This story originally appeared in i-D’s The Timeless Issue, no. 371, Spring 2023. Order your copy here.
Lee McQueen once said, “People don’t want to see clothes, they want to see something that fuels the imagination.” Speaking over Zoom from his sun dappled studio in Hackney, it’s a sentiment Harry Pontefract echoes almost word for word when talking about his own emotive and cerebral pieces. “If you’re just designing clothes, there’s not so much to get excited about,” the Sheffield-born designer says, his dog Paco pawing at his feet out of frame. “Until other people react to the work then it’s not really anything: it’s just a dress in a cupboard.”
Harry has waited six long years to launch his label, Ponte. Emerging from the same graduating class as Richard Quinn and Matty Bovan back in 2016, the designer’s Central Saint Martins MA collection was considered by many to be the most promising of his year. Inspired by an ambiguous inappropriate sexuality, it played with ideas of eroticism and memory through a series of looks crafted from fleshy tights and found objects. A display of strange beauty, intellect, and skill beyond the years of a student, it seemed to signal the arrival of a bright new force in British fashion. But – after turning down private commissions from Kim Kardashian and Rihanna – the young designer chose another road, instead taking up an offer from Jonathan Anderson to work at Loewe.
“I think it’s really important to see how the other side works before you jump on the hamster wheel of fashion and get engulfed in it,” he says of his time at the house, where he remained until 2022. So why, after all this time, is he taking the plunge now? “You either keep developing in bigger companies or you bite the bullet and go for it.”
This visceral compulsion to create, to turn what’s going on inside his head into something physical, has brought Harry to Ponte, a place where he is quietly and purposefully forging his own path. He’d rather stay out of the spotlight than position himself as the face of the brand – “that’s why it’s not my name” – and he doesn’t like telling people what his designs are about. Harry describes having an “obsession” with the subjectivity of experience as his reasoning for this. “A dress I might find really funny, to you might be really dark and a bit disturbing,” he explains, adding that he’d much rather hear other people’s thoughts on his work.
That’s not to say, though, that Harry’s designs are without personal meaning. Ponte’s debut collection, released in October, found its starting point in the softest spot of all: family. It all started back in 2019 while playing dress up with his nephew Rory – an evening which sowed the seeds for a heartfelt visual diary that later became a book sold in the Comme des Garçons Trading Museum Paris. Bringing together tender shots of his nephews and nieces in Sheffield, beautiful found photos salvaged from a bin in Paris, and his father’s etchings from the 1980s, Harry Pontefract, Abereiddi, Sheffield represents something of a blueprint for all that Ponte stands for. “I feel like sometimes in fashion things can get so over-produced and then they don’t mean anything,” Harry explains. “I was trying to do something raw.”
Ponte’s debut collection picks up where the book left off, tapping into universal childhood memories of dressing up and our first encounters with the transformative magic of clothing. Theatrical glamour battles with the messiness of the every day in a series of unpredictable looks, where an awkwardly layered football shirt ensemble is followed by a “huge fuck off fake fur ball gown”; a simple slip dress is humped at the hip and blotched with a single food stain; and a cascading, floor-length sequinned top is layered over a pair of too-big, falling down jeans. Using deadstock materials that strike chords of familiarity – denim, shearling, faux fur, suede, swathes of sequins, jersey and even bedsheets – Harry distorts archetypal silhouettes to make something just a little bit off, and therefore new. His genius is that the collection simultaneously recalls the deconstructed mastery of Martin Margiela and a kid running around the park in a princess dress with muddy wellies.
Woven into the collection are lost and found treasures which reveal an obsession with discarded objects and the forgotten histories they hold, from a pile of wigs saved from the floor of a market to a sun-bleached, shibori-effect jumper found on a barbed wire fence at a train station. “I’m just a hoarder,” he says with a smile. “My studio is full of all sorts of weird stuff. I want to throw things away but I never can, and then you want to make something out of them, something new.”
Unlike the majority of designers, who will create a collection around one story or mood, Harry describes Ponte’s first collection in its totality as a “mess of thoughts”. And while his designs certainly are the product of a busy mind – witty, inventive, and pointedly all over the place – these are creations that interact with the vastness of collective memory, skillfully blur chaos with tradition, and instantly access something emotional.
“Until people react to the work then it’s not really anything: it’s just a dress in a cupboard.” Harry Pontefract
Beyond all else, Harry seems to be gripped by the secret lives of everyday people; who they are, what they do behind closed doors, and the fantasies that fill their days. It’s the reason why he wants others to bring imagination and meaning to his work – whether the soft curls of a shearling top jolt a memory of your mother’s winter coat, or a pair of knitted underpants that stir up something humorous or sexual. And more than that, Harry believes his designs only really come to life when they aren’t his anymore.
“I’m interested in people,” he explains. “I would go crazy if it was just about me. The work starts out so personal, but then that’s the nice thing about letting it go, because then it turns into something personal to someone else. That’s what’s important.”
Crucially, he says, the start of this journey with Ponte has been an exercise in forgetting the rigours of design to make way for something more human. “It’s about trying to get that naivety back again, because the best work happens when you make mistakes. I feel like you have to forget to let new things come out.”
It’s this statement of intent and identity that Harry put into practice with an unusual launch in Paris this past October, where designs from the collection were displayed in installation-like forms which resembled something between Sarah Lucas’s sloping, padded figures and the playful sculptures of Erwin Wurm. The event, and the pieces it celebrated, marked the advent of a world Harry has created not only for himself, but for others to see themselves in too. It’s a place which he is, quite rightfully, protective of – one built on the foundations of total, unbridled freedom. “That’s what really excites me,” he says when I ask him what the future holds for Ponte “Next time, if we want to just do a series of shirts, we do it; or just sculptures, we do it. It’s about trying to be free.”
Credits
Photography Deirdre Lewis
Fashion Milton Dixon III
Hair Junya Nakashima using Oribe
Make-up Kuma at Streeters using Surratt Beauty
Nail technician Mamie Onishi at See Management using Dior
Photography assistance Lilly Winter
Digital technician Gregory Wikstrom
Fashion assistance Cyrenae Tademy and Amontae Arnold
Hair assistance Skye Melena
Make-up assistance Hinako Takagaki
Production FLORENCE
Casting director Samuel Ellis Scheinman for DMCASTING
Casting assistance Alexandra Antonova
Models Birgitt Doss at Muse NYC, Mannat and Sirat Kaur and Omar Egas at Crawford, Connor Wright and Angeer Amol at Kollektiv Mgmt, Vanessa Aguasvivas, Khris Jasper and Soouizz Okeke at Next, Mahi Mamadou at Midland, Shaminder Biring at DNA, Toni Smith at The Society, Wali Deutsch at Women, Emmanuel Noi and Ajak Noi Dwol at Ricky Michiels, Mycky Brown and Maliea Brown-Bookman at New Pandemics
All clothing and accessories PONTE