In the autumn of 2025, the fashion industry will face a tidal wave of “newness.” Nearly a dozen creative directors have changed allegiances and will debut visions for fashion’s most storied brands, among them Chanel, Dior, Versace, Gucci, and Balenciaga. Industry insiders predict the dawn of a new era in fashion—a moment when the old ways wash away and a new generation takes the helm.
These changes may only be superficially true—I don’t know if we can count tweaking and freaking a company over a century old as new? It can be radical and subversive, or traditional yet deviously luxurious, but can remaking an old thing for a new time truly define the zeitgeist?
To find true newness, you have to look far, far away from the marble storefronts on Avenue Montaigne. You’d have to look all the way up in the 19th, where Bror August Vestbø and Benjamin Barron held their first fashion show for their creative project All-In: part magazine, part brand, all fantastic.
In a dusty ballroom filled with tinsel they staged a debutante ball for freaky heroines in giant ruffly poufs and cascades of pink bows. Heart bracelets jangled from stilettos. I remember gasping when Issa Lish twirled on a silvery platform in a dress made of prom decor tinsel. This was in the autumn of 2022, at the apex of bow girl coquette-core during the pinky, precocious proposition of girl-dom, and yet the sumptuous collection and celebratory mood didn’t feel dumbed-down or born from a viral trend. The clothes and the people who wore them represented a new, heightened proxy of the girl we all wanted to be. Fabulous, slightly feral, fashionable without being pretentious. Most importantly, fun. I had so much fun at that show, giggling, laughing, coveting, that my friend and I took pictures of ourselves sitting on the stage afterward like two prize winners. Two fashion lovers being there for the start of something this exciting, actually, is a prize.
Tomorrow, Ben and August (and they’re known by their friends and fans) are up for the LVMH Prize—the top honor awarded by the top brass in the fashion industry. They have renamed the fashion arm of their creative pursuits to August Barron to delineate it from their magazine, as well as their one-off creative projects and events, and their individual photography and fashion work. It’s a kind of step toward adulting—making their creation passion into a true fashion brand. “We started making pieces that weren’t really for sale, but as the clothing brand has been growing a lot over the past few years it felt like the right time—10 years in—to shift to a name that feels more personal,” Ben tells me on a video call from Paris.
To say the fashion brand has grown is an understatement. You can find Charli xcx strutting in their lingerie skirts, Haim vamping in granny woolen sweaters suspended from pearls, Arca writhing in a dress made of shreds of other dresses, and party people partying in Level boots from Paris to Prague. August Barron is a defining brand of the 2020s—and we’re just about halfway through the decade.
The designers met in 2015 in New York at a party for the All-In magazine, that Ben co-founded (“He asked me for a phone charger, I said no,” Ben laughed). Ben was an in-demand photographer and the creative director. August had been interning at New York indie mainstays like Eckhaus Latta and Telfar, launching his eponymous fashion collection at New York Fashion Week. “We started dating before we started working together. Ben was doing All-In [the magazine] and I was doing my own brand, but we were always working on each other’s projects. I remember I designed the first merch collection for All-In, and then we were like, ‘Oh, let’s make it a bit more exciting,’” says August.
Making it more exciting meant repurposing vintage clothes found around Paris, where the duo moved in 2021. A lookbook debuted in 2022 featured Lotta Volkova, the stylist behind Miu Miu’s kitty-cat runway aesthetic, and caught the eye of Chloë Sevigny, who wore an upcycled pink ruffle dress. Later that year was the pivotal debutante show in Paris—their first large-scale IRL fashion show experience. In the collection was a dress made from vintage concert tees of the divas, from Cher to Lady Gaga.
“The Pop Diva dress felt very personal when we made it, like a tribute to all the things that we love and have really influenced the way we think,” said Ben when asked to define a piece that encapsulates the brand’s spirit.“Pop stars are very inspiring to us,” affirms August. “They are a constantly evolving image, and they’re also seen as frivolous, but to us, they feel very serious.”
Being serious, but not oppressively so, is another reason that August Barron has become more than just a fabulous side project. Since its inception, the brand has worked with the Swedish Fashion Council for support and brought in some of fashion’s most visionary collaborators to help push their fanciful clothes into new dimensions.
“When Lotta and Nick entered the project and started to help us develop it, that was one of the biggest moments,” said Ben, referencing Lotta Volkova and Nick Tran (the head of buying and merchandising at Dover Street Market, who consults on merchandising for August Barron). “We learned how to make the clothing more desirable and functional—things that could exist in the real world, not just as an image. They’ve both taught us a lot of the tools that we use now to decide when a garment needs to be made more wearable or when it needs to be made more extreme. We’ve been noticing that some of the more simple pieces aren’t necessarily the pieces that are selling the best. It’s often some of the most extreme pieces that are the most successful commercially.”
That’s welcome news to those worried we’re living in an endless age of luxurious blazer-core (see some of those big brand debuts…). This October, the brand will present another runway show—one they are staying even more mum about. “It’s one that we want to keep a bit more mysterious,” said Ben. Their big plans are a bit mysterious too, and that’s probably a good thing. “Of course we have a bit of an idea of where we want to be in five-to-ten years, but we also like to let experiences dictate what our next response will be. It’s hard to really define what the next chapter is going to look like. All we know is that we want to continue doing this and for it to feel creative and free. I don’t really want to be working towards a clear goal because the goal is to do what you enjoy doing, and then that will kind of create the path.”
“I mean, one of the most inspiring things is to have it be a bit undefinable,” August adds. “Anything you can easily pinpoint is quite boring. We’re always interested in characters and stories that have a lot of contradiction to them, we’re always looking for something that challenges us.”
The next challenge for the brand—beyond getting their name change to stick—might just be continuing to inspire the kind of dress up beauty epitomized through their divas, from Addison Rae to Lotta Volkova. It’s an aesthetic proposition that contrasts with the ever basic-ing reality of mainstream culture—but one that It Girls the world over so desperately need. “We always come back to the idea of a character who’s in these heightened moments of presentation: a debutante going to their first prom, someone getting dressed for the workplace trying to impersonate someone from a more upper class background,” says Ben. “There’s something also about a character that’s in transition, which I think is very relatable in a way to everyone, about these attempts at trying to represent an image and the failures that you find along the way.”
“We got asked about how to, in one sentence, describe the clothing, and I came up with something that I think is accurate: Delusional characters for delusional people,” August continues laughing. “Delusional sounds extreme, but there is something beautiful about when you’re trying to present something on the outside that you haven’t lived up to yet in a way.”
In the past 10 years of their creative partnership, Ben and August have lived up to every sense of drama and beauty they’ve imagined. Even if it was created in their bedroom. “It’s funny to think this used to be our studio,” Ben laughs gesturing towards the bedroom door. The next 10 years already include a studio space—and maybe a new prize. You’ll have to watch the headlines tomorrow to see.
