HARRIS REED FALL 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.

Titled 60 Years a Queen after 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.

Images courtesy of Harris Reed.