Fashion’s favourite clothes horse, Harry Styles, might be best known, sartorially speaking, for his Gucci-packed wardrobe, yet for his 2018 world tour the former One Directioner chose to wear a slightly more niche name. Looking like a modern mash-up of Prince and David Bowie, Styles took to the stage in flamboyantly ruched and ruffled blouses, high-shine metallic shirting and Saturday Night Fever-style flares. It was camp, sexy and left us in as much awe of his tour outfits as his vocals.
But the man behind the looks? That would be the 25-year-old American-born, London-based designer Harris Reed, who met the singer’s stylist, Harry Lambert, at a model casting in 2016 and the rest, as they say, is fashion history. After their initial meeting Reed and Lambert began working together on magazine editorials; months later, Lambert called Reed and suggested he would be perfect for a client of his. “I had an inkling it was Harry Styles and it was,” Reed explains. “I put together a collage of work for his tour and he loved it.”
Lambert was instantly fascinated by the Harris Reed world. “He brings drama, excitement and beauty to menswear,” he says.
On the back of creating Styles’ brilliant tour outfits, Reed designed a look comprising a smoking jacket, wide-leg trousers and a cage-like hoop skirt for the star’s cover story in American Vogue’s December 2020 issue, for which the singer became the first man to appear solo on the magazine’s cover.
And yet his work with Styles only cemented an extraordinary year for Reed, one that saw him confirmed as the go-to designer for stars pushing the boundaries of gendered clothing and, in the process, redefining the very idea of traditional masculine styling for the rest of us.
It was no better encapsulated than when Olly Alexander slipped into a Reed-designed, crystal-embellished lace two-piece and a floor-skimming cape to perform alongside Sir Elton John at the Brit Awards in May, another effortlessly iconic look. Elsewhere, Reed supplied a wide-brimmed hat for the UK cover of Selena Gomez’s EP, Revelación, launched a unisex jewellery collection with London-based label Missoma, created a -gender-fluid make-up line with Mac Cosmetics (a first for the globally recognised brand) and unveiled his debut demi-couture collection. Stephanie Cooper, Reed’s former lecturer at Central Saint Martins, simply states that “Harris has created an oeuvre that defines a generation”.
Reed, who is gender-fluid, produces seasonal collections infused with femininity and theatricality; extra-exaggerated flares, frilled collars inspired by the Romantic era and double-breasted, waist-nipped suit jackets combined with taffeta bodices make up just a few of his perfectly polished design touchstones. You’ll also find him crafting extravagant, deconstructed business suits hand-attached to tulle gowns for his clients. “This is my version of a menswear brand,” says Reed. “It’s glam-rock androgyny with a fluid, romantic escapism that is also tinged with a 1970s aesthetic. It’s constantly evolving.”
Reed wasn’t always planning to redefine menswear in such a radical way. “When I started at Saint Martins, I was [making] traditional masculine clothing by way of suits and trousers and it didn’t work for me.”
We’re in Reed’s studio space at The Standard hotel in London, which is full to bursting with mood boards and colourful fabric swatches, and the designer, who looks like an elfin cross between Lila Moss and Saoirse Ronan, is draped in a semi-sheer black blouse.
“If we can bring Savile Row back to what it was in the 1970s, when we had all the magnificent over-the-top suits with in-your-face lapels and exaggerated trousers, we’d be in a good place. When tailoring is taken for what it is and regurgitated on the body, it remains in the past,” he says. “I started designing menswear for myself and that’s when it clicked. When traditional masculine forms – the suit, the trousers – are pushed and explored, it’s fabulous!”
Reed’s progressive designs, which, he tells me, are in part inspired by the work of Belgian designer Ann Demeulemeester (“She represents androgyny and her work, for me, is a beautiful play on classic tailoring”), are, perhaps unsurprisingly, particularly popular with the showier sect of the celeb crowd. In addition to Styles and Alexander, Reed counts Sam Smith, Miley Cyrus and actress Tommy Dorfman among his superfans.
“Fifty years from now we will look back on Harris’ work with immense gratitude,” Dorfman says. “It will have impacted the global understanding of gender fluidity, steering us into a more accepting world.”
Another of Reed’s most vociferous cheerleaders is the Messianic creative lead of Gucci, Alessandro Michele, whom the young designer met while studying. “I [applied for a placement] and immediately got a call from Alessandro’s team. The next day I flew out to Milan,” he tells me, excitedly. “Michele put me in his 2019 Resort show and a perfume campaign, but, for me, it served a bigger purpose. Alessandro used words like ‘creature’ and ‘weirdo’ to describe the people he admired and those names resonated with ones I had been called when I was bullied for being different at school. I realised that fashion has this unrivalled power to reclaim personal identity.”
It’s that same sense of taking ownership of his identity that Reed tries to reflect in all of his collections. “I think of my brand with a pendulum effect in mind,” he explains. “I swing so far to one side, which is extremely fantastical and over the top, in the hope that a more traditional man who swings to the other side will feel he can actually wear a blouse or pearls.”
His six-look demi-couture collection, which he unveiled in early 2021, is a case in point (think full-skirted tulle paired with “menswear” tailoring), but Reed isn’t expecting blokes to go down the pub wearing his pieces just yet. “I’m not pushing for a big fashion awakening,” he says, “but I want to ensure there is a comfortable space for any single person to be in. The mental freedom I feel from wearing genderless pieces is something I want everyone to have.
“I get up to 100 messages a day via social media from people explaining that they want to wear this or that, but fear being beaten up. It’s hard,” he adds. “I still walk to my studio and I get people who heckle me, even if I’m just wearing a black suit, because the more feminine blouse underneath scares them. Fuck it, I’m doing it anyway. I am part of the change.”
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