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Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion

A traditionalist at heart, his tailoring methods mix the bygone era with a personal twist to create heirlooms to pass down generations

Designer Lee Hurst often found respite in the arts during rough times in his childhood. “I could never pay attention in school if it wasn’t an art subject,” says the Liverpool-born designer. Sculpting and sketching were an outlet to let out his feelings, which became a therapeutic habit he would often use to escape reality. When his grandfather passed away, Lee found himself channeling the melancholy he felt in his art. “It was just a way I expressed myself,” he says. The Royal College of Art graduate regards his designs as artworks – or even sculptures – offering an insight into his identity as a designer.

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Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst, Final Collection
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion

With a scholarship from the British Fashion Council, the MA at the RCA was for Lee about putting all the skills he had learnt to use. While completing his BA in womenswear from Central Saint Martins, Lee gained experience in the ateliers of Iris Van Herpen, Marques’Almeida, and Dior. His time at the Parisian fashion house gave him insight into men’s tailoring and how to play with structure and fluidity, which informs his work today. After graduating, he moved back home in Liverpool to work with local menswear tailors.

“Working with the tailors was very interesting because it was about the wearer and not the creativity that went into making the suits.”

“Working with the tailors was very interesting because it was about the wearer and not the creativity that went into making the suits,” says Lee. It helped him to dig deep into the meaning behind clothes, focusing on the psychology of fashion. “It changed my perspective on fashion and allowed me to focus on the individual,” he says. He describes the clients walking in as businessmen and lawyers who would ask for sharp suiting with nipped-in waists, and through the fittings, he would notice the clothing’s effect on the wearer. “It would completely change the individual’s persona, it would change their posture, and even the way they talk,” he describes.

Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst, Design Development
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion

Lee’s MA collection follows a similar line as he brings back the ethos of traditional craftsmanship with tailoring and tries to capture the hidden details. Each jacket, skirt, and suit has a story ingrained in the construction of the clothes. While his silhouettes offer the old-world charm, there are also some crazy elements like his dog Gizmo’s fur on a bold pinstripe suit, incorporated using a self-developed spinning technique to make the stripes. The dog fur was coincidence though, he was on the phone with his mother who was taking the dog for a routine grooming session. Apart from wool sourced from English mills, silk, and dog fur, he also used threads made for First-Aid bandages from World War II that he stumbled upon at a taxidermist’s shop. Looking at his collection of jackets with shoulder pads, shirts and skirts with cinched in waistlines, he references 90s tailoring techniques throughout.

The RCA graduate prefers working with toned-down colours as it allows him to see the silhouette and the cut of the clothing. Black dominates the colour palette with a few hints of green. Inspired by the artworks of Kevin Francis Gray and Mark Rothko – whose exhibit Lee had visited the summer before starting his MA – he wanted to play with the starkness of black and added a flash of colour in between. “When I went into the room to see Mark Rothko’s paintings, it had a really intense atmosphere and I wanted to incorporate that in my work,” he says.

Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst, Design Development
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion

Lee experiments with the contrast in colours and textures in his designs. A lime green bolster of soft silk became a delicate shirt, and then there were coats and jackets with a strong sculptural structure that exaggerated the dips and curves. He also wanted to add longevity to his pieces – an important characteristic in handmade clothing of the Savile Row variety. “I didn’t want it to be just a fashion collection, I wanted them to be pieces that you keep forever.”

Designing his collection was a personal journey for Lee. During his BA, the pressure of finding a job affected his work process and so while completing his MA, he wanted to eliminate all distractions. “I wanted to be completely honest with myself and create what I truly believed in,” says Lee. Although he created the collection in quarantine, he felt liberated and that helped shape his aesthetic. But the quarantine posed a question mark at first. “We were in the studio grabbing whatever we could, I was grabbing lots of fabric so that I didn’t have to pay for it,” he says.

Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst, Design Development
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion

“Sometimes it can be quite intimidating, you always have to explain yourself and have an answer for everything, which disables me in a way because I feel like I’m fighting for a message rather than to simply create.”

Creating his collection in lockdown turned out to be more beneficial than he had anticipated. Working from his own little space he was able to escape from the tense and high-pressure environment of the studio. The tutors would also push him harder to better his work. “Sometimes it can be quite intimidating, you always have to explain yourself and have an answer for everything, which disables me in a way because I feel like I’m fighting for a message rather than to simply create,” he explains. When digital became the medium to showcase collections, the polaroid shots he took to capture the process of creating the collection became a part of his lookbook.

A few factors that he finds define his experience at RCA are the atmosphere of being around talented students and the ease of collaborating with different departments. “At first, I didn’t like collaborating, but I realised that when you find a good team and bounce ideas off of each other, the creativity elevates a lot more,” says Lee. It allowed him to work better on his job at the label J.E Cai, where he started working the day after he graduated. On the contrary, it hasn’t been smooth sailing for him throughout his days as a student. “Prepare to fail over and over again,” he says, “that would be my advice to myself,” he adds.

Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst, Design Development
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion
Lee Hurst wants to bring back the old-world charm in fashion

While studying at the RCA, Lee was encouraged to develop sustainable techniques to work with and think of new manufacturing methods, hoping that the industry would slow down. “I always felt out of place for thinking “Should we be going back?” he asks. In an era where fashion is a game of racing forward and making a profit, he is a traditionalist, he wants to bring back the old ways of working. But Lee’s principles still hold modernity as a driving force of his aesthetic. “In order for me to move forward and design for the future, I need to understand the past,” he says.

“The quarantine really put my money where my mouth is, so now I want to create clothes that last.”

Lee often revisits the archives of McQueen and Madame Grès for inspiration and is fascinated by the long life of their pieces. “It helped me think of longevity as an important aspect when creating clothes,” he says. He admits his own wardrobe does not hold pieces that would survive wear, so when lockdown started, the idea of being able to pass down clothing as heirlooms to the next generation became an essential aspect of the pieces he makes. Lee’s design direction was influenced partly by the pandemic this year, but it put things in perspective about the future for young designers like him. “The quarantine really put my money where my mouth is, so now I want to create clothes that last.”