Ask American-British fashion designer Harris Reed who his icons were when growing up in California and Arizona, and he will reel-off a list of British legends: Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano at Dior and Alexander McQueen. “Westwood was one of those designers that fused punk attitude with the dream world, which really resonated with me. I connected with designers that made performance an integral part of their creation,” he says in an American drawl. Reed, who was born in Santa Monica, is the son of the American artist and fragrance connoisseur Lynette Reed, but his father, the documentary filmmaker Nick Reed, is British. “I was an American mall child until I was 18. We didn’t have that ‘fuck you’ fashion, and I fell in love with it,” he says of the avant-garde, and highly theatrical cultural wave that crystallised across the Atlantic in the 90s. “My mom bought me WWD every week because I was dyslexic and that was the way I learnt how to read. So for me Westwood was everything as well as people like David Bowie. I just loved people who had this insane transformative nature to them.”

Reed carries the same internal spirit. Ask him when he first became aware of fashion and he will tell you about plundering his mother’s Halloween dress-up box. “I was probably eight or nine and remember putting on the fishnets and my father’s old Hugo Boss blazer and my mom’s witch hat,” says the designer, who at 29 remains unapologetically flamboyant. At 6ft 4, he is known to rock seventies tailoring, teaming sky-high platform boots with oversized hats over a mane of waist-length auburn hair. “For the longest time as a child I told my mum I wanted to be a ‘dresser upper’. Of course, that doesn’t exist. I guess I meant a stylist or art director. But, at the core of that, I was obsessed with the transformative power of clothes.” 

The designer witnessed this power firsthand during his time at school. “I remember wearing a pink shirt in the playground and everyone would turn and look and say, “Oh, he’s gay!” And I recall thinking, ‘Wow, how are people so angered by a boy in pink?’ They had such a visceral reaction to a colour or to a silhouette,” says the designer who has been candid about his early experiences with bullying, writing a letter to his nine-year-old self in British Vogue, in which he detailed feelings of isolation and distress. “As I got older I think I’ve played on that. There’s an element of tongue-in-cheek about my work, which is all about grandeur and taking up space with pattern and print. I am a maximalist. I don’t do quiet luxury.”

Reed’s fearless maximalism has propelled him from Central Saint Martins’ hopeful to dressing pop heartthrob Harry Styles (he created Styles’ custom outfit for the December 2020 issue of American Vogue while still a student), establishing his own eponymous label that same year, before showcasing his first official collection in February 2021 at the first gender-neutral London Fashion Week. The designer quickly established a reputation for his nonbinary demi-couture “Glam rock meets romantism” sensibility, and a commitment to sustainable, handmade pieces crafted in London. In 2022, he took the helm as creative director at the French fashion house Nina Ricci sealing his ascendancy, overseeing both fashion and fragrance, and designing collections alongside his own label. 

I catch-up with the designer as this is all set to change. He’s just announced (11 March) that he is exiting Nina Ricci, a strategic move after a successful three-and-a-half-year tenure that gives him the breathing space to concentrate on his own booming eponymous brand. It's only been a few weeks since the unveiling of his first Fluid Bridal collection at London Fashion Week and the buzz is still circulating – the collection included the bespoke wedding dress Reed made for the French fashion influencer Camille Charriere and the chantilly lace, cowl-necked crystal embellished shirt and flared pants that referenced the outfit Reed wore when he married Eitan Senerman, the founder of design and branding agency Spatial Innovation, in October 2023. His joyous Multifarious collection – a vision of Baroque eclecticism contained within corsetry and caging – presented at the same AW26 show, is also commanding headlines: Odessa A'zion is spotted in Harris Reed at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party as is Suki Waterhouse when attending the premiere of The Drama with Robert Pattinson. “It’s a new chapter,” Reed says, “I have a great team of mostly women helping me navigate this crazy landscape – of the world and fashion.” 

This new space involves expanding his mega-maximalist vision to the world of interiors, introducing wallcoverings and soft furnishings – “the first steps towards Harris Reed Home” – that build on his collaboration with the bespoke wallpaper specialist Fromental which began in 2024. A new Fromental x Harris Reed collection has launched this week (16th March) encompassing five new wallcoverings alongside soft furnishings. The designs range from Wilde Dreams, a bold but whimsical interpretation of Fromental's Folly chinoiserie rendered on a silk moiré to Ambiguous Tiger, a striking tiger pattern originating from full-scale hand-painted panels, built up through layers of wet and dry brushwork to achieve a bold, fluid texture. 

“The collaboration isn't about surface decoration – it's about testing the limits of technique,” says Fronmental’s founders Tim Butcher and Lizzie Deshayes of their approach to the partnership. Reed met the pair when he and Senerman were renovating their London apartment. They bonded over their love of print and pattern and Fromental created four bespoke wallcoverings for their home, before donating archive silk wallpapers for Reed's February 2024 show Shadow Dance. “The collaboration has continued organically to a place where we now have a home collaboration, which includes some existing Fromental silks and some collaborative designs,” Butcher explains. 

‘I think of interiors as world building,” Reed adds. “It’s that young and queer story that many people have in that you don’t belong in a space, so you sit there and you dream of a new world and a new life, and a new space. For me, interiors have the same transformative power as fashion but I find them even more precious in many ways because they can last ‘forever’ or for as long as people want to live with them. There is not this cyclical cycle every six months.”

Reed is a serial collaborator but has never intentionally forged a partnership. “Even celebrity wise, it’s all happened organically,” he explains citing Missoma, the jewellery collaboration he says has been huge for the brand. “It literally came out of a meeting with Marisa [Hordern] the founder over a dinner party and bonding over trinkets and jewels we’d found at Portobello Market. I love that, especially when building a brand - you have to go from a really core space of a genuine relationship and build from there.”

There have been other serendipitous meetings along the way, not least with Harry Lambert, the stylist who spotted Reed’s first collage project on instagram just hours after he posted it and DM’d the designer looking for pieces to dress Styles for a shoot in Amsterdam. Reed attributes these fortunate happenings to dharma. “I’m very much a believer in universal energy. I think I manifested these things back in Arizona. I had a picture of the Eiffel Tower I painted on my wall and when my mom asked why, I told her I was going to move to Paris and be a creative director,” Reed laughs. “And I had a One Direction poster. I remember thinking Harry Styles was one of the coolest people I had seen, and Beyonce and Lady Gaga, and then to later meet their stylist on the Eurostar or the CEO on Instagram, or have someone find you on a “For You” page, which I guess is the modern version of meeting in a bar, I feel incredibly grateful.” 

The designer’s alignment with many of these superstars came about when they too were opening new chapters. “A new album is like a new collection, they are coming up with a persona, doing something new, and being a part of the different characters they are building has been really exciting. I mean Beyonce… Beyonce!” Reed jokes.