Heron Preston Comes Home to New York
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New York isn’t just a fashion capital—in fact, it may be more of a style capital, where crowds of citizens reclaim their individuality through clothes.
A designer who knows that well is Heron Preston, a longtime New York resident (since he moved to the city from his native San Francisco to attend Parsons in 2004.) “New York has always been a big inspiration and connection point for the brand,” he said in a phone call earlier this week. “City life, and street uniforms.”
But he’s never shown in New York. A founder of the influential collective Been Trill, which included the late Virgil Abloh and Givenchy creative director Matthew Williams, Preston has staged his shows in Paris, during Men’s Fashion Week. For the first time, on Saturday evening, he’ll show in the city that nurtured the brand. “I’ve really grown as a designer,” he said, “and I started my career here in New York.”
You might even say the 39-year-old is the contemporary designer whose clothing is most about New York. In 2016, Preston collaborated with the city’s sanitation department, for which he repurposed old sanitation worker uniforms and other used clothing to highlight the organization’s efforts towards decreasing waste. Two years later, for a project with Carhartt’s fashion-forward diffusion line Carhartt WIP, he showed his pieces on art handlers, often artists themselves, who do the tricky business of carting around enormous (and enormously expensive) works of art in the brand’s heavy duty workwear.
And in 2021, he worked as a creative consultant for Calvin Klein, creating some of the brand’s best products and imagery—Kaia Gerber in jeans and high-rise briefs, Nas in cool beige sweatpants—in its post-Raf Simons period.
So the move to New York seems like a natural fit. “I just really started missing the city,” he said. “I started missing showing and connecting with my friends and my family here in New York.”
He has a number of fans outside of the world of fashion who follow his career on Instagram; some have become his friends, and he's invited them to the show. “There’s so many different layers of fans” in fashion, he said. “You have those core fans, but then it kind of trickles out to someone who doesn’t even wear fashion or can’t even afford it. But they follow me and I work with them and they love what I post, and they always compliment me”—they particularly love the 3D-printed sneakers he first introduced in October 2021, he said. “These are people who are watching from the outside.” Many of them, he noted, have said they’ve never even been to a fashion show before.
It’s true that the city seems to bring something out in Preston—a wide-eyed creativity that can be harder to detect in Paris, which is a city all about fashion and less about how style, music, stores, and restaurants coalesce to create a distinctive culture. (It’s hard to imagine a Parisian designer collaborating with the city’s sanitation department.) His invitations, for example, were all discarded stuff he found wandering around New York: crushed up cans, pieces of cardboard packaging, and even remnants of a discarded sink.
As for the show, the choreography of his runway presentation will echo the pedestrian cacophony of the city, with graffiti artists (including Preston himself) spraying utility markings on the runway as the models weave in and out. He is also eager to show off the progression of his designs, which, again, are an homage to urban materials and uniform style. “This collection’s really inspired by the reclaiming of found objects and observing the city,” he said, and “looking at the city as layers of materials.” Tarp, barbed wire, and faux fur are some of his “fabrics,” along with denim; his fascination with chain link fencing inspired a swath of chainmail hoods, bras, and shirting.
It’s sweet to remember that a decade ago, Preston, Williams, and Abloh were just fresh-faced outsiders in New York. “We’ve always been able to identify gaps within storytelling and gaps within culture that could be filled, or done better,” he said about the enduring influence of their spirit. They were able to identify things that “hadn’t hit their full potential yet. Or maybe that thing needs to be flipped on its head. Maybe that rule needs to be rewritten. Maybe that rule needs to be erased altogether. Maybe something needs to be rebuilt from scratch, or the bottom up, instead of fixing stuff.”
Their creative alliance “was always just kind of questioning culture, the vibes of the streets of youth. What do we need? What’s exciting us? What’s boring us?” He said he feels that spirit in the show he is staging Saturday evening.
At a time when some longtime New Yorkers feel the city is changing too fast and for the worse, Preston’s show might be a reminder that the foundations remain unaltered. “Obviously, this is a fashion show. But I look at this as more of a celebration,” he said.
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