“I never just wanted to be a great fashion designer with Natasha Poly walking down my runway. What I’m interested in is creating moments.” So said Charles Jeffrey of the London brand Loverboy on a Zoom from his studio this week. Fans know that Loverbody started as a club night almost 10 years ago, with Jeffrey as its club kid host. It has since evolved into the fashion label we know and love, but apparel was never intended as its final form. Jeffrey has already dropped an album; Neko is a sonic counterpart to his fall 2022 collection. His latest venture is a new radio show, titled Loverboy Radio, launching today on Foundation FM. “I like our brand being amorphous and having different avenues,” he said. “We could be a TV show next.”
The debut episode of Loverboy Radio features a lineup of interviews recorded in New York earlier this summer, plus tidbits of goings-on in the Loverboy world. It opens with vintage songs (including Elaine Stritch’s “The Ladies Who Lunch”); jumps to music from past Loverboy shows that included looks featured in the upcoming exhibition “Rebel: 30 Years of London Fashion,” which is being guest curated by Vogue’s Sarah Mower; then cuts to interviews with DJ Joey LaBeija, Colm Dillane of KidSuper, and Angelica Davincii of Dover Street Market New York. The show closes with a segment in which Jeffrey chats with his fellow Scott, musician Luca Manning. Two additional interviews, one with Duckie Brown designers Steven Cox and Daniel Silver, and another with makeup artist and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy superfan Niko Haagenson can be seen exclusively in the short documentary here.
Loverboy Radio makes good use of Jeffrey’s knack for performance. He sees himself not only as the brand’s founder but as its mascot. “Having compiled a portfolio of nearly 10 years of work with Loverboy, I keep seeing myself as this character within it,” he said. “It’s becoming more apparent to me as I’m older how important that is, not only for my own artistic needs but for the brand.” Like his contemporaries Simon Porte Jacquemus and ERL’s Eli Russell-Linnetz, Jeffrey is his own best marketing asset.
“One of my hopes for the brand is that it can be seen as something that has a fashion element to it, but also exists across multiple avenues,” says Jeffrey. He wants to make Loverboy a platform for a range of disciplines, which will not only expand its subversive-slash-“silly, stupid, and funny” ethos, but also open new income streams for the label.
A closer look at Loverboy Radio and Jeffrey’s time in New York.
“There’s always going to be money if you’re Dior or Chanel, but if you’re a medium-sized luxury brand like myself that is trying to make clothes for younger people at a lower price, that’s just a very volatile space,” he said. “I want to make sure that we’ve got little elements in other places that can help us with the shape of the business financially. Whether that’s going into things like beauty or nurturing things like music, it helps move the pin forward to where I want to be.”
