Height of Glamour

Among the portraits that hang in the National Gallery in London, few subjects look as amused, self-confident, and unassailable as Jacques Cazotte, the eighteenth-century French writer and public administrator. As painted by Jean-Baptiste Perronneau, Cazotte is wearing a powdered white wig befitting his social standing, but his posture is youthful, his eyes are gleaming, and his smile is irrepressible. His attire is strikingly showy: a plush jacket of rose-colored silk, with extravagantly flared sleeves ornamented with gold buttons, and a matching vest. White lace spills from his collar and cuffs, and a black silk band hangs from his neck.

Next spring, the portrait is scheduled to be displayed across town, at the Victoria and Albert Museum, as part of an exhibition, “Fashioning Masculinities,” which will explore the role of menswear in conveying power, artistry, and gender identity. The painting is to be hung near an ensemble by Harris Reed, a twenty-five-year-old British-American designer: fashioned from shiny, dusky-pink polyester, it consists of a blouse with puffed upper sleeves that taper to decorative ties at the wrists, and high-waisted bell-bottoms that skim the crotch and thighs. Claire Wilcox, the V. & A.’s senior fashion curator, recently spoke to me about the decision to include Reed’s work: “It melds together different historical textures. There’s a touch of masquerade wear in it, but Reed makes it extremely fashionable.”

The juxtaposition of the Reed outfit with the Perronneau portrait illuminates, among other things, how gendered assumptions about color and decoration have evolved over time. In Cazotte’s day, pink was stylish for both men and women. Lace, too, was a marker not of effeminacy but of affluence and taste. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century—by which time Cazotte had been led to the guillotine—that English-style tailoring, in natural shades of wool, had begun displacing French splendor as Europe’s prevailing attire for men, establishing a sombre template that now extends worldwide.

Reed’s pink outfit came from a collection that he produced in 2017, while studying at Central St. Martins, the London arts-and-design college, whose alumni include Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. The collection had only three other looks, but each was equally dramatic: an outfit of black matador pants, black jabot, and frontless jacket; amber metallic pants and a matching top with flounced, detachable sleeves; and a white ensemble that included a frilled bustier jacket, with a plunging square-cut décolletage, and a hat with a brim the size of a bicycle wheel. Reed has explained to reporters that the white outfit was inspired by a story he had imagined about an eighteenth-century aristocratic boy who, after being thrown out of his home for being gay, lives backstage at the Royal Opera House and plays dress-up with the costumes. In a series of Polaroids taken to show off the collection, Reed, who is tall and slender, modelled the garments himself in silver high-heeled boots, his face framed by cascading long hair, whitened like that of an aristocrat from the ancien régime.

Reed graduated from Central St. Martins in the spring of 2020, and began using money that he made from modelling to start his own clothing line. His output has so far been very limited: the designs could almost fit onto a single garment rack, and would if they were less voluminous. But he is receiving widespread acclaim from fashion gatekeepers and forging the kinds of collaboration that provide financial support for a young designer’s creativity. While still a student, he was identified as a promising talent by a stylist of Solange’s; a photograph was taken of her wearing Reed’s white ensemble with the jacket turned back to front. Not long after, the stylist Harry Lambert commissioned Reed to make garments that Harry Styles could wear on tour, including an outfit that went viral on social media: a taffeta blouson shirt with puffed and ruffled sleeves and a dishevelled frilly collar. The top was paired with a tiny black vest and pants with wide, flapping flares, giving him the look of an earl’s wayward son stumbling out of a brothel at dawn. “To wear Harris’s clothes is to be having fun,” Styles told me, in an e-mail. “Every frill is there to be played with, and an overwhelming sense of freedom shall rain down upon you.”

Last fall, Vogue asked Reed to design an outfit for a cover shoot with Styles. He created a black suit with exaggerated square shoulders and trouser legs as wide as sails; at Styles’s waist, a ball-gown skirt exploded, with white tulle and fuchsia ribbon draped over an architectural frame of black crinoline. The look previewed the sensibility that Reed put on display this past February, on the eve of London Fashion Week, when he showed a collection in which elements of men’s suiting were sometimes embellished with spray-painted tulle erupting at the hip, shoulder, or rib. Despite the brevity of Reed’s career, his aesthetic is well established. He likes to combine traditionally masculine forms—say, jacket shoulders that echo Yves Saint Laurent’s “le smoking” tuxedo—with draped layers of satin and sculptural skirts that bring to mind the gowns of Charles James, the mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American designer. Reed’s looks, which he calls demi-couture—they are handmade but, of necessity, use relatively affordable materials—are often finished with what has become a signature accessory: an outlandishly outsized hat or headpiece. The 2020 collection, he told Vogue, was inspired partly by the lavish garb of the Victorian aristocrat Henry Paget, whose history Reed had discovered while exploring the archives at Central St. Martins. Paget, who had a pronounced fondness for furs and bejewelled headgear, became the fifth Marquess of Anglesey in 1898, at the age of twenty-three, whereupon he converted his family’s chapel into a theatre in which he starred in productions of Oscar Wilde’s plays. Paget was, Reed said, “shamelessly his truest self.”

Critics praised Reed’s show, which helped him publicize more immediately commercial ventures, among them a cosmetics collection created in collaboration with mac, which includes palettes of iridescent colors for eye, cheek, and lip. In a promotional video, Reed dabs rouge onto his cheek, shows off his gold-painted fingernails, and recites his inspirations: “Glam rock and Romanticism, boys, girls, in between, everyone just crossing paths and mixing the old world and the new world.” Sitting before a backdrop of pink silk, and wearing a see-through pink lace blouse with high-waisted ivory trousers, he exudes the jaunty élan of a Jacques Cazotte—both relishing his cultural influence and seeming utterly at ease in gorgeous finery.

Reed was born in 1996 in Los Angeles, where his father, Nick Reed, was an agent at I.C.M., the talent agency. Nick, now a film producer, was born on a military base in Gibraltar, and served in the British Navy in the early eighties. Harris Reed told me, “I’m the only man, if you will, in my family not to be in the Navy.” His mother, Lynette Reed, is American, and worked as a model in New York in the eighties. After moving to the West Coast, she started a candle business and opened a boutique. Harris’s eye for design was evident early on. “From the moment he could walk, he would rearrange the house,” Nick told me. “He would move pillows, cushions, blankets. He would say, ‘Dad, can you move this chair over here?’ ” When Harris was four, Lynette took him to a friend’s house. He began staring at a window treatment. “He looked up at me and said, ‘Mommy, those curtains are awful,’ ” Lynette told me. “I said, ‘Everybody has different taste,’ and he said, ‘Yeah, but those are bad taste.’ ”

Harris cycled through several elementary schools. His parents removed him from his first school, a traditional private institution, after teachers suggested that he should be in a remedial class. He was then enrolled at a Waldorf school, which fostered his creativity but left him, at the age of nine or ten, unable to read. He was belatedly given a diagnosis of severe dyslexia. The Reeds hired tutors, and also came up with more unconventional strategies to foster literacy, including a subscription to Women’s Wear Daily, which cultivated in Harris a precocious interest not just in the latest styles but also in the workings of the fashion industry. When he was nine, he proclaimed to Lynette that one day he would become the creative director of Chanel. Lynette recalled, “I told him, ‘Oh! Well, if that doesn’t happen, you can always have your own little line.’ And he just looked at me and said, ‘Mommy, why are you trying to squash my dreams?’ ”

The Reeds finalized a divorce when Harris was ten; he soon moved to Phoenix with his mother and his sister, Isabelle, who is now a senior at Arizona State University. “That was when I came into myself and my sexuality, and I started really responding with clothing,” Reed told me. The social environment was far more conservative than that of California. “I remember wearing a pink polo shirt on the playground and everyone turning their head,” he told me. “I loved the power that fashion had—that one item on your body could set the playground on fire!” The attention was often negative, though. Lynette told me, “He didn’t have any friends, because he was so weird.” Some parents asked the school principal to have their children removed from his class. The family began moving around a lot, from Phoenix back to Los Angeles and then to Eugene, Oregon. Lynette’s entrepreneurial fortunes rose and fell: for a time, she saved money by moving herself and her children into the warehouse for her candle business. In response to this peripatetic life style, Reed learned shortcuts for presenting himself to potential friends. “I got really good at my elevator pitch,” he told me: “ ‘Hi, I’m Harris Reed, I’m twelve, I’m gay.’ ” His mother said, “I worried for his safety. I never, ever worried for his future.”

After school, Reed took dressmaking classes, and by the age of nine he’d earned an editorial credit: through a connection of his father’s, he was commissioned to design a slinky red dress worn by a model in a shoot for an article featuring Jamie Bamber, a star of “Battlestar Galactica.” When Reed was twelve or so, he went shopping at Nordstrom and could not find anything he wanted in the boys’ department; a friendly sales assistant recommended that he try the women’s section. Thereafter, he chose his clothes without regard to gender. He also developed a fashion insider’s familiarity with labels and trends. Lynette recalled that Reed once stopped at the Nordstrom handbag counter and asked to see a Gucci bag: “The lady bent down to hand him a bag, and he goes, ‘Not last season’s.’ ”

Family friends, including Kelly Cutrone, the Manhattan-based fashion publicist, also helped Reed find his way. When he was fourteen, he served as Cutrone’s intern during New York Fashion Week, and slept on the couch in her apartment in SoHo, one floor up from her company’s office. “He was already really tall,” Cutrone told me. “I would say, ‘Where’s Harris?’ and someone would inevitably say, ‘Oh, I sent him to Condé Nast.’ I would be, like, ‘What are you doing? He’s fourteen, he is from California, and he has no idea of what is going on—you can’t let him out of the building!’ ” Reed returned for several seasons, eventually working in the front of the house at the shows of such designers as Jeremy Scott. In 2015, when Reed was a high-school senior, he was accepted at Central St. Martins.

Reed had visited England as a child—his paternal grandmother lives in Eastbourne, on the south coast—and had the sense that London was “this kind of posh, proper place,” he told me. Upon arriving at Liverpool Street Station with his suitcase, at five or six in the morning, he realized that his impression was incomplete: “I remember seeing this guy—well, I shouldn’t say ‘guy’—this being, in a wedding dress and a beard, walking by, and then another person, a man in a very classical business suit, also walking. Not one of them looked at the other—they just continued forward. And I thought, I’m home.” In high school, Reed wore jeans and a white T-shirt, or, mimicking the tidy self-presentation of the “Glee” character Kurt Hummel—the most readily available exemplar of out gay teenhood—suspenders and bow ties and suits. In London, he discovered a queer community with a much more varied sense of style. “It was so eclectic, and authentic and grimy and dirty, but in the best way possible,” he said. “It was, like, ‘This is what people look like on ecstasy at six in the morning, who have a Mohawk and no eyebrows, and who are in a polyamorous relationship.’ I was so inspired and overwhelmed. I called my mom at three in the morning and said, ‘Mom, am I basic?’ ” Within a month, Reed had started wearing flowing slip dresses with Dr. Martens.

At school, Reed did not always smoothly navigate the rigors of the classroom. He recalls people saying to him, “Your vibe is a costume designer.” Reed told me, “I would say, ‘No, I’m a fashion designer.’ My teachers were always, like, ‘Who’s going to wear this? Who’s your customer?’ And I would say, ‘I hope I don’t know who my customer is, because they shouldn’t exist yet.’ ” Reed balanced his course obligations with increasingly heady extracurricular adventures, including making the clothes for Harry Styles. The first time that Styles wore one of his outfits, at a concert in Amsterdam, Reed was in a basement venue at Covent Garden, attending a launch party for a Tom Ford fragrance. “It was the first fashion event I had ever been invited to—before that, I had been sneaking into everything—and I was so excited,” Reed told me. “I remember walking down the stairs and my phone lost reception, and I bumped into the model Karen Elson, who had been my idol since childhood, and she whispered, ‘You look fabulous,’ and I looked at her and said, ‘You just made my life.’ ” Reed went on, “I was drinking champagne and talking to people, and all of a sudden my phone loads, and there are twenty missed calls from my mom. I picked up, and she’s sobbing, and she’s, like, ‘Check your Instagram—Harry’s worn your stuff.’ And I went from, like, a thousand followers to seventy thousand in a matter of an hour.”

Soon afterward, Reed applied for an internship at Gucci. He got a call asking him to fly to Milan the next day to meet with Alessandro Michele, the brand’s creative director since 2015, who has infused Gucci with a sumptuous vintage sensibility. “I rushed home, made myself a pair of silver leather flares, and got on a plane,” Reed said. When he entered Michele’s office, “there were thousands of swatches on the floor, and he looked up at me from his tea, and I felt like in a nanosecond I just got read, in the best way possible.” Michele invited Reed to model in a show at a Roman burial ground in Arles, in the South of France; Reed accepted, and ended up wearing a pink satin kimono-style coat over a glittery greenish shirt and pants.

Next, Michele asked Reed to model in an advertising campaign for a Gucci perfume, alongside Styles. “I said, ‘I’ll do it, but I want to interview to be an intern,’ ” he told me. “I think everyone was a bit confused. They were, like, ‘You’re about to be a V.I.P. with us, and you now want to go pick up pins?’ I was, like, ‘I want to be whatever you guys want me to be, but I’m a designer. That’s what I do. It’s fabulous to ride around in town cars all day and stay in beautiful places, but I want to do work.’ ” He was at the Gucci atelier in Rome for nine months. “At the end, it was, like, ‘Do I go back to school and really pursue me, or do I kind of stay here?’ ” Reed said. “I loved working for the company, but there was a moment during the show in Arles when—I was so happy with what happened, but part of me felt so empty, because I couldn’t put my name on anything.”

The opportunities for ordinary consumers to buy Reed’s clothing have thus far been limited. His demi-couture garments are not available for sale in stores. In the summer of 2020, he began offering a “deadstock” blouse collection online: billowy, romantic, one-size-fits-all garments that can be worn as a top or a minidress and are fashioned from remnants of tulle, taffeta, velvet, and lace. Priced at upwards of eight hundred dollars, they quickly sold out. For the time being, however, the Harris Reed essence is principally available in olfactory form: this summer, in collaboration with his mother, he launched a line of scented candles.

Under normal circumstances, a small designer might start out by producing a limited range of separates to be sold in a few stores. But, with the pandemic having interrupted manufacturing and hobbled in-store shopping, Reed has concentrated on creating one-off garments for editorial projects or for private clients, while building brand awareness through his collaborations. This month, he is launching a jewelry collection with Missoma, featuring a labradorite cocktail ring and an ear cuff in the shape of a serpent. Reed told me, “When I talk to clothing retailers and buyers, they are, like, ‘You’ve done this all wrong—you need things in the marketplace.’ But I think that in the day of Instagram—and the day of covid—it’s really more about what people stand for, and what they are doing in the world, than ‘Now buy my rack of clothes at J. C. Penney.’ ”

Having pushed the concept of fluidity to its limit, and perhaps past it—he recently told Vogue that his candle line offered “a fluid escapism in someone’s home”—Reed has realized that he needs to broaden his message. In particular, he has been eager to promote sustainability. This is another of-the-moment theme in the fashion industry, which is belatedly acknowledging its role in generating wasteful novelty and environmental pollution. Reed’s personal wardrobe contains many vintage clothes collected during the past decade—a habit that proved useful, he told me this summer, when, while preparing for a Zoom call about his Met Gala collaboration, he pulled out a silk Dolce & Gabbana blouse that he’d bought at a New York thrift store. (The Met Gala outfit that Reed ultimately concocted—for the supermodel Iman—consisted of a brocade bustier, flared pants, and a hoop-skirt frame festooned with hand-gilded feathers, all of it haloed by a matching feather headpiece. He accompanied her to the event, dressed in white pants, a white tuxedo jacket with a train, and a slightly smaller version of the headpiece. Harper’s Bazaar soon declared that “Iman stole the show.”)

During the breakfast discussion at Annabel’s, he explained to the audience that his commitment to sustainability was another reason he had not yet begun marketing a collection of clothes to be sold in retail stores. “We’re in a space now where, hopefully, we’re buying less,” he said. “I love the idea of making a piece that goes from the grandmother to their trans daughter to her son to their kid, and gets handed down, like a Kelly bag or a great Chanel jacket.” It may seem unlikely that a pair of Venetian-wool flares with a spray-painted tulle pannier will have the long-term utility of an Hermès handbag. But, if Reed’s career maintains its current trajectory, such a garment may turn out to be a wise investment. Last year, a number of Alexander McQueen’s early designs were auctioned off, including several pieces from his 1995 “Highland Rape” collection, and some dresses sold for as much as fifty thousand dollars.

In late spring, Reed began planning what he anticipated would be his first in-person show since leaving school, at London Fashion Week, on September 21st. Sustainability would be an even more prominent theme in this collection, he told me, which would consist entirely of “upcycled” clothing. For weeks, he and his team had been communicating with a representative from Oxfam, which runs hundreds of thrift shops in the U.K. One morning in June, Reed and an assistant, Rebecca Bean, took a car from the Standard to Richmond, an affluent, village-like neighborhood in southwest London, where the upper floor of the local Oxfam shop is given over to a bridal boutique filled with used gowns.

Working with wedding dresses appealed to Reed because they offered an abundance of satin and lace that he could alter in fresh ways. The gowns also came freighted with symbolic meaning. In fashion shows, a wedding gown is traditionally the final garment to be presented—the culminating exemplar of a designer’s sensibility and skill. Moreover, a wedding dress is perhaps the most gender-loaded garment that is worn today. For many women, their wedding will be the only occasion in their life in which they wear a floor-length gown adjusted to their specific measurements. A dress may reflect contemporary trends, such as “Bridgerton”-style ruffles, but it nevertheless adheres to a presentation of femininity that has prevailed for centuries.

Before going to Oxfam, Reed had tested his concept by breaking down a wedding dress that had belonged to a friend. “I loved this idea of giving it a new life,” he told me. Reed had worked with a male model, dropping the bodice to waist height, which bared the model’s sculpted pectorals, and reshaping the dress’s white tulle skirt so that part of it fanned upward from the floor to the shoulder. For his forthcoming collection, Reed intended to take the concept further and make ten looks that combined previously worn wedding gowns with used men’s formal wear. He told me, “I’m putting a lot of men, or male-identifying beings, in quite ostentatious, out-there clothes that are maybe deemed feminine.”

In Richmond, Reed was led up to the bridal boutique, the walls of which were lined with enough gowns to trigger what is known in the bridal industry as white blindness: a befuddled state brought on by the sight of too much silk and beading. “Oh, my God, this is actually a dream,” Reed said as he started working his way down the aisles, rubbing fabric between his fingers to assess its quality, and lifting lace drapery to see how it might be detached and reapplied at unexpected angles. Reed was wearing black pants and a white long-sleeved blouse with a low neckline. Unusually, he was dressed not in heels but in furry black slides, which he slipped off so that he could move lightly among the gowns on display, like a dancer navigating around the costumes backstage at a theatre. Bean helped him select gowns, and took photographs and videos on her iPhone, to be posted later on Reed’s Instagram. “Being a young designer, it’s all about social media,” Reed said, as he squeezed behind a clothing rack and poked his head out between the skirts. “Isn’t that what it’s all about—the balance between the content and the making?”

On one rack were dresses from the sixties or even earlier, with Empire waists and delicate chiffon skirts. Reed glanced at them, then moved on. “I don’t want to cut into something vintage,” he said. “Maybe it was meant to live its life like that, and not to be cut up into some crazy, fluid thing.” Instead, he focussed on more recently manufactured garments, especially those with lots of body, drapery, and a long train: “If it has ‘bridal couture’ in cursive on the label, it’s fair game,” he said.

Reed had a budget of two thousand pounds, and he was staggered by the discounted prices. He said of one dress, “This lace alone would be three hundred and fifty pounds a metre, and the dress is only a hundred and fifty pounds”—about two hundred dollars. Around the bottom of the skirts of one gown, seeds had snagged onto the fabric. “Someone has spent hundreds of hours sewing tulle, and then someone has danced the night away in some field,” Reed remarked. He pulled the dress off its hanger and put it to the side to save.

At the rear of the store was an enormous mirror, and after Reed had amassed a heaping pile of gowns he stood before it, using himself as a model and as an inspiration for how each dress might be imaginatively subverted. Taking off his shirt, he slipped into a strapless dress with a ruched, sequin-bedecked bodice, which expanded into a tulle skirt at what the designer had intended to be its wearer’s hips. With the back of the dress unzipped, Reed lowered what should have been its bustline to the level of his waist. Clouds of fabric gathered around his knees and ankles. Then he stepped out of the gown and lifted the skirt to just below his chin, so that it fell around his shoulders and down to his waist, like an exaggerated collar from an eighteenth-century portrait. A few moments later, he put on a dress that was covered with an enormous lace overskirt, holding its narrow waist up to his own with his hands on his hips; he flipped the skirt up and over his head, causing it to cover his face in falling layers. With his chin demurely lowered, he looked like a bride in the moments before she is invited to raise her veil at the altar and kiss the groom.

Within days, the dresses that Reed had selected were being reshaped at the Standard. An oversized bow once affixed to a bustle would be moved to the neck, pussycat style. Panels of satin would be sliced out and stitched together with dark, tailored suiting, creating a beguiling hybrid. The collection would evoke Reed’s experience upon first arriving at London’s Liverpool Street Station, when he’d witnessed sartorial worlds crossing and merging, and felt at home.

Before Reed left the bridal boutique in Richmond, he grabbed a formal black blazer in a boy’s size and shrugged it on. After the jacket was buttoned tightly across his ribs, its narrow sleeves reaching only just below the elbow, its silhouette was transformed from nascently masculine to glamorously feminine. Reed then reached for a satin wedding dress, its long train embellished with lace and sequins, and held it up to his left hip, tipping his head to one side, with his hair blanketing his shoulders. He kicked his right pant leg loose from the folds of white fabric, so that as he looked in the mirror—imagining where he might take the dress, or where it might take him—the reflected image was half one thing and half another. ♦