We meet for a pint in Shoreditch, and Geordie Campbell arrives in baggy jeans, a fresh, boyish chop, and the kind of laid-back energy that instantly matches his clothes. He looks like his namesake brand—slightly undone, sharply precise, quietly nostalgic. The kind of guy who might have slipped out of art class early to catch a train to a club night. He flashes an easy smile as he orders a lager.
Over the clink of pint glasses and the low hum of a Thursday crowd, Campbell tells me about the menswear label—menswear “with a tad of womenswear,” as his Instagram bio puts it—that he launched in 2023. It’s part British nostalgia, part sweet rebellion: school uniform codes, childhood rituals, and softly queer sensibilities colliding in silhouettes that are tailored but never uptight, experimental but never overwrought. He speaks quickly but with intention. “I design from a place of doubt,” he says. “That feeling when you buy a pair of shoes thinking, this is the moment, and then you spend all night looking down like, what the fuck am I wearing? That’s the space I’m interested in: the space between confidence and self-consciousness.”
Campbell works from five self-described pillars—British, boyish, coming of age, doubt, and continuity. “They keep the brand honest,” he says. “It’s not about having a fixed aesthetic—it’s about being in motion. Messy progress.” He says it like a mission statement, but with a shrug, as if the messiness is part of the point.
His Fall 2025 collection draws directly from that feeling. The inspiration sparked with a photo of his dad standing stiffly on the front step, ready for his first day of school. “It’s so classic—blazer, bag, socks pulled up,” Campbell says. “It just clicked. That photo was everything I wanted the collection to say.”
Campbell grew up in Oxfordshire—”just close enough to London to always be chasing it,” he says—with a childhood stitched together from school plays, sketchbooks, and DIY costumes. “My sister had the dresses, my brother had the capes. I was somewhere in the middle trying to nick both,” he says, grinning into his pint.
You can still hear a bit of that childhood mischief in the way he talks about clothes—as something to steal, to repurpose, to play with. He didn’t touch a sewing machine until he was seventeen, when his art teacher handed him a rusted old one and told him to have a go. “I didn’t know how to thread it,” Campbell says, laughing. “I just started stitching and hoped it would work.” He tells the story the way you might retell a minor teenage disaster—equal parts horror and pride.
After a run of internships—including one at S.S. Daley, where he learned the nuts and bolts of production—Campbell launched his label on his own terms. His first lookbook was shot in a friend’s garden. “I kind of hate it now,” he admits, laughing again, the kind of laugh that’s more affectionate than self-critical. “But it taught me what not to do.”
Currently, Campbell’s process is half Pinterest spiral, half frantic sketchbook stacks. He digs through vintage shops, deadstock fabric bins, and his own memories. Blur and The Cure play constantly in the background, though he’s quick to clarify: “You can pull weirdly great references from the lyrics,” he says, “but I’m not opposed to runway music being Pussycat Dolls. Never say never.”
The new collection, titled Michaelmas—a nod to the autumn school term—spiraled out from these points of inspiration: schoolboy shorts, rosette-covered vests, gold-star motifs, teddy bear textures, and a long-sleeved striped maxi dubbed The Dennis Dress (“It’s oversized and dragging—something you’d grow into,” Campbell says). There’s also a ballet dress that evolved from a skirt pattern slashed open and stitched back together, the seams left visible like a wink at anyone paying close attention. “It’s about dressing up in your own way—how much can I get away with within the rules?”
When I ask who he’d most love to dress, he barely pauses. “David Tennant. Billie Piper. Andrew Scott. Luther Ford. Judi Dench,” Campbell says, ticking the names off like a shopping list. “British icons only.”
The Geordie Campbell boy, as he describes it, isn’t necessarily a boy at all. “They’re usually young, probably queer, still working things out,” he says. “They want to try something new, but not make a whole thing about it. They’re just figuring it out—like I am.”
His first pop-up opened this month in East London, after some pointed advice from Priya Ahluwalia: “Don’t rush to do a runway show. Do something off-season, when no one’s watching—that’s when you’ll be seen.” Campbell took it to heart, and it worked.
What Campbell is building isn’t polished or perfect—and that’s exactly the point. It’s tender. It’s deliberately unfinished. It’s evolving. And like its creator, it wears that evolution well. Besides, he’s great company over a pint.