What’s a young American in London to do after he has designed a life-altering fashion item?
Conner Ives was told his trajectory as an upstart young fashion designer would go something like this: “You’ll do this for however many years, you’ll develop your viral product, and then everything will change,”
The soothsayers were not wrong.
Ives’ viral product wasn’t the ivory duchess satin duster and upcycled sequin minidress that British model Adwoa Aboah wore to the Met Gala in 2017. It wasn’t the dresses made from spliced deadstock T-shirts, like the “Scarface” style Rihanna wore around the time she hired Ives, now 29, to help her introduce Fenty, her short-lived LVMH-backed fashion brand, in 2018.
His life-altering design came when he wore a simple white T-shirt printed with the words “Protect the Dolls” in all-capped Big Caslon font for his bow at his fall 2025 runway show during London Fashion Week in February.
The slogan tee, a call to action in support of trans women – commonly referred to as “dolls” in LGBTQ+ culture – was the result of a last-minute surge of activist energy and guilt the night before Ives’ show. As an American living in London, he said, he “felt like my trans friends’ lives were being threatened by a country that I’m from”.
He was moved to create the Protect the Dolls T-shirt a few weeks after President Donald Trump signed an executive order on the day of his second inauguration that withdrew federal recognition of transgender people and ceased federal funding for gender-affirming care, among other provisions that rolled back transgender protections.
The response to Protect the Dolls was swift and high profile.
Troye Sivan and Addison Rae wore Ives’ Protect the Dolls shirts at Coachella in April. A week later, Pedro Pascal wore the tee to the premiere of Thunderbolts. Haider Ackermann, the creative director of Tom Ford, posted a photo to Instagram of himself wearing the shirt with Tilda Swinton. She subsequently bought several tees and took her own selfie wearing one.
“When I learned what it represented, I didn’t think twice about wearing it,” Ackermann said. “The fact that it had such an immediate impact was both unexpected and deeply moving.”
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To date, Ives has sold more than 14,000 units of the original US$99 ($170) T-shirt, generating more than US$1.3 million in sales. All proceeds go to Trans Lifeline, an organisation that offers support and financial services to the transgender community. The number of T-shirts sold dwarfs that of any other single product in Ives’ collection. He had to hire staff specifically to complete the T-shirt orders.
Ives admitted that “a certain level of T-shirt fatigue” has set in. Without abandoning the cause, he is looking for ways to provide financial support for Trans Lifeline beyond the T-shirt sales. “The message is even more true now than it was six months ago,” he said.
Now that Ives has cut through to a wider audience, he is navigating all that has changed. In May, he beat out four other semifinalists, including the buzzy designers Dilara Findikoğlu and Talia Byre, to win the British Fashion Council/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund. It includes a cash prize of £150,000 ($347,000) and mentorship from an industry veteran. Ives, who has staged one runway show a year since his London Fashion Week debut for fall 2022, is increasing his schedule to two shows a year starting Monday, when he presents a spring collection for the first time during London Fashion Week.
Ives, the son of a paediatric dentist-orthodontist mother and a Presbyterian minister-psychoanalyst father, grew up in Bedford Hills, New York. He became fashion-obsessed watching Fashion File with his babysitter and checking collections on Style.com.
“Even the designers I didn’t really like,” Ives said. Knowing that designers like John Galliano and Alexander McQueen went to Central Saint Martins, Ives applied in 2014 and was given a place in the foundation programme.
Being the rare American designer working in London has given Ives an edge, he would say. He recalled the Saint Martins faculty chafing at his chutzpah. “I’d say things like, ‘I don’t think it’s what the brand is doing right now,’ ” Ives said. “They were like: ‘What do you mean, the brand? This isn’t a brand.’”
When Ives dressed Aboah for the Met Gala, his tutors were nonplussed. But Rihanna and her stylist and Fenty creative director, Jahleel Weaver, ate up her outfit. “It was one of those moments where you have to know who was behind it,” Weaver said.
Ives twists the codes of the American sportswear designers he idolised, like Donna Karan, Ralph Lauren and Halston. Cheeky archetypes populate his runways. His 2021 graduate collection, titled “The American Dream,” included characters like the “High-schooler,” based on the yoga pants and Brandy Melville tops his classmates wore, and the “Horse Girl.” Subsequent runways have mused on Carolyn Bessette-Kennedy and the society swans C.Z. Guest and Nan Kempner.
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Advertise with NZME.Ives doesn’t want to be known only as the “Protect the Dolls guy” or as the “archetypes guy.” He’s mining Pop for spring 2026.
“I’m processing the times we find ourselves in,” he said before specifying several inspirations: Rae, 2010 hipster Brooklyn-American Apparel and “Jane Fonda’s Workout” of the 1980s. Americana and American women loom large.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Jessica Iredale
Photographs by: Alice Zoo
©2025 THE NEW YORK TIMES
