For London-based designer Conner Ives, New York Fashion Week has always been more than a homecoming; it’s a North Star. “The thought of doing a show in New York has always been there, and people would kind of make fun of me because I saw New York as my Paris,” Ives tells ahead of his stateside debut. But does this location change-up classify him as a British designer? In the most technical sense of the term, Ives would argue maybe. Ives was born and raised in Westchester County, New York, where he first developed his love for art and costume design; however, it wasn’t until he moved across the pond in 2014 to attend Central Saint Martins in London that his career really began.
Over the course of a decade in the UK, Ives has established himself as a beloved name on the London Fashion Week schedule, where fans and industry insiders first gravitated towards his upcycled, ruched sports-jersey dresses. It is from London that Ives launched the ultraviral “Protect the Dolls” slogan T-shirt, which raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for the US-based Trans Lifeline nonprofit, and it is also where the designer took home the British Fashion Council Foundation Award in 2023 and the BFC/ Designer Fashion Fund in 2025; most recently in 2026, he was one of six designers to receive the BFC Fashion Trust Award. The effect of his dual design identity is a hodgepodge of fashionable, transatlantic party designs: “In London, I’m an American designer, and in New York, I’m a British designer.” Just take his February fall collection, which mashed up decades of American glamour with a sneaky British twinge.
If the decampment seems sudden, fresh off his BFC grant win, it’s not quite. The idea to guest-star in New York finally began to take a more solid shape at the end of 2025 when Ives returned home for a prolonged trip during his British visa renewal process, and he was reinfected with the American itch. When he began development for February’s show in London, he brought this American idea to BFC CEO Laura Weir and eventually the CFDA, who both helped to make it happen. “I’ve always loved this idea of a lifestyle designer, of a person that has enough conviction to sell you a world and bring you into it – that’s what I love about Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren, Paul Smith, those heroes in my book,” he explains.
Ives’s American homage wouldn’t be complete without leaning into the tongue-in-cheek of his own dichotomy – he’s even titled the collection “Across the Pond”, and there are plenty of New York references to match. The show, which will take place this Saturday, is in part inspired by its setting, New York’s hallowed time capsule of a power-lunch restaurant, The Grill. Ives, who introduced menswear last season, plans to pay homage to the institution through his continuation in the category, this time in the form of two men’s suits, semi-ironically made in collaboration with Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes. Likewise, Ives nods to the 60th anniversary of Truman Capote’s Black and White Ball with sardonic costumed glamour: One of the mint green finale gowns, which also takes inspiration from Parisian dressmaker Callot Soeurs, is affectionately nicknamed “Lady Liberty.” On the more casual side, of course, this will include some new viral T-shirts too.
Always one for archetypes, this season’s bridal look tips its hat to a lesser-known New York film, Jonathan Glazer’s starring Nicole Kidman. “I think that is just such a perfect piece of cinematic New York,” he explains. “The original husband dies in Central Park in the opening scene as it’s snowing, Lauren Bacall plays her mother on the Upper East Side – it’s like you couldn't write a more New York story, and I think that, to me, was really the kind of crown jewel of what we’re doing here.”
Though Ives doesn’t technically classify this show as a homecoming, there are still heartfelt aspects that, for him, only a stateside show can produce. The designer’s parents, as well as his high school art teacher, who allowed him to pursue an independent course in fashion design at such a young age, as well as some of his teacher’s current students, will be in attendance. Says Ives, “I feel like I am now embarking on a point in my career where I’m present in both spaces, which I think for the longest time, I almost maybe thought wasn’t possible.”