The man behind A-Cold-Wall*
A British fashion designer offers a bracing new vision of luxury
“Twenty-eight is really the death of youth,” says Samuel Ross, 29-year-old founder and creative director of the clothing label A-ColdWall*. “My last frivolous purchase was this necklace, and now it’s just bond shares and ETFs [exchange-traded funds].” Those who have followed Ross’s career to date will not be surprised by the designer’s attitude: his is a serious-minded approach.
A-Cold-Wall* is regarded by many in the fashion industry as the exemplar of a modern brand, Ross the embodiment of a modern designer. It is a commercial business, selling products; an art happening defined by its occasionally unsettling live fashion shows; and a platform for Ross’s vocal stance on social inequality, all rolled into one. Founded in 2015, the company’s high-low fusion of technical sportswear, utility clothing and classic menswear has met with critical acclaim and commercial success.
Ross did not train as a fashion designer, instead pursuing a career in graphic design, studying at De Montfort University in Leicester. He was born in south London but grew up in a small town just outside Northampton, and though clothing served as an outlet of creativity, it never represented a likely profession.
“There was a fascination, there was an intrigue, there was a curiosity,” he remembers, speaking to Esquire on a Zoom call in late May, boyishly handsome in his plain white T-shirt and recently acquired gold chain. “But it was never really seen as a career.”
The designer’s trajectory was unusual, to say the least. “If I look back at the past 17 years,” he says, “at age 11, my first placement was in the streetwear store in Northampton. By age 15, I was selling counterfeit Nike and sportswear on council estates and selling Evisu jeans to my friends. By age 18, I was screen printing hoodies and T-shirts. By age 21, I’m developing clothes with Virgil and Hood By Air and… yada yada ya.”
Virgil is Virgil Abloh, the current artistic director of Louis Vuitton Menswear, among the most influential people in fashion; Hood By Air is a cult fashion brand founded by designer Shayne Oliver in 2006. Both are at the cutting edge of the blurring of boundaries between socalled streetwear and high fashion.
“I believe I came across [Ross’s] Instagram profile, and I thought it was extremely intelligent and incredibly creative and chic,” says Abloh, over the phone from his hometown, Chicago. “I was struck by the graphic design skills that he had and the intellect he had behind it, so I followed his page.”
At that point, Abloh was creative director of Kanye West’s creative agency, Donda, and a member of Been Trill, a group whose website describes it as an “art collective and DJ crew whose image and sound is defined by the frenzy of new youth culture found on the pages of the deep web and on the blocks of big cities”.
Ross was inspired by how Abloh and his collaborators, which included now-celebrated designers Heron Preston and Matthew Williams, created and communicated. Been Trill, which began as a Tumblr account, produced music, apps, clothing and accessories, and there were collaborations with Adidas, Harvey Nichols and Coca-Cola.
“I wanted to be contributing to what was happening, from a global design conversation,” says Ross. “And that’s what really led me to fashion. From that point on it was looking at what artists were producing and communicating in interesting ways, and proposing new ideas.”
In 2012, Abloh hired Ross as his assistant without the pair having met in person. “I was like, ‘Hey, these are the projects I have. I’m sort of in over my head. Would you be down to join what I’m trying to build?’,” Abloh remembers.
Among other things, Ross worked on Pyrex Vision, Abloh’s first solo foray into fashion, that included Champion T-shirts and Ralph Lauren rugby shirts screen-printed with artworks, lettering and logos. Ross was also present for the start of Off-White, the graphics-heavy streetwear brand which Abloh still oversees alongside his work at Louis Vuitton.
Neither Abloh nor Ross studied fashion design and both made drastic career swerves after a couple of years in their respective graduate jobs. (Abloh has a degree in civil engineering and worked at an architecture firm following university.) Unlike tailors or dressmakers, they come to clothing design with a graphic sensibility: clothing is a medium in the way that moving image and interior design are mediums.
“It’s funny," says Ross, not without confidence, “because if it wasn’t street-wear-to-high-fashion-to-luxury-goods, it would have been graphic-design-to-industrial-design-to-Pentagram [the leading design consultancy]. Or we would have just been at Apple.”
The first ACW clothing arrived in early 2015. Ross says he wanted to speak to a part of society which he felt had been neglected, from a style perspective. “It was still quite a taboo to have this idea of the intellect, coming from an impoverished environment in British culture. ACW, initially, could be looked at as a defiance of the class system.”
It is projected that by 2025 those born between the early Eighties and the early 2010s will account for 45 per cent of the global luxury market. Ross pitched ACW as a high-fashion brand that both took inspiration from and marketed itself to young people who were perhaps overlooked as realistic clients by the traditional luxury brands, due to their age and supposed social standing. As established fashion brands and luxury houses increasingly target younger consumers, so-called millennials and Generation Z, Ross’s calculation looks to have been a smart one.
Streetwear shoppers loved early ACW for its graphics-heavy, technical aesthetic, and for Ross’s link to their hero, Abloh. The staples of modern youth — hoodies, technical outerwear, statement-making trainers, cross-body bags — all featured, but they were tweaked, or “elevated”, as the industry likes to say. In its autumn/winter 2017 collection, for example, traditional sportswear fabrics were used in soft tailoring, and drop-shoulder sweatshirts were gently cropped and trimmed with ripstop. Looks from the show meandered from sleek elegance (a cream wool overcoat with royal blue windowpane check) to sturdy utility (a shawl-collar field jacket in silver nylon fastened with emergency-red buckles). And almost everything was cut asymmetrically.
The watershed for ACW came in 2018: production moved to northern Italy — the global centre of luxury manufacture — and Ross was announced as a finalist for both the LVMH Prize and the ANDAM Award, two of the most coveted and lucrative gongs in the fashion industry. In June, the label’s spring/summer 2019
show earned rave reviews. An off-kilter, pocket and zipper-heavy take on traditional sportswear, interwoven with the odd industrially forged men’s staple — a simple single-breasted blazer, for example, was cropped and boxy like a Victorian work jacket.
That collection was bookended by the kind of melodrama only a fashion show can get away with. On arrival, front row guests were presented with bundles of ACW-branded PPE, including goggles, face mask and ear plugs, but little suggestion as to why it might be needed. First, a gloomy posse of hooded zombies moved in slow, robotic unison to a blaring soundscape of discordant groans, before the eventual, violent destruction of a colossal Styrofoam monolith, from which a writhing, naked, seemingly blood-soaked individual emerged. At the time, Ross told the press that the set-piece represented rebirth and clarity of mind. (The PPE was later released as a capsule collection, prices starting at £20 for the ear plugs.)
In January of this year, Ross moved his catwalk shows to Milan. Showing alongside the likes of Armani, Versace and Fendi demonstrated Ross’s intention to act on ACW’s potential to be a global brand. He did not leave his penchant for the poetic in London, however, stating that the AW ’20 collection was inspired by the “manifest ways in which physical space meets metaphysical grace: from cityscapes to riverbanks”.
But the clothes were something new. There were still trainers (really excellent trainers) and occasional crisp, mountain-weather fabrics — but gone, largely, were logos and graphics, replaced with soft tailoring, knitwear and leather coats. Some models simply wore a shirt tucked into trousers. Aside from the sporadic spike of azure blue or mustard yellow, the overall palette was dusty and understated.
In unusually direct language, the brand described the collection, and the show, as a momentous redirection in its short but fruitful history — a change of tack. “Shifting the cultural conversation,” said the show notes, “in its fifth year [ACW] welcomes a new kind of man; a working man at the heart of his community, whether artisan, writer, sculptor or industrial designer.”
“I think that my role is to always be like a thought-leader in the field of fashion,” says Ross when Esquire asks him about this season’s new aesthetic, “which is why it’s kind of brought me to the situation I’m in now. It would be very easy to just redeliver a message. But that wasn’t the intention I had when I initially founded ACW.”
The term “thought-leader” is more often associated with academics, intellectuals and activists than fashion designers; more Silicon Valley than London-Paris-Milan. But during this conversation with Esquire, Ross references the progressive research habits of major car manufacturers and how smartphone company HTC pivoted to VR headsets when Apple started to dominate the smartphone market. He speaks of his desire to explore the potential of “intangible” fashion — that which comes from a digital or conceptual (rather than material) source — and has recently launched Service Point 1, an “open source” project that features ACW-branded hardware (zipper pulls etc) so customers can own a piece of the brand’s “intellectual property” for a fraction of the price of a full garment. Clearly, science and business and sociology offer as much creative inspiration as anything else.
Ross is being tipped to helm a major fashion house sooner rather than later, and he seems a safe bet when you consider other recent appointments. First there was Abloh at Louis Vuitton. Then, in June, Givenchy announced its new creative director would be Matthew Williams, the former Been Trill member and founder of 1017 ALYX 9SM (better known simply as Alyx).
“I would love to see him as the head of a Parisian fashion house, writing a new script,” says Abloh, with evident pride. “I think that his intellect, his skill set, his ability to read a room, make him a perfect candidate.”
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‘I think that my role is to be a thought-leader in the field of fashion,’ says Samuel Ross of A-Cold Wall*