The 2021 LVMH Prize: Conner Ives

In many respects, Conner Ives has been living a dream. The 25-year-old designer from Bedford, New York, made it to London's prestigious Central Saint Martins. He launched his own label while still in school and immediately got picked up by retailers like Browns and Matches. Then, in his second year of his master's program, he was tapped by Fenty to join the design team, where he could proudly say his boss was Rihanna.

It comes as no surprise, then, that Ives's graduation collection (technically his fourth collection after the smaller capsules he produced while at CSM, but his "official" début in the eyes of many) is titled "The American Dream," serving as his most eclectic and most personal yet. It earned immediate acclaim, but underneath the surface it represents a designer fundamentally determining his approach and establishing his identity within fashion.

Throughout Ives's early CSM collections, he put forth a vision of America that is influenced by his suburban upbringing—he embraces both the elegant and the tacky to produce a vivid portrait of American culture in this moment in time—but never has that been more apparent than with Fall 2021. "I'm still first and foremost an American designer," he declares. "I do things in the UK because it gives me a distance from America, and you need a distance from whatever you're commenting on, but I think there's no shortage of inspiration in looking at what is American."

The American Dream pulls from Ives's formative years, taking cues from his high school friends' style and blending them with a more idealized national fantasy. He channeled those inspirations into distinct characters, presenting each look as its own story. "I always admired designers where every look in a collection was treated almost as its own approach," he adds, like John Galliano, who referred to his runway looks as "passages." "I always thought it was so seductive. There's something so ingenious about that, each look that you're presenting is a different girl. I think that's how it naturally progressed into archetypes, this whole idea of each girl being her own person."

The result is a collection full of references and contrasts that go from bohemian to sophisticated, and from kitschy to cool. In other words, a celebration of the modern American woman. In one look, Ives matches red trousers with a teal butterfly top—as he describes, "textbook from what my friends were wearing in high school." As he continued to build the story of the collection, he would pull and prod these influences to create dramatic flourishes, pushing the designs further. The final look, a bubble dress—which was selected for the Metropolitan Museum Costume Institute's fall exhibition "In America: A Lexicon of Fashion"—is emblematic of that process, representing a prom dress that moves away from reality and into something more fantastical. "I loved that I had that ability to almost dreamscape, this idea that I could make things up, I could bullshit," he says, "and as I was doing this collection, it really was me falling in love with fashion again."

Ives's dreams were nearly dashed when the pandemic hit, depriving him of his label's proper launch and a full graduation show, but it also afforded him the opportunity to think about what he wanted to be as a brand. "For me, it was saying, 'What is your output going to look like? Are you going to show two collections a year?'" he recalls. "And the answer to that question is no. That is fucking ridiculous for a 25-year-old designer to be expected to do more than one showing a year, and so I zoomed out from that and was like, 'Well then I'm not going to do it.'"

Instead, Ives wants to focus on one collection annually, leaving room for capsules when the opportunities present themselves. "I think it's the only way to make things happen, to shift things that are uncomfortable as an industry," he explains. "The only way you're going to get there is by doing it and making people uncomfortable and putting your foot down."

Even in his breakout moment in fashion, Ives is adamant about doing things his own way and discarding the conventions the industry imposes on its talents. In that respect, he really is living the dream. "I felt so grateful to have the experience I had because I had three or four years there to kind of test my luck and try things out and see what I could get away with as a young designer," Ives recalls. "I realize that I [have] a lot more say."

See the full portfolio of the 2021 LVMH Prize finalists here. Read this story and many more in print by preordering our Fall 2021 issue here.