gala and styled it on a nonbinary body type.
17 February 2022
On the morning of his first-ever runway show, Harris Reed woke up to a 5,000-word profile on himself inThe New Yorker. “I knew someday I would have a profile in The New Yorker, but I didn’t think I would have it at 25,” he admitted, during a preview in his studio suite at London’s Standard Hotel where he has landed a “designer-in-residence” deal, free of charge. His debut show took place in the Serpentine Pavilion with a performance by the artist Kelsey Lu, and was followed by cocktails and canapés hosted by the gallery’s CEO. As you may have gathered, Reed isn’t your average emerging designer.So, how exactly does a 25 year old, who only graduated from Central Saint Martins last year, get intoThe New Yorker? “I think it comes from putting all my work on Instagram through the pandemic,” he said, citing an effect of the lockdowns similarly highlighted by his friend Chet Lo at yesterday’s Fashion East show: digital exposure during a time of collective boredom. “And,” of course, “having high profile clients,” Reed added. He is to fashion what Lil Nas X is to music and After is to cinema: a product of a social media fan culture, where new stars are created by association with existing stars.While he was still studying, a chance meeting with the celebrity stylist Harry Lambert earned him a commission for Harry Styles, whose image was made for the fluid romanticism in which Reed deals. The pop star’s 39 million followers kicked in, and just like that, a star was born. As his debut show demonstrated, Reed—who is the son of the Oscar-winning movie producer Nick Reed—thrives in the costume territory. He repurposed bridal and groom’s wear sourced from the British charity chain Oxfam into majestic hybrids of gowns and tuxedos, topping them off with enormous spherical headpieces that have become his trademark.The way he cut his dresses was imaginative and resourceful to say the least. Most successful were the ones that showed more silhouette, like a tuxedo jacket chopped into a bolero and elongated with a veil that cascaded like a waterfall, turning it into a dress. The hats made for the most DIY-looking element of the show and could perhaps have done with some less obviously recycled fabrication. But that wasn’t the point. “Everything is about being huge and being seen,” Reed said. It was true for the outfit he created for Iman at last week’s Met Gala, made with the support of Dolce & Gabbana’s Alta Moda ateliers.
He spent the fittings talking to the supermodel about her late husband David Bowie, who featured heavily on his collection mood boards, and to whom he paid tribute in a striped glam rock suit made out of strips cut from said second-hand finds. Reed shares his Bowie mania with Alessandro Michele, with whom he interned at Gucci for nine months after being invited to be a part of the brand’s roster of cutting-edge cool kids, who get ferried around the world for events. Reed—who looks like a young Elizabeth I—even walked Michele’s cemetery show in Arles.You’d be forgiven for looking at Reed’s one-off creations—which he called “demi-couture”—and thinking, “What’s it all for?” Like Michele, he wants to fly the flag for gender fluidity and nonconformity. Unlike Michele, he doesn’t produce ready-to-wear and barely offers any other accessible merchandise. Rather, Reed is a brand without a brand: something as post-post-modern as a personified idea that other people and their brands want to buy into. He’s an internet sensation and celebrity favorite, which—in this day and age—is arguably a talent in its own right. And he’s only just begun.
21 September 2021