With Ryan Murphy’s new, Truman Capote–focused series, Feud, taking over TV right now, it’s the season of the Swan—and if anyone is poised to translate the spirit of that glamorous coterie of women into something worthy of a socialite of today, it’s Conner Ives. (In fact, it’s territory he’s previously touched on: His fall 2023 collection was centered around the Shiny Set—including C.Z. Guest—as featured in magazine veteran Nicholas Coleridge’s memoir, The Glossy Years.) The designer couldn’t have picked a more appropriate location than the duck-egg blue Rococo interiors and chandeliers of The Savoy’s Lancaster Ballroom, arguably London’s closest parallel to the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel in New York, in which Capote’s famous Black and White Ball was held.
First out was Ives’s regular muse, Alex Consani, in a floaty spaghetti-strap LBD paired with a black stretchy headband, looking as if she were halfway through the process of getting dolled up for a night out. Soon after, subversive Ives-isms began to appear in wardrobe staples: a T-shirt and skirt decorated with mirror-work embroideries; a bias-cut gown with silvery florals (made of safety pins) crawling across it; another upcycled T-shirt-and-skirt combo, this time with Schiffli lace embroidery that trimmed Art Nouveau–ish curved cutouts. Some of the pieces, like a faux-shearling trapper hat, deliberately flirted with bad taste. Of a shiny upcycled faux-python textile, Ives said it’s “kinda yucky, but I love it.” But taken as a whole, this lineup was a reflection of the designer leaning further into craftsmanship. “I feel like this is probably the most aspirational collection I’ve made,” he said at a preview in his north London studio.
In a notable shift, Ives moved away from the archetypes of American women he explored in previous seasons, where each look arrived with a backstory or a character from popular culture that inspired it. Instead, this collection was about turning the spotlight to the real women who surround and inspire him—and Ives was keen to add that part of his fascination with the debutantes also lies in how his career has been propelled forward by the well-to-do women who have taken him under his wing. (His first big breakout moment, lest we forget, was when Adwoa Aboah wore a dress of his to the Met Gala while Ives was still a student at Central Saint Martins—which, in a full-circle moment, was appliquéd with a dozen ivory satin swans.) “I owe a lot to these women, so in some ways this collection is really a tribute to them,” Ives said.
To wit, Stevie Sims (daughter of David Sims and Luella Bartley), Sofia Testino (daughter of Art Partner founder Giovanni Testino), and Ella Richards (granddaughter of Keith Richards and Anita Pallenberg) all walked—nepo-baby discourse be damned—while the closing look was worn by the blue-blooded beauty editor Tish Weinstock. Yet elsewhere in the lineup was Consani, of course, along with Vogue cover star Precious Lee and the nonbinary model and poet Kai-Isaiah Jamal. For Ives, the casting reflected his vision of what high society looks like today and the (relative, at least) democracy of who you might find in those spaces in London. “Obviously there are still a lot of social barriers in London, but when you get all these people in one room, it does feel like those barriers fall down,” he said.
What made the collection truly shine, however, was Ives’s thoughtful use of upcycled materials. Ives is one of London fashion’s most eloquent young voices on sustainability, but he’s also cautious to only speak on what he really knows. “I think everyone needs to be a little more honest about what we’re doing on that front,” he said. “There’s a lot of buzzwords flying around all the time, and I’m not sure many people really know what they mean.” For fall, his horror at the wastefulness of our consumerist world was subtly woven throughout: Many of his jersey pieces were made from deadstock military surplus, something he describes as an example of “waste in more ways than one,” while a standout silk bubble dress was made from a Qing Dynasty wall tapestry, which he deliberately left in its raw state (unlike, say, the restoration process he embarks on with the piano shawls he sources from antique dealers). It served as a potent reminder of the beauty to be found in the discarded and forgotten.
Which leads us to that final look: a white organza gown hand-embroidered with cast-off headphone cables sourced from an electronics factory. (Ives is nothing if not a fashion nerd, and you get the sense that the idea of closing each show with a bridal look is catnip for a designer who grew up idolizing the great French couturiers while flicking through his monthly issue of Vogue.) Worn by Weinstock, it was duly paraded around the room, then stood pride of place in the center as the models took their final walks to Björk’s “Headphones.” It turned out that Ives’s inspiration actually lay in his frustration with the idea of the junk drawer. Here, though, Ives turned trash into treasure—and even the haughtiest of Capote’s Swans couldn’t turn their nose up at that.
