CONNER IVES BY JACK SNELL AND DIVYA BALA
PHOTOGRAPHER: Jack Snell
WORDS: Divya Bala
“The most responsible thing would almost be to do nothing. The world doesn’t need more clothes,” says fashion designer Conner Ives. It’s a hard thing to admit when you’re in the business of making them. Harder still when you’re good at it – but Ives isn’t interested in easy answers.
Up until a few months ago, despite a rapidly growing cult following, Ives was still personally responding to customer service emails from his London atelier. Most were about sizes and shipping, but some were stories. “One was from a mum in Wisconsin being like, ‘My daughter is trans and this was just such a ray of light in an overwhelmingly bad news environment,’” recalls Ives. “A lot of people would tell me their life stories in our inbox. It made me realise the job can be bigger than just making clothes.”
The ‘ray of light’ the mum in Wisconsin was referring to is a T-shirt. The night before his autumn/winter 2025 show, Ives printed a message on a white tee with transfer paper to wear for his bow. It read: ‘PROTECT THE DOLLS’ – a love letter to trans women that quickly became a viral flashpoint of visibility and support for a community under relentless attack. Troye Sivan wore the T-shirt on-stage at Coachella; there was Laverne Cox, Tilda Swinton, Charlie xcx and Lisa Rinna; Pedro Pascal and Haider Ackermann both chose the shirt to mark their birthdays, all purchased organically. To date, sales of the original tee have raised more than $600,000 for Trans Lifeline. As for the inevitable flood of dupes, Ives offers just one caveat: that anyone buying one honours the spirit of the original and donate to the cause it was designed to uplift.
Ives was born in upstate New York on the cusp of the millennial-gen Z divide – post-optimism, pre-disillusionment (to wit, his work carries equal parts hope and reckoning). By age 12, he had taught himself to sew, drape and completely redesign garments. At 18, he moved to London to attend Central Saint Martins and started commanding attention well before graduation. Today, at 29, he has become one of London’s most closely watched emerging designers. On Zoom, Ives looks like one of those young, pretty starlets the fashion world likes to orbit. There’s a glint of industry-weary knowing, tempered by a kind, clear-eyed determination.
He is part of a generation of designers increasingly tasked with both making and unmaking: creating garments and unlearning the habits that once defined the industry, like waste, opacity and disconnection. Ives’ clothes are known for their collage-like exuberance. Spliced silhouettes, cheerleader nostalgia, First Lady fascination and Americana debris made weird and wearable. But beneath their visual noise is a story about discipline, decency and what he refers to as a “tireless pursuit” of doing things differently.
It shows up in how he works with bulk recyclers outside London, where he sources T-shirts that he and his team reconstitute by hand into hybrid garments. Or in how his studio’s output often begins with leftovers, not moodboards. Or how, at 21, he dropped Adwoa Aboah off at the Met Gala wearing a dress he made, then drove upstate to his parents’ house.
That house – the one in Bedford, New York – is where much of his emotional architecture was built. His mother is a dentist. His father, a Presbyterian minister turned psychotherapist. “I remem – ber someone telling me the story of my dad showing up to church barefoot one day. Someone asked, ‘Where are your shoes?’ and he said, ‘I gave them to someone who didn’t have any.’” He pauses. “That story has stayed with me my whole life.”
It’s this emotional throughline that gives Ives’ work its particular register. And still, he hesitates to frame it as anything more than the next step in an evolving practice. “You kind of do the whole thing where you’re, you know, preparing for something that you’re almost not sure is happening in the first place,” he says of the preparations for his spring/summer 2026 show. “Which I think kind of does weird stuff to your head.”
It’s hard to square that uncertainty with the velocity of his career. After Adwoa Aboah wore his gown to the Met Gala, he joined the design team putting together Rihanna’s inaugural Fenty collections at LVMH – two feats that came while he was still studying at Central Saint Martins. Soon after graduating as part of the class of 2020, when the pandemic caused the traditional student runway show to be cancelled, he was named a runner-up in the LVMH Prize competition, and landed a piece in The Costume Institute at New York’s Met. His collections, built from salvaged pieces and stitched with social memory, have been worn by Rihanna, Dua Lipa, Sky Ferreira, Zoë Kravitz and Keke Palmer. Even his model line-ups feel like a Venn diagram of fash – ion’s present and future – nepo babies, Vogue editors, non-binary poets – all orbiting the same patched-together universe.
“It’s so easy to work in this industry and feel really kind of bummed about… complacency,” he says. “But then you have moments where you maybe see the good that something as sim – ple as a T-shirt can do.” Ives doesn’t linger on it – the shirt was never the point.
What lingers, instead, is a designer who doesn’t speak in absolutes. Who builds a studio around acts of salvage, who sees dignity in what often gets overlooked. And who, when he can, still reads the emails.
