The Vile and the Perfect: Inside Aaron Esh’s Latest Show

Ahead of his Spring/Summer 2027 show, Laws of Attraction, Aaron Esh talks vomit colour clothes and his painstaking pursuit of perfection

Aaron Esh is an obsessive. At a preview ahead of his London Fashion Week show, he keeps plucking pieces of his latest collection from the rail, turning them inside out, running his fingers over stitching and exposing invisible seams. His voice is riled-up and anguished, as he points out the tiny things that will be frustratingly hard to notice on the runway. “This is beyond my expectations of how nicely the clothes are made and finished,” he says. “It takes time.” Esh skipped a show last season and has effectively spent a year working on Spring/Summer 2027. “I don’t want to rush stuff.” For a young independent designer without the scaffolding and technical machinery of a major house behind him, making 36 looks to this standard twice a year simply isn’t realistic. There are around 100 garments here, he estimates, each subject to all that scrutiny. “It was always going to be working until the night before the show finishing the last thing,” he says. “That’s just how long it takes to have things that are so beautifully made.”

Beauty is a thorny word in the Aaron Esh universe. This season, some of his most obsessive work has been devoted to making things look a bit vile. This is the first season Esh has used a colour board, which plotted out queasy collisions of turquoise, electric blue, shocking pink, violent red and a particularly bilious yellow-beige. “We wanted it to feel almost ‘purgy’ and cathartic. It’s like vomit.” Puke as palette cleanser then – how Roman. “When we said, ‘Let’s do a vomit colour,’ it was about being ’purgeful’,” he continues. “But the whole year was ‘purgeful’ for me. The vomit colour makes sense.”

A lot has changed, in fact. Last October, he was appointed as the chief creative officer at the nostalgia-soaked British brand AllSaints, a hiring that surprised many in its gumption for a high-street label. When I first interviewed him for his debut show three years ago, we sat in a blank room little bigger than a garage, with two chairs, two rails of clothes and fitting photographs taped to makeshift walls. Now his operation has migrated into AllSaints’ slick Spitalfields headquarters. He is speaking to me on day four of casting. Around 400 models have apparently passed through – some are waiting nearby in the wings, ready to slip into looks and pace across the office’s echoing floors. At one end of the room sits a long table where Esh and his team watch them walk like talent show judges. Casting is instinctive; after years of developing the label, Esh says he finally knows exactly who belongs in its world.

Super stylist Katy England, he says, found this collection unusually easy to work with because “we know exactly who the girl and the boy is”. They go out, they love clothes, they listen to music at an eardrum-busting volume. Nightlife remains important to Esh, but not as a grab-bag of Berghain clichés. He wants the clothes to contain “the attitude of listening to really, really loud music. And snogging someone.” It’s a heady kind of hedonism that comes quite naturally to him. 

“I think the word couture is bandied around,” Esh says, grabbing ahold of a coat from the rail, “but this is genuine couture.” He strokes its surface, which looks like a deep bruised aubergine-brown shaggy shearling from across the room. Up close, it splinters into strips of organza, hand brushed, clumped together and re-embroidered in dense florets. The process took more than 100 hours and, of course, it is fully lined. “You have this tactility and sensibility. It’s not so much about being Parisian [anymore], it’s about being … 1stDibs.” Elsewhere, crocodile-effect leggings are constructed from individually cut leather pieces before being embroidered together. Jackets have exaggeratedly high ribs; trench coats come in floppy, unlined poplin; tailoring is soft. Even seemingly straightforward pieces reveal satin linings, leather trims and intricate internal finishing. 

Esh first went to Central Saint Martins to study graphic design around 2010. His fascination with Raf Simons, Nicolas Ghesquière and Martin Margiela – designers who taught him that clothes could be about identity, belonging and recognition as much as fabulous clothing – eventually pushed him towards fashion. He enrolled at London College of Fashion without knowing how to thread a bobbin. Later, a knockout MA collection at Central Saint Martins set him on his current path. That old-school devotion to technique is still enduring, yet thrown onto London’s spirited young generation, its wearable sense of ease is prime.

That attitude spills into the show itself at Camden’s Electric Ballroom. Esh wanted the music “so loud that it’s teeth-shattering”. He got his wish. There is aggression in all that pink and red, he argues, a punk quality without any need for cliché punk signifiers. It is maybe the release valve for all that precision, the thrilling, whistling, burning hot steam escaping from a year spent fussing over invisible seams, culminating in clothes meant to feel fast, sexy and a gritty. “That’s what makes it cool,” Esh says. “I can do whatever I fucking want.”