Samuel Ross is “obsessed” with outerwear, and has been since he was a teenager. The British designer and artist’s first memorable coat, bought at the age of 16, was, he recalls, “a Nike Quick Strike Stormbreaker on discount from TK Maxx” in Northampton, “with woven reflective reliefs for texture and in a desaturated lime green”.
If you have followed Ross’s career thus far, the Stormbreaker makes sense. Punchy, sporty, in an uncompromising colour and arguably avant-garde, it’s in line with the brand he founded in 2014, A-Cold-Wall*, which offered a conceptual take on the luxury streetwear boom. It’s in line with a collaboration strategy that has seen him work, in fact, with Nike Inc, on some 45 sneaker designs, or with Hublot, for which he has designed various models of its Big Bang watch with straps in gleaming hues.
Today, however, in his Islington studio, the 33-year-old is more invested in another colour: an inky shade of blue. “I’ve spent the last year developing this colour,” says Ross, himself dressed all in black, bent double, staring at another windbreaker laid on the floor. The studio is furnished with small Benin bronzes, two salvaged church pews, a red steel desk and a rather lovely looking wooden exercise station, which he promises he uses. Ross – a big-picture thinker not shy of a big pronouncement – is analysing the shade. “It’s not corporate but not quite anarchist, right?”
We have met to preview his latest project, a new clothing brand conceived in collaboration with high-street giant Zara, which adds to an already very long list of enterprises. Ross is, at this point, a professional polymath. He was first design assistant to the late Virgil Abloh (he helped launch Off-White), and consulted on Kanye West’s Donda project too. Since launching A-Cold-Wall* in 2014, he has designed furniture, headphones (he is a consultant for Apple) and even a bright orange toilet at last year’s Milan Design Week. His Converge gilet has been acquired by the V&A – the museum included his work in its 2022 Fashioning Masculinities exhibition – while Anesthesia I, “a large sculptural form”, is in the collection of the Met. He has an MBE and is a doctor of arts (courtesy of an honorary PhD from the University of Westminster) and also works as a visual artist, with exhibitions at London’s White Cube and New York’s Friedman Benda on his CV; today, a rack of abstract, splodgy canvases are ranged against the wall.
“It’s his ability to translate his design language across a variety of mediums – that’s what really impresses me about Sam,” says curator and designer Rob Boyd of Opencircle Agency, who has followed Ross since his beginnings. Ross has always been exacting about fabric and sourcing with his clothes, he says, “but it’s what comes with those garments – the projects that sit alongside them, and how it all becomes a multiverse, or his vision, his world. That’s the intriguing thing.”
Having sold his majority stake in A-Cold-Wall* in 2023, Ross is introducing SR_A Engineered by Zara, the first chapter of a project that will run for a few seasons. “It really is inherently a joint venture,” says Ross. “It’s the first time that Inditex and Zara have worked with an independent designer on a multi-year partnership.” The collection will be showcased in presentations – the first was last weekend, at Paris’s menswear fashion week, with a pop-up in New York this month – “and there will be a deep integration of cultural figures I have relationships with, from music to sports to counterculture”.
Zara has a long history of collaborations, most recently with Stefano Pilati, Harry Lambert, Nanushka and Kate Moss, but this is the first in which the brand is backing a line that exists in its own context. For Ross, it offers a capacity for production and distribution that is hard to match. “It made sense to work with a group who have the facilities to experiment and express new positions.”
SR_A will sit at the intersection between casual tailoring and sportswear that has predominated in menswear of late. “The collection is a reflection of my world, my universe, and where I think loads of people are,” he says, referring to those who, like him, first developed their style in the early days of Tumblr and Instagram. “Those people are now entering a new chapter of their lives, refining who they are. I’m proposing a viewpoint for that generation to move into gracefully and comfortably… It’s neither a hoodie nor a suit. This is an offering for the space in between.”
It is “far less structured and less rigid” than in his A‑Cold-Wall* era – “more loose”, he says, speaking lyrically of the zips, fastenings or wicking. Prices range from £49.99 for a T-shirt to £289 for a parka, the most expensive piece. “It’s about movement and transit. But not in a crass sense of a running club, which has been flagellated to death,” he says mischievously, nodding to the gorpcore trend that has dominated recently. “I know that my place is within art and design and fashion, not in running clubs!
“When you start out, you have to scream and shout,” he continues, of his design evolution. “Now, it’s a reflection – contemplation, almost.” It’s a more mature product? “Absolutely.” Age-appropriate? “Ageless!” he shoots back with a smile.
Much of Ross’s approach and ethos is due to his upbringing in Wellingborough, a town near Northampton that sits pretty much at the centre of England. His childhood home was a “very, very bohemian household”: his mother is an academic, teacher and enthusiastic painter (she was on BBC News recently for a contest); his father studied at Central Saint Martins and at Goldsmiths, and worked as a stained-glass procurer. Ross was home-schooled for four years. “I absolutely loved it, to be honest,” he says.
His father taught him how to build pinhole cameras and took him to computer fairs. “Engineering and expression were, for the most part, the two core tenets.” His vocation was always clear. “I knew I was going into the arts, from as soon as I was cognisant. There was never a question; never some worrisome perspective to it, like, am I an artist? I know I’m an artist.” He studied graphic design and illustration at De Montfort University in Leicester, but quickly left a job in industrial design to work in fashion; Abloh emailed him with the offer of an internship. “I could feel and see that newness was on the horizon. And every bone in my body needed to contribute to that dialogue.”
He won three British fashion awards for his work with A-Cold-Wall*, but decided to sell his part in it after only nine years. A-Cold-Wall* had a very specific perspective, he explains, which he had outgrown. He started thinking about his “second chapter” in 2021 after he became a father for the second time. “As an artist and a designer, my instinct is to always be honest with what I have to say. Also, an artist and designer needs liberty.”
A-Cold-Wall* was acquired by Tomorrow Ltd in late 2023, which sold it within a year to Four Marketing, backed by Frasers Group. “It’s an objective success,” Ross argues. “I’m so proud of it. How a person of colour, from a low cost-of-living area outside London, can independently scale it to 200 wholesale doors… that is a rarity.” At the same time, he says it’s nice “to be emancipated of your origin story… I have to push into the unknown. It’s part of my nature.”
In a particularly precarious moment for fashion, Ross’s work with Zara might work as an industry bellwether. “We need new models,” the designer says of the approach. Many agree. “2024 was the first year that the fashion industry contracted since 2009,” says brand consultant Tony Wang, founder of Office of Applied Strategy. “It’s a bit of a cultural reset in luxury and in fashion because, in some ways, a recession does give brands permission to innovate. If the markets are going to be in a downturn anyway, you might as well experiment.” (Even Inditex, successful as it is, is not immune to the climate: in December it was announced that its shares had fallen around five per cent due to what reports called “a rare miss on quarterly sales and profit”.)
For Wang, the SR_A collaboration is “new language” for Zara – it implies “a longer-term commitment, with strategic longevity”, he says, not just using a collaboration as a marketing moment, as high-street brands tend to do. “Zara is clearly building a platform where they can empower emerging designers, and even creators, influencers and celebrities.” If it is not a luxury brand, it acts like one. He even wonders whether this is part of a longer-term goal.
“The next major fashion group might come from a high-street brand – the next LVMH or Richemont or OTB Group. [Renzo Rosso’s group started out with Diesel, a denim brand, before acquiring luxury labels such as Maison Margiela, Marni and Jil Sander.] It feels like it’s hard to enter that through the luxury fashion route now. So I wonder if a Zara or an H&M would eventually try to take equity positions in emerging designers as part of a long-term strategy, to become the next LVMH or Kering.”
The brand itself remains tight-lipped, preferring to focus on Ross. “All of us here have long admired Sam’s work, and we were blown away by his ideas and thinking when he approached us,” says Javier Romero, menswear director at Zara. “He has a great sense of his audience.”
The merging of Ross’s audience with Zara’s is clearly of great interest to both parties. Ross is acutely aware of his own: he designs first and foremost for a “global POC audience”, he says. “I want to be able to represent the global majority in fashion.” And representation matters to him. It’s why he sets such store by his honorary degree, or the acquisition of his work by institutions. He wants to “make sure that the next generation see themselves integrated into society – not just part of the advertising material”.
However, he admits, much of his work has been about “a caucus of people” who haven’t always been able to access his designs. “Pricing was always complicated for me, because where my heart is and where the margin needs to be can often be at odds.” Yet he wants to support expertise and craft. The SR_A Zara line is in fact complemented by an Atelier line by Ross’s studio (also called SR_A) that will feature drops, twice a year, of limited-edition, much higher-priced designs, made with craftspeople and artisans in Britain. His solution is to offer two options at opposing ends.
“You need to have balance,” he says, “and carving out, deteriorating the middle, is how you do that. It’s either social, accessible, or it’s craft and luxury. You have to be decisive. It’s either the £150,000 Big Bang that we launched in Miami [in December] or it’s a beautiful poncho for £169. But there’s no awkwardness in the pricing. You’re clear in who you’re speaking to.” (Wang believes that many of his peers are coming to similar conclusions: “A lot of young designers are realising that there’s a lot more latitude around pricing strategy, while still maintaining a luxury positioning.”)
Asked why he thinks Marta Ortega Pérez, chair of Inditex, chose to work with him, Ross refers to the opportunity he got when he won the Hublot Design Prize in 2019, which kickstarted his work with the watchmaker. The money was one thing, “but it was more the opportunity to speak to the C-suite and Hublot, and actually talk about the quality of their material development and, perhaps, untapped markets and aesthetics and sensibilities that hadn’t been proposed [to them] yet or considered”. He believes it’s the same with Ortega Pérez and her family. “We believe it is a joint venture model that will start to determine how the fashion industry works.”
Still, there are obvious questions. Zara does not accept being called “fast fashion”, but the brand has been criticised for its use of synthetics and vast production – in 2023 alone it was said to have produced around 450 million garments. A report published last month linked Inditex’s supply chain (like that of several others) to labour abuses, while the sustainability watchdog site Good On You rates its overall efforts as “not good enough”. The brand refutes these accusations. It says that “in the campaign of 2023, 68 per cent of the total raw materials used by Inditex/Zara was of lower-impact fibres or preferred raw materials”, that it operates on a flexible model designed to “avoid surpluses”, and that “we regularly conduct detailed and robust due diligence and monitoring of all our suppliers”. It is, it says, “committed to using only textile fibres with a lower environmental footprint by 2030”.
Ross is aware. However, when he describes the collection as “organic”, he doesn’t just mean an aesthetic. He always pitched it to Zara, he says, as something “moving away from synthetics”, focusing on sustainable dye processes and cottons. “There is some waxing in the collection, and some coatings, but it’s been kept to a complete minimum,” he says. He had a revelation in Guangzhou, in 2018, when visiting factories for A-Cold-Wall*. “Going over the different composites of nylon and polyester in a liquid format in several buckets in front of you is a moment of change,” he says. “From that point on, there’s been an awareness that we need to move away from the old way of producing garments and to try to push for more organic garments to be produced, with fewer plastics and fewer synthetics.” The collection will also be produced on a more limited scale and offered in select doors, which should limit waste. He hopes that it will be part of a shift “in the next three to five years, where we move into this newer, ideally cleaner, slightly more organic way of production”. But for him, it’s also a matter of juggling priorities. “Eroding the tension around price and access and focusing on a reach to the global majority – considering median incomes in the top 10 economies, let alone the broader economies of the world – it’s the right thing to do.”
In short, he has a clear-eyed sense of how to survive, at a time where even many mid-level reputed designers are struggling to keep afloat. But he has always aimed to be savvy. “When I founded A-Cold-Wall*, I was very clear that it was a business, more so than a practice.” Independent and emerging designers need better models in order to grow feasibly, he says. “We expect independent British designers to come straight out of school and sell us a T-shirt for £400. In what world is there a user case study where that’s a viable build?”
Clothes are not the only thing on Ross’s roster this year. Another exhibition of his paintings has just opened at SCAD Museum of Art in Savannah, and he will serve as the artistic director of London’s Design Biennale in June. He does however promise that in the next year to 18 months, “you’re going to see some components of my practice fall away, and you’ll see a focus on fashion and art”. Regardless of what else may be going on, “I’m always infatuated with this idea of making clothing”. Where will we all be in 18 months? In fashion, it’s a very long time. For someone like Ross, it’s probably an eternity.