You’ve moved through the worlds of high fashion, subculture, and academia — where do you feel most like yourself?
In the archive. It’s where everything I care about intersects; design, research, politics, identity. But more than that, it’s a conduit. It’s not just a space for preservation; it’s a space for exchange. Designers, students, curators, researchers, they all come in and engage with it on their own terms. The garments are triggers, not trophies. The archive lets me work quietly but critically, tracing how systems operate, while creating a site where others can challenge and rethink them too.

What did you see in menswear that others didn’t - and still don’t?
That its invisibility isn’t accidental, it’s systemic. Menswear has long been seen as functional, neutral, and secondary to womenswear. But that supposed neutrality is a form of control. It disciplines the male body, reinforces hierarchies, and hides its politics in plain sight.

What interested me wasn’t just what menswear looked like, but how it operated, as uniform, as armour, as fiction. It’s a system of dress built around authority and regulation, yet rarely treated as worthy of serious study. That’s what I wanted to expose: not a history of styles, but a history of structures.

You were once described as “the dark prince of British fashion” — does that label still fit?
These days I’m more of a forensic examiner than a provocateur. Less fire, more evidence. But the instinct to expose and interrogate is still there. I’ve always been interested in how systems work in fashion, who they serve, who they exclude, how they maintain power. Whether it was on the runway or in the archive, my focus has always been the same: pulling things apart and showing people what’s underneath.

So maybe the label doesn’t fit anymore. But the attitude behind it hasn’t changed. It’s just become sharper, more precise, and more effective without the noise.

Your runway shows in the late ’90s were explosive, literally. How do you view those performances now — as art, provocation, or necessity?
I saw them as a form of critique. I was part of a generation of designers who used the tools of the fashion system, especially the runway show, not just to present clothing, but to interrogate the system itself. By the late 1990s, the post-war fashion system had solidified into a globally recognised structure, with clearly defined rituals, hierarchies, and expectations. It had become stable enough to critique, and visible enough to dismantle.

The Menswear Archive has garments from skinheads to Savile Row — what connects these pieces?
They’re both uniforms. What interests me is how pervasive uniform is in menswear, to the point we rarely question it. A skinhead in an MA-1 and a banker in a bespoke Savile Row suit might seem like opposites, but they could just as easily be the same person, performing different roles. Menswear hides behind archetypes. It creates the illusion of individuality while rendering the wearer invisible. The clothes speak - the man disappears.

There’s a rawness to your focus on working-class clothing and overlooked narratives — how do you navigate the line between fetishising and historicising?
The Archive doesn’t collect based on aesthetics — that’s a core part of our policy. Aesthetic value is loaded with assumptions about taste, and taste is always classed. Instead, we focus on what a garment can reveal about the people who made it, wore it, or sold it.

Take the McDonald’s x Supreme T-shirt. We have the shirt, but we also have the Chicken McNuggets box that you had to buy to access the drop via a QR code. That packaging alone opens up a conversation about marketing, class, access, and consumption. It’s not just the garment — it’s the whole system around it.

How do you see digital fashion?
Digital tools can free us from physical limitations, but they often flatten context. The power of clothing lies in its relationship to the body. It’s not just seen, it’s worn, shaped, stretched, stained. It absorbs who we are. The crease in a sleeve, the worn-through pocket, the lingering smell of smoke or sweat; all of that carries memory. These are sensory histories, not visual ones.

Garments hold time in a way digital fashion can’t. They record movement, repetition, habit. They become evidence, of work, of care, of conflict, of intimacy. Digital fashion offers surface and simulation, but it lacks weight, smell, temperature, resistance. It can be useful as a tool or a concept, but it’s not a substitute for the lived, material reality of clothes.

If you could rescue one subcultural look from the edge of extinction, what would it be?
Rockabilly. It’s often written off as retro pastiche, but there’s real discipline in that look, the precision of the hair, the sharpness of the tailoring, the tension between rebellion and uniformity. It’s a subculture that understood performance and silhouette. I’ve always loved it.

Finally... Where is your SOMEWHERE GOOD?
A city away day in Southampton, Bournemouth, or Newcastle. Six pints in, singing my heart out. Football, noise, and losing your voice for something that actually matters.