Heron Preston’s promised world creates a way out of plastic streetwear, PPE and reclaiming the ecology of our future

«it’s taking people who do it from a point of passion to educate consumers on what is sustainable» – designer Heron Preston on the introduction of a whole new material to the world in coming months

Heron Preston has designed his last two collections in New York City, an ocean apart from his creative team in Milan. He has been in complete isolation both times and this has affected his approach to the work.

It’s frustrating not to be with my team, to be in close proximity to my clothes. I haven’t seen anything over the past year, just little trims or samples of materials or fabrics that they’ll ship to me via DHL, so there’s a lot of shipping back and forth – but the final pieces, I haven’t seen them. It’s just been pictures from shoots so it’s been weird, because growing up – and before New Guards Group – I was hands-on and very DIY. That’s how I learn, and that’s how I love to design, by just sinking my teeth into the process. I haven’t been able to be handson, and given the circumstances, I have to design from a place of memory and what I already know. For Heron Preston Fall 2021, it was about amplifying the best of what I’ve done in the past by revisiting those pieces and kind of putting a twist on them. I wanted everything to be wearable and as essential to the consumer as possible, that’s what the collection was about, focusing on pieces that I felt were part of an everyday assortment.

Just to take it back a bit, what made you really get into skate culture and streetwear?

Growing up in 1990s San Francisco, the skate culture there was thriving and that was one of the cities that put a stake in the ground when it came to the sport of skateboarding. We attracted some of the best skaters in the world. At the time, before social media, you didn’t see too many skaters unless they were in front of you, so there was no real exposure to the community yet and I remember the first time seeing a black skater like Stevie Williams. San Francisco was one of the best cities to see that in as a young kid growing up. This also influenced where I wanted to work: in skate shops. I wanted to be a retail rat, in amongst sneakers and the culture. That informed the jobs I was taking in high school, in the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood where all the shops were. A lot of the kids that worked there became my friends. We all gravitated towards certain things and a lot of those friends of mine were attracted to culture and skateboarding, that was just the kind of circle I had. In early 2001 and 2002, New York City not only attracted me, but a lot of my friends from San Francisco. We all moved to New York City where all of these like-minded people are taking the same jobs, working at Supreme, working at Stüssy or Union on Spring Street. I wanted to kind of open up the window to what life was like in New York and so I was taking tons of photos and posting them on my blog, that’s how I got my first book deal. That was called The Young and the Banging and it was a yearbook for New York City. I looked at the people who lived here as the student body, and New York City as a school – so it was for everyone who lived in New York City, all shot on