A-Cold-Wall (Q7902)
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A-Cold-Wall is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | A-Cold-Wall |
A-Cold-Wall is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
Now that founder Samuel Ross hasexitedA-Cold-Wall to design his next chapter, longtime colleagues William Slocombe (design director) and Liam Hassimi (brand director) are overseeing the line. The first thing you saw when walking into their Milan presentation this morning was a series of screens which displayed a constantly cutting lo-res montage of look book and “show” images for this collection. As well as emphasizing the garments, shoes, and bags, these lingered on headshots of the cast, which included Don Letts of Big Audio Dynamite, Jason Williamson of Sleaford Mods, and drum ’n’ bass legend Goldie.Midway through the London shoot, Goldie had scripted the name of his pioneering record label Metalheadz down each leg of his double-treated denim pants: Slocombe was understandably excited by this (said pants were on the rail) and reported that he and Hassimi were considering how best to divest this one-off grail to a worthy cause. Goldie’s involvement synced nicely because the collection was loosely inspired by pirate-radio culture: the jaggedly angular tape seaming that ran through the collection’s technically treated future tailoring and sometimes ornately cinched urban utility pieces was derived from imagery of illicit antennae used to broadcast unlicensed radio in the BD (before digital) age. Goldie’sTimelesswas arguably the first great album—itself now an anachronistic format—to break through into the UK mainstream via stations such as Kool FM, Pulse, and Rush. So, as a nod to A-Cold-Wall’s inspiration, Goldie’s casting was a deft move by this new team.Metal-shot fabrics in weathered, cloudy tones were used to encase loosely volumized abstract tactical vests, a house signature. There was an interesting sort of black future-bouclé in a spongy fluro-string cinched dress and jacket made in a material by Japan’s Sbider that Slocombe reported was derived from brewed protein. The double-brim caps and cowl-like hoods were convincingly useful tools for evading both face recognition software and pirate-radio enforcement officers. More broadly, this brand’s signature dystopic minimalism was expressed with appropriate seriousness and severity in pieces whose DNA blended military and functional sporting apparel. It was intriguing that Johanna Parv, such an innovative thinker in the space, got a shoutout on the credits list. A-Cold-Wall 2.0 is up and running.
14 June 2024
We were in Paris, at a presentation space near the Atlas metro, for this preface to a new geographical chapter in the progress of Samuel Ross and A-Cold-Wall. Ross, who prior to the pandemic had been showing Italian made collections in Milan, had kept news of the two presentations and two raves he threw here during fashion week (one as a part of a collaboration with Converse) extremely close to the vest. “We are slowly loading into Paris,” he said, then dropped that he plans to present A-Cold-Wall’s next collection here in a show format in January (read into that what you will).This lookbook is mostly concerned with the atelier-finished pieces that right now Ross is most creatively stimulated by. Or as he put it: “I wanted to be a lot closer in the making of the clothes. And you can’t use these techniques if you try and operate at scale, because they have to be done by local hands in the atelier. But this produces garments of true beauty and I have fallen love with this side of the work.” The opening piece was a prime example of Ross’s new approach. Full of volume, tactically pocketed, with removable arms, cut in eco-leather, and patterned with a distorted Carrera leather relief, this much worked upon coat was then finished with a stencil paint treatment.Favorites for me included the last look jacket in rich hand-hued garment-dyed and painted ripstop and a subtly patinated chore jacket produced in conjunction with Timberland (but not in this lookbook), part of a six piece co-project. What’s not especially apparent either on the garments hanging statically in the showroom or in these pictures is that most of them were developed with built-in wiring to allow the wearer to shape the garment to his or her specifications. Observed Ross: “the focus it to allow distortion without overcooking it.”Alongside this impressive section of work was a higher-volume, manufattura made collection that will be more widely available and accessibly priced. It included core house pieces such as a front-slung tactical pack, chest rigs, zip-ups, and so on. Less layered than the atelier pieces and therefore arguably more direct, this element of the season’s output featured lots of cool detailing like the A-shape cut-outs at the base of collars on shirting and sleek piping on knitwear, a category I hadn’t seen here before.Bienvenu à Paris, Dr. Ross.
29 June 2022
“The real thought behind this collection was not to overanalyze,” said Samuel Ross on a Zoom. In order to get into that zone, Ross switched up his usual design process of sketch to CAD in favor of molding clay and plaster into maquettes, which he then colored with inks. “I wanted to find a really full expression that you cannot necessarily find with a computer or a pair of scissors.”This hyperanalog starting point emerged from his exhibition of marble and steel sculptural furniture at last December’s Art Basel Miami, which he added, “has definitely extended my creative process.” Ross applies to clothing metaphorical illustrations of the consequences of social physics—the force of weight and energy exchanged between centers of power and territories unempowered—to create garments that help loosen the wearer’s place in the world rather than confirm it. Literal-ish examples here included the shirred arc-leg trousers that he said reflected the load-bearing elasticity of lead, the marble finish on tactically pragmatic outerwear, and the pieces in overdyed canvas twill to which were applied a linear pattern rendered by compressing photographs of London, New York, Milan, and Tokyo.The apiary-adjacent head shrouds were, on a practical level, Ross’s response to his frustration with daily mask wearing, and also a form of impactful subterfuge and category evasion. As in other seasons, copper-wire edging within garments allowed the wearer to tweak his (or her) frame of fabric to their exact specifications. During our chat, Ross said that his thoughts during the making of this collection had run from Classical civilization to the Renaissance to the contemporary Conservative government in the UK—an itinerary taking in two peaks and one trough. By keeping these tides of thought in the background as he sculpted this collection, however, Ross shaped a portfolio of clothing whose ideological inspiration seemed at the very most abstract. Its points of attraction, meanwhile, were manifestly concrete.
18 January 2022
“Motion. Form. Oscillate. Converge,” was the four-word manifesto for a collection that Samuel Ross described as: “conceptual garments, steeped in functionality, which then oscillate, or integrate with ready-to-wear forms.” As opposed to his pre-collections—such as that which dropped last week—Ross said that his main line collections are focused less on the systematically pragmatic and more on the instinctively emotional: “because there is more scope to be experimental and explore the idea of building abstract sculptures on the body.”For this spring collection that abstraction manifested itself most overtly in cocooning, nylon ponchos that swathed and obscured the form within almost completely—a sort of stealth semi-invisibility cloak for urban adventuring. Ross said he was investigating “concealment, coverage, and saturation of the body through form and through color.”The flip side of this were the almost aggressively defined and structured contours of his gilets and strapped coats, or the jagged contours of paneling on his future-workwear tracksuit hybrids. These shapes seemed less about the form within, and more about the forms that surround the wearer in the modern urban landscape: the printed image of a detail from Le Corbusier on a T-shirt hinted at the dots Ross had connected to shape this exploration of wearable neo-brutalism.Forward-facing fabrications included layered base nylons under a translucent membrane, then a Kevlar membrane, and then a final black membrane—a meniscus of wearable surface within which to shimmer through the city. Collaborations with Macintosh, Converse, and Roa complemented the central A-Cold-Wall proposition, and a final look nodded to the fossils of formal sartorial shapes while hinting at evolution ahead.
21 June 2021
Samuel Ross said that spending more time out of London, focusing on his family and especially his young daughter, has added a “new spirit,” as well as new colors, to the conception and execution of his work. As per his rhythm of developing his mainlines sculpturally, conceptually, and emotionally before dialing down on the detail to consolidate his focus on functionality—not to mention pricing—this pre-season outing was a pragmatic development of his fall 2021 offer.Defined overall by minimalist silhouettes, yet textured by injections of color and precise buffets of asymmetry, the collection worked to bring aesthetic technicality back to its functional roots. A semi-tailored tracksuit in yellow and gray layered over a yellow camp collar shirt was cut in sustainably treated synthetics and lined with Merino wool, and made for a convincing post-suit professional ensemble. Organically dyed Japanese denim in cobalt blue, perfectly imperfect, was cut into a street silhouette lent versatility by the quality and thought of the fabrication and finish.That green apart, the color of the collection was the cyclist’s alarm orange—both functional and fine on the eye—deployed in studiously pragmatic gilets, nylon outerwear, and leggings. Shot against a backdrop of 1990s East London financial district development, this collection boosted A Cold Wall’s already convincing stock as a London-based—but Milan-showing—anticipation of menswear developments that are still fully to be realized.
16 June 2021
It’s a tough time to be a young British designer. Not only is the world at large in a particularly precarious place, but the machinations of our Brexit deal still remain a mystery—and the reverberations of confusion are impacting everything from price points to sample delivery. “We’re probably going to have to relocate our global distribution to Italy,” sighs A-Cold-Wall’s Samuel Ross, who shows on the Milanese Fashion Week calendar but remains located in London. “Some of our shoes didn’t arrive in time for the collection. We’re going to have to look again at how we sample everything. We’re in the core of anarchy.” In recent months, no headline has put it better.Such a reality would easily lend itself to the dystopian fantasies Ross has often explored through his work—but instead, this season, the designer has relaxed. Not only does his fall 2021 collection open with a zen series of all-white looks he describes as imbued with a “more positive, optimistic spirit” than usual, but the high-concept narratives he has regularly been fixated on have been replaced by a more pragmatic approach to design. Case in point: This time last year, the show notes distributed to editors comprised a 45-page book; this season, we got 10 words (among them:open, portal, forum, reach). “Giving people space to enjoy [what we do] and interpret the collection in their own way has been a massive step forward for us,” he laughs. “It should be enjoyable—it’s not just education.”Equally, the enjoyment he finds in his personal wardrobe (and that of the team he works alongside) has now expressly infiltrated the clothing he designs. These include some almost monastic ribbed loungewear he describes as a studio uniform, and separates, experimental in their materials and construction but almost normcore in their appearance (a perfect pleated creased mustard vest and a starched white shirting formed from mottled wool both expressed “a conscious professional persona”). A collaboration with Mackintosh showcased a particularly alluring array of gently abstracted outerwear—“a mix of our 21st-century heritage with their 19th-century heritage”—and an array of graphic tees and shirts that will easily appeal to the brand’s long-standing acolytes. Essentially: “This is a collection based on making really, really good product,” Ross reflects. “I want people to be able to take things that they see on the runway and have them be wearable.”
19 January 2021
“That which weighs heavy on the mind / Anchor our actions to the world.” So ran the first two lines of the third act of poet Wilson Oryema’s text to accompany the film dropped with this A-Cold-Wall collection. Whereas last season Samuel Ross referred to the changes that have unfolded during 300,000 years of history, for this collection he had more than enough material by sticking with the last seven months.Weighing on Ross’s mind as evidenced by the action in this video was the lockdown (Act I), emergence from it (Act II), and our progress to an uncharted future (Act III). Also moving Ross’s dial was the shifting gravity of social uprising. This was Ross’s second runway-season collection in partnership with Stefano Martinetto’s Italian production powerhouse Tomorrow Ltd. With the menswear calendar merged with the women’s—and with Stella Jean having stepped off it as a challenge to the system here about its lack of inclusion—this left Ross as the only established Black designer on the Milan schedule. Black Lives Matter, and that extra Italian factor are all weighty contextual reefs through which to steer his young business, but Ross, with great concentration, is cutting throughDuring a Zoom from London (he’s still based there, even if the garments are made and shown in Italy), Ross said: “I’ve definitely had to augment my direction as a form of response […] the reality is that we are going to have to stay in our personal spaces for a long time, but still aspire to a feeling of professionalism.” This translated into pieces in which you could discern the fossilized silhouette of 20th-century suiting, proto-Prada-ish, but expressed in technically-spliced knit and jersey. Around these were layered stratae of garments, including ergonomic bobbly gilet/harnesses, collarless shirting, and ruched bombers. Referring to his shapes Ross cited Bauhaus, Dada, and Albers, adding that the graphics spoke to Niemeyer—classic modernist grist to the fashion designer mill—and emphasized asymmetry and those ergonomic curves as key parts of the visual language he is building. Accenting that were some lilting and again layered gradations of tone and patina in garment and/or tie-dyed denim and jersey pieces. Also present were more easily readable punctuations of house graphics, which makes sense when you are trying to cultivate a flourishing commercial business from a flourishing conceptual label in the grip of 2020.
Of this process Ross said: “I am learning fast!” Two well-performing collaborations (with Converse and Retrosuperfuture), plus a first-ever pre-spring collection that more than doubled projected sales, said Ross, suggest that: “We are making huge strides from diligently working and learning what it takes to survive and move forward confidently in the industry.”Moving forward in the system is progress even if the system is flawed. As Ross said: “If we’re not happy with the tropes that have been applied to people of color for the last 200 years, and I’m not happy with them, in terms of performance, in terms of bard, in terms of concubine, then we need to invert and implode our level of engagements with those discourses. There is more power in the hands of Black people than we think.” The revolutionary is often tricky to articulate because language has not yet caught up with the idea: Both in clothes and words Ross is laying out a position that is both increasingly meaningful and urgent.
23 September 2020
Now the 28-year-old founder of a prodigiously risen label aged five, Samuel Ross said that this first collection in Milan represented a profound shift for A-Cold-Wall—a growth spurt from infancy and adolescence to early maturity.All of this was metaphysically expressed in the themes of the collection, which were about the 300,000 year history of the movement of homo sapiens in slow and incremental shifts around the world. The seaming on an attractive nylon and cotton workwear jacket or an oxblood-tufted, rust-colored zipped duffle coat was meant to echo the meandering movements of man (and woman) across the continents from our point of speciation in Africa.Ross thought about the geological shifts that made this possible, and advances such as irrigation that allowed areas to be settled. You could see these considerations—or at least discern them—abstractly translated into the scarfed or fringed desert-tone knitwear, and the handsome weathering and garment dyeing utilized on leather and denim, respectively. The models also meandered down the runway rather than simply walking straight, in order to emulate the haphazard and opportunistic evolutionary story Ross was building.But that story was also a personal metaphor and this collection a vehicle to express that, too. As he said pre-show: “I’m going to map it back to everyday man, and how he moves through space still. So in this show, you are going to see this ode to menswear…. You know at the five-year marker I’ve looked at A-Cold-Wall and defined it as a luxury menswear brand versus an artistic project.... I’d say up until the five-year mark it’s been an artistic endeavor. It’s been my narrative and about our community narrative.”When Ross spoke of a “a professional man moving into a working environment” and “classic menswear styles” it was in a third-person manner that seemed also first-person: a declaration of intent to make the leap forward from his original space, retaining its essence, but also evolving. Practically, the point is to make (and sell!) lots of great clothes and create a commercially irrigated personal ecology. There’s a sort of second-album syndrome for many designers from London, an environment where creative potential is in abundance but the oxygen of commercial mechanism sparse. Which is why this move to Milan made sense.
13 January 2020
Samuel Ross scooped the £150,000 British Fashion Council/GQDesigner Menswear Fund prize on the evening he’d just shown his best collection, A Material Study for Social Architecture, in the cavernous Printworks venue in London’s East End. Ross and his popular brand A-Cold-Wall need no introduction for millions of boy followers internationally. He’s living proof that nothing succeeds like success, a leader who emerged onto the designer streetwear scene after working for Virgil Abloh at Off-White, and an important trailblazer for the talented generation of young black British creatives who are explosively breaking through into London menswear from multiple directions.His ambition to use his platform to set a positive example, and to lift eyes to the possibilities of social change also marks Ross as belonging to a generation in London—and beyond—who are committed activists of one kind or another. From staging his show in the vast ex-industrial East London venue—to which he’d invited the public—through to the clothes and accessories, the event served to establish Ross as a constructionist, a designer literally using the raw materials of the building trade to say that the foundations of a new society will rise from the rubble of the old.He took the colors of cement and clay as a metaphor to demonstrate how the basic wardrobe of streetwear—hoodie, track pant, parka—can be elevated as building blocks of a far more sophisticated modernism. There was grit on the floor and dust in the air, references to metal, electrical wiring, concrete, industrial tubing. In the time of Brexit, many designers have been voicing rage and disgust at the decay of the political system and looking for ways to get through it. This was Ross’s response: If things are falling apart, then it’s time to rebuild them with our hands.A product of British art education—he studied graphics and product design at De Montfort University—Ross feels the responsibility for redirecting the collective narrative around diversity in the U.K., and knows he’s in a unique position to be able to speak to his customers as they grow up with A-Cold-Wall. After the show, he had a lot to say about that. “I started from hardship, but I’m not in that place any more, I don’t wish that to be celebrated,” he said. “I want to focus on a more positive, altruistic future. I’ve done a study, looking at the hype and positioning of A-Cold-Wall—growing from four stockists up to 165 in four years.
The brand is now positioning at a higher tier of garment construction and development. It ushers in new price points. But for me, it’s very key that we keep accessibility through the information the brand puts out—that’s not just about purchasing garments, it’s about opening the brand to the public. I wanted to ensure that there wasn’t this conservative division that is often associated with bourgeois fashion—that didn’t seem very liberal to me, so pushing forward. It’s incredibly important that there’s this circular form of communication, I want to incubate that discussion.”
11 June 2019
Samuel Ross is the only designer in London who has 15- and 16-year-old boys skipping school to congregate outside his show in hopes of getting in. This happened early today in freezing Brick Lane as Ross was prepping his A-Cold-Wall show for midday. The reputation of his brand has exploded into the obsessive kind of fandom that used to fire teen music-collector loyalties from the 1960s to the 1980s—today’s teenagers’ granddads and dads. Ross is a young British hero of the streetwear phenomenon, whose followers know everything about him—including the fact that he worked for Virgil Abloh.Ross is conscious of his power and responsibility as a cultural leader who is touching the aspirations of a generation—a potential to message beyond the domain most fashion designers occupy. “There is a further insight beyond the immediacy of just the clothes,” he said, as the crowd was filing into an installation space filled with two tanks of black water. “This is about how to paint a holistic picture of what’s going on in society that our generation has to deal with. Freedom of movement, nationalistic fears; these are nuances I’m touching on in this show.”There was a regular runway in the narrow space between the two tanks, in which two groups of black performance artists clung together, helping each other to crawl through the water. In a week when a Royal Navy patrol has been sent out to intercept boatloads of migrants desperately crossing the English Channel to seek asylum from the camps of France, it made for conceptual imagery that came uncomfortably close to home.Yet elevation—the overcoming of conditions that hold people back—was the ultimate message in the design of Ross’s clothes. You don’t see the surrounding drama in the water in these pictures—or the moment when a Rottweiler was let out to bark at the actors. The brief Ross seemed to have set himself is that his vision of streetwear isn’t going to be confined to any sub-cult lane. His collection spoke to the graphic design education the 27-year-old received at De Montfort University, filtering the symbols of graph paper, rulers, and protractors into his brand identity, with the slogan “Modernist” printed on coat hems and scarves.It reached for a sophisticated level of design, integrating the familiar language of utility pockets, zippers, and puffers into a collection that now extends to tailored suits in technical fabrics, trenchcoats, and leather jackets with cut-out portholes.
Like so many of his young British menswear peers this season, Ross went one confident stride beyond what might have been expected of those representing a country mired in adversity. In a time when politicians are giving no hope of a brighter future, it’s the creativity, dignity, and undaunted energy of this generation that does.
7 January 2019