Conner Ives

Conner Ives is an independent London label founded in 2021 by the American designer Conner Ives. The business grew from work he developed while studying womenswear at Central Saint Martins, including red-carpet commissions, a 2018 T-shirt-dress capsule for Browns and a placement with Fenty. His graduate collection, The American Dream, established the label’s central subject: American identity reconstructed through remembered women, popular culture and the dress codes of suburban New York.

The studio combines two production systems. One-off and limited demi-couture pieces are assembled from vintage garments, scarves, military blankets, deadstock embellishment and other found materials, while repeatable ready-to-wear uses deadstock and newly manufactured recycled fabrics in London factories. Patchworked T-shirt dresses remain a commercial anchor, but the collections have expanded into tailoring, outerwear, evening dresses, knitwear and accessories without abandoning the irregularities carried by their source materials.

Ives entered the London runway calendar with Fall 2022 and developed a sequence of character-led collections that moved between American archetypes, fashion memory and political urgency. The viral “Protect the Dolls” T-shirt emerged from the Fall 2025 show and became a fundraising vehicle for trans-led organisations. After winning the 2025 BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund and receiving BFC Fashion Trust support in 2026, the London-based company scheduled its first New York Fashion Week show for September 2026.

The label treats existing clothing as both material and evidence. Vintage T-shirts, scarves, sports jerseys and military textiles retain traces of earlier wear, graphics and manufacture; cutting and reassembly do not erase those histories but place them in new silhouettes. The method allows an evening dress to remain visibly related to casual American clothing, producing glamour through displacement rather than through immaculate newness.

Ives develops collections through fictional or remembered women: debutantes, editors, suburban mothers, cheerleaders, club figures and socialites. These characters are not fixed costumes but devices for testing how class, aspiration, nostalgia and performance circulate through dress. A London education and studio structure sharpen the distance from which he examines American imagery, allowing affection and criticism to remain present at the same time.

Material responsibility is organised around use rather than a single claim of purity. Labour-intensive one-offs coexist with scalable recycled-fabric pieces, and the studio has repeatedly adjusted production to make upcycling viable beyond the sample rail. Casting, slogan garments and partnerships extend this practice into public life, most clearly when “Protect the Dolls” converted the emotional conclusion of a runway show into sustained support for trans communities.