PROFILE
He’s the clothes designer who put Harry Styles in frills and won an A-list clientele in the process. Harris Reed tells Laura Craik why he’s fighting for fluidity in fashion
If there was an Oscar for time management, Harris Reed would win it. He’d collect it wearing one of his elegantly fluid designs, and give a speech thanking his filmmaker father, Nick – himself an Oscar-winner – his mother, Lynette, his husband, Eitan, and his celebrity fans; Adele, Beyoncé, Sam Smith and Harry Styles among them. He’d give said speech at breakneck speed, words cascading out of him with the same rapidity at which he lives his entire life. For if Beyoncé has the same 24 hours in the day as we do, it’s tempting to imagine that Reed has 48.
This would certainly explain why, at the age of 27, Reedhas already ticked so much off his to-do list. His eponymous fashion label is thriving, he’s the creative director at Nina Ricci (the youngest in the history of the house), and he’s collaborated with the jewellery brand Missoma and cosmetics giant MAC. His latest achievement? Oh, just a book that sets out to redefine fashion for a new, gender-fluid world – one for which he has designed the perfect wardrobe. ‘If something is fluid, it has no fixed shape,’ he explains in the book’s preface. ‘It’s able to move, flow, change and ebb. Gender fluidity takes its cue from these varied definitions of the word. The term refers to change over time in a person’s gender expression, gender identity, or both.’
‘It’s something I’ve always wanted to do, the same way I’ve always wanted to have my own label, go to the Met Gala and be a creative director,’ he says of writing the book. ‘I always imagined all those things were things I’d do in my 40s or 50s. Cut to being a business owner in my early 20s, going to the Met Gala at 25 and becoming a creative director at 26.’
He almost declined the offer of a book deal, he admits, believing himself to be too young: ‘I remember laughing, and thinking, “Yeah, we’ll touch base in 10 years.” But I’d just got the job at Nina [Ricci], and had so much time on all the Eurostars I took between London and Paris [where Ricci is based] that I started voice-noting for a year. This is my life, my experiences, my contextualisation of fluidity right now, and the most raw, real and honest it’s going to be.’
Today, Reed is speaking to me from his London flat, where he’s working from home because of ‘a bit of a cold – I wanted to be cosy.’ We’re twinning in our black polonecks – mine high street, his Harris Reed, accessorised by rings from his Missoma collection and some vintage finds. His shock of long red hair gives him an otherworldly, Pre-Raphaelite air. Titian would have loved him. Although, everyone loves Reed. Harry Sty
