Conner Ives’ Complicated American Homecoming

Ahead of Conner Ives’ New York debut, Alexander Fury visited the designer’s London studio for a first look at a collection reflecting on America and identity

The collection of the American Museum of Fly Fishing isn’t conventional source material for party dresses. But, in his studio in north London, it is key inspiration for the barely 30-year-old designer Conner Ives while devising his equally incongruous New York debut. Incongruous because, exporting yourself to another fashion capital is a giant leap typically made deep into a designer’s career – Ives has only been working for five years, though his aesthetic is already distinct and pronounced. But for Ives, this trip is a form of homecoming – he was born and raised in New York State, rather than the city, moving to London to pursue his studies in 2014. That is, as Ives points out, just before the start of the first Trump presidency. He’s been back ever since, but only for short periods of time – less than a week a year.

But back to fly fishing – because it all connects. Ives calls the collection Across the Pond, and in the designer’s eyes it is “a reflection of my somewhat strained and complicated relationship with where I'm from.” Meaning America as a whole, rather than New York. Many have seen American themes as rife in Ives’ work – founded on sustainable practices, using feedstock fabrics and upcycled pieces such as embroidered piano shawls and sports shirts, that alone could be seen as a great comment on American consumerism, or even on the recycling of the pop-cultural phenomenon of the prequel and multiple sequel. In between, Ives has created clothes that seem geared towards American archetypes of female dress – gala dresses, fancy bathing suits, banal T-shirts (reworked with punched-out holes or mazes of smocking into something more complex) and a fur-trimmed dead ringer for a mid-century housecoat that has become a runaway seller. On the other hand, his Protect the Dolls T-shirt, sales of which have contributed some half a million dollars to transgender charities, reflects his profound political disagreement with America right now. “Rather than thinking about Americana and Americanisms through clothing, it became a lot more about exploring the state of America,” Ives says. That’s about this collection specifically, but could apply to his output as a whole.

Back in London, back in the studio, his fit model walks a narrow oblique towards Ives and show stylist Vanessa Reid. She wears a washed-out lilac sweatshirt above a hand-painted skirt with fluttering gills of chiffon, Across the Pond translated with a directness that seems part ChatGPT-era anti-nuance, part Warholian deadpan. There are another couple of fish dresses, and also a long bias-cut evening dress in Clorox blue appliquéd with three-dimensional water lilies and their pads. Alongside, clothes were rinsed of the theme, semaphoring in animal prints and embroidered silks a Manhattan glamour. Ives says he always wanted to stage a show at The Grill in the Seagram Building, formerly the stuffy, old-money Four Seasons, designed by Philip Johnson in 1959. And central to The Grill is a decorative pond. It all fits.

Maybe it is a case of shifted perception, but Ives’ clothes this season seem to have a new New York slant, a bit of gloss. A fitted, flounced-hem black lace dress had a whiff of a twentysomething-year-old Oscar de la Renta; a long bias dress in sea-foam green could’ve been Halston, while the chopped-up pre-existing pieces had a whiff of Miguel Adrover and his second-hand exploration of American archetypes. Incidentally, during the gestation period of this collection, Ives spent seven to eight weeks marooned there, waiting for a UK work visa – the longest he’d been back home for 12 years. “It was the most incredible market research I think I have ever done,” Ives says now, of the two months he spent meeting clients who stump for his multiple hand-remade shawl dresses trimmed in macramé fringe, and those fur coats. Those have become a neo-socialite uniform of sorts, seen uptown and downtown, on women of all ages, reinforcing the old upward-mobility cliché. While they sat in the audience, the models were joined by trans women of power and influence, such as the stylist Dara and actor Hari Nef, echoing Ives’ similar casting stance in London. There was also a menswear collaboration with Gieves & Hawkes, comprising softly handled suiting and artfully tied scarves that imitated cummerbunds or cravats, exporting unmistakable Englishness abroad. And the shocks of colour and flamboyant gestures of frilled and fringed evening dresses bear out another of Ives’ maxims around the show: “Flamboyance and passion are inherently American traits.” This season, he’s embraced them fully.