Famously known for being the designer behind some of Harry Styles’ most important looks, Harris Reed is constantly trying to push the boundaries of what men, women and non-binary people wear. In an interview for BBC, Harris said, “I believe and look at clothing being a vessel that transports the wearer and the people that see them to another space, another time.”
It’s almost hard to believe that Reed has just graduated from design school at Central Saint Martins in London just this past year given the prominence of some of his clients, such as Ezra Miller, Solange Knowles and Alessandro Michele. The unapologetically queer designer has completed his debut collection labeled as “demi-couture,” a balanced middle ground between luxury couture and ready-to-wear collections. The collection is titled “For Now, Unexplained,” leaving a lot of the production open to interpretation. “That nine year old queer kid has just woken up and that playground dream that got me through it all is a now reality,” Reed says in a caption on Instagram.
The collection contains a staggering number of six looks in total, quite abnormal for a fashion week collection. A single model wears each of the six looks on different places of the color spectrum. With Reed’s philosophies on life and clothing, the theme of Harris Reed AW21 is based on gender fluidity — gender as a spectrum, from which, people can choose and grow from. Reed, who prides himself on breaking barriers, intends for the clothes to be worn by anyone, and as you move from look to look you see the development of a dandelion headpiece. This is about one character’s journey through life — discovering themselves and becoming something.
As a midway between couture and ready-to-wear, the clothes themselves don’t appear to be that wearable. They are meant to be pieces of art rather than these sellable garments actually meant to turn a profit. “I didn’t really want to do something people could wear, I wanted to do something that people really felt had a relevance now and it was kind of escapism into this fluid world that I build with what I do,” Harris says. Inspired by the punk movement, the pieces themselves are almost incomplete as they flash from a room cloaked in pink, red, orange, blue, white and purple light.
As we reach the sixth phase of the model’s transformation cloaked in purple, we’ve achieved this idea of totality and wholeness. Just as in life, the final piece is a cumulation of all the pieces that have come before it. “It’s really this idea of progressing and progressing and progressing and really kind of seeing all the different facets of yourself that I really find that you only see through this idea of rebelling and immense pressure and being uncomfortable,” Harris says.