September 23, 2025 |
Conner Ives is in his caps lock era, and the SS26 show – dubbed On Pop – was nothing short of a neon-dipped manifesto. Opened by viral rapper Cortisa Star (check), and featuring the runway debut of fashion’s own Osman Ahmed – who pens an essay about his personal evolution inside the 25th anniversary issue of 10 Magazine – (double check), it was a presentation that pulsed with both celebrity sparkle and subcultural grit.
Bold and bright was the order of the day: acid rugby shirts, uranium-glass greens, Tab Soda pinks and Club Tropicana orange fused into house codes that screamed joy in high volume. Everything hummed with rigorous, hardcore handwork, turning everyday archetypes into luminous, defiant armour.
But beneath the fizz, there was heart. “Rather than proposing a hypothetical escape to get us out of here, I forced myself to sit in the now, to make sense of it when nothing makes sense anymore,” the American designer wrote in his show notes. “The only way out of this is through.” It was a rallying cry to stay grounded amid the chaos of the world right now. Pop, he reminded us, is not low brow – it’s survival, endlessly reconstituting itself. And here, too, it became protection. “This one, and every one, is for my Dolls!” he wrote, and with his viral ‘Protect the Dolls’ tees having raised over $600,000 for Trans Lifeline so far this year, Ives proved himself to be a designer of fashion as solidarity, as community, as resistance.
Neon joy, radical care and a brighter side of human nature – forever for the Dolls.
Photography courtesy of Conner Ives.
