'Style is Instinct': Designer Heron Preston on Taking Fashion Forward

Heron Preston is creating a universal design language. He is the human embodiment of a modern gesamtkunstwerk, with endeavours encompassing fashion, product design, music and art. Preston's cultural accolades include, first and foremost, his on-going namesake fashion brand, which he launched in 2016. Also a founding member of the infamous art and DJ collective #BEENTRILL# alongside Virgil Abloh and Matthew Williams, on his own terms Preston has collaborated with Calvin Klein, Bape and GENTLEMONSTER, and worked with Nike as a global digital producer. Born into the cultural and political landscape of the United States, in short, Preston has become one of the founding fathers for where global fashion and design stands today.

Taking workwear and found objects from New York City as the starting point for his fashion label, Preston continues to subvert everyday references like a modern Marcel Duchamp. Never has this felt boring, however. Collaborating with the NYC Sanitation Department and NASA, in his early collections Preston took both the iconic and the mundane from American iconography and made it democratic, through t-shirts, utility jackets and trousers. Since launching his first commercial product with SHOWstudio in 2014 in the form of a polo-neck top featuring the brand's Cyrillic font motif, Preston has since put his weight behind fabric development, showing camouflage prints in jacquards, or his Ex-Ray materials program where fabric is studied with the aim of lessening the environmental impact of Heron Preston collections. Responding to consumer demand, Preston's A/W 21 collection featured industrial fire-retardant fabric, making his clothes site-fit for the contexts from which they were inspired. The introduction of tailoring and a move away from graphics has also nodded to Preston maturing with in line with his loyal customer base.

For the brand's latest A/W 22 campaign, Preston tapped photographer Gabriel Moses to bring fashion to the people. SHOWstudio's features editor Hetty Mahlich spoke to Preston about the collaboration, and where the brand goes next.

Hetty Mahlich: What differentiates style from fashion?

Heron Preston: There is this famous quote that I think about that says: ‘Fashion is fleeting style is forever’ and I think fashion is kind of this thing that comes and goes and it is not necessary something that the entire world can embrace or understand or even afford sometimes. Fashion isn’t necessarily designed for everyone, but within all of that there are layers of style, and style is this kind of universal thing that everyone has within their DNA. Style is human instinct.

A couple of years ago, I developed a huge respect for the word style and its meaning. That’s where my iconic logo came from and funnily enough, that moment started with my SHOWstudio collaboration back in 2014! Fashion can be narrow, alienating and exclusive but the face of fashion is all of us. In today's world, fashion has became so powerful yet not everyone can be part of it and not everyone can necessarily afford it but within all of these people style exist, and style is natural. When I think about fashion, I obviously think about clothing but when you break it down to the bare essentials, they are just pieces of material to help protect us and keep us warm. That goes back cave men, making clothing to protect themselves during extreme cold, but when you think about them, they had a style that was applied to how they lived their life. Fashion didn’t exist then, but style did. Style is part of being human, it has been with us forever and it will remain forever. Fashion is more like storytelling, it walks on the line of what’s trendy or trying to make something trendy, it comes and goes.

HM: Could you explain the concept of Ex-Ray and how that feeds into production?

HP: Ex-Ray is a materials program that gives me the space to investigate the materials within my collections that produce the highest environmental impact. Ex-Ray are the materials that I use the most, given that, they use up most of the resources that it takes to build my collections. It’s looking at materials inside and out, and that’s where the name comes from. It’s looking at how they are made, where they come from, who is making them, how they are treating them, and that is all considered in how we choose materials and what we incorporate in the collections and those have the highest standards of quality in the collections.

We started with nylon and cotton because those two are the most used materials in the collections and so, over time hopefully, the entire collection will be made from Ex-Ray material. It is me challenging myself to continue exploring less environmentally destructive (L.E.D.) solutions for the collections but also for the industry. Hopefully one day I can open-up Ex-Ray to other brands who share the same values.

HM: How do you find fresh inspiration from American archetypes, which are a recurrent reference for the brand?

HP: I find fresh inspirations from American archetypes through my imagination. That is what I use to preserve and maintain inspiration. It is kind of having this idea that having a vision and imagination is fun and it can be playful. No boundaries. This helps to give me the space to see ideas through an all-new lens without any pressure to succeed.

HM: Why did you choose Gabriel Moses to photograph the AW22 campaign?

HP: I chose Gabriel Moses to photograph the campaign because he is super talented and his style of photography employs a unique understanding of lighting, colours and composition that I personally felt was missing from my body of work. His output is so raw and beautiful. When I look at his photography it really feels to me he’s managed to capture the soul of his subjects. When I worked with him, I felt like he could put anything in front of his lens and produce magic, no question. We come from the same culture therefore speak similar language. Sometimes you got it, sometimes you don’t. Gabriel got it!

There were so many exciting qualities about Gabriel, he is young, he is a rising star in photography, we have the same friends and I was honoured he agreed to work with me. It was his first time traveling to NYC, so that also felt special that through my brand I was able to give someone the opportunity to see a part of the world that they had never seen before. I like to think that those experiences stick with someone for life.