Steve O Smith Is The London Designer Bringing His Illustrations To Life

The UK capital is bursting with raw fashion design talent. From the engineered sensuality of Knwls to Steve O Smith’s drawn-by-hand expressions, the future heirlooms of Talia Byre and Tolu Coker’s memory-made clothes, London’s designers are reshaping the face of fashion.

STEVE O SMITH

Steve O Smith does not sketch collections. He draws them and then insists they stay as drawings, even once they become clothes. His garments begin as wax on paper, marks laid down quickly and instinctively, before being translated into wearable pieces. “I think of each garment as a drawing in its own right,” he says. “That’s reflected in the way they exist, which is made to order and one-of-a-kind.” Control is central to his practice: quantities are limited, output is deliberate and the work is designed to be collectible, “just like the drawings are”.

Drawing has always been Smith’s primary language. He’s dyslexic, so as a child he found focus through mark-making. “The best way to shut me up was to give me a piece of paper and a crayon,” he recalls. Fashion entered early too – his grandmother was a dressmaker – and the two disciplines eventually fused. As a child he drew obsessively, half-faces cut off by the page, a recurring pink house perched on a cliff, complete with sewage pipes. “I don’t really know what that has to do with anything,” he says with a shrug, but what mattered was the creativity. “It let me go into a flow state where I wasn’t really thinking too much about anything.”

That instinct became his method during his MA at Central Saint Martins, which began in 2020 and unfolded largely online. Smith had long felt that traditional garment development diluted the urgency of his drawings. “I actually liked the drawings a lot more than the watered-down results I was getting.” The breakthrough came in 2021, during a summer locked down due to Covid, where he was cut off from fabrics and forced to work with off-cuts. Out of frustration, he began applying fabric pieces at the same speed he would draw. “Treating the actual body of the garment as a canvas,” he says. “That’s where it began.”

The mental shift was decisive: “[I was] thinking of fabric as a medium rather than [as] fabric.” Appliqué became his translation tool, as it allowed ‘gesture’ to remain visible in cloth. Smith is precise about the term. “By gesture, I mean movement of the hand.” Repetition is key. He redraws ideas obsessively until errors creep in. “You start to make mistakes… and those are the ones I like.” Aggression, boredom and speed sharpen the work, producing marks that feel alive rather than resolved.

References are tightly edited. Each collection is anchored by around five images or garments. For his LVMH Prize presentation – titled Awash – Smith drew on Pavel Tchelitchew’s wet, erotic sailor drawings, René Gruau’s graphic illustrations, Paul Cadmus’s charged queer painting The Fleet’s In! and the language of Dior and Givenchy. “You’re drawing a gown, but you’re doing it in the same sort of wet, sultry way [as those artists],” he says. The result was a collection about ink, tonality and social tension, clothes that signal, provoke and suggest rather than describe.

Winning the Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize brought visibility, mentorship and validation. “It’s legitimising,” Smith says. Still, his focus remains unchanged. “I’m at my best when I’m just working on my own drawings.” Growth is cautious, the prize money ring-fenced and expansion slow. The work, however, keeps moving with new drawings, new references. As Smith puts it: “I just want to keep doing what I’m doing at the moment, which is making drawings.” Making drawings and bringing them, beautifully, to life.

Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 76 – CREATIVITY, CHANGE, FREEDOM – out NOW. Order your copy here. 

LONDON MADE

Photographer THOMAS HAUSER
Fashion Editor TARA ST HILL
Text EMILY PHILLIPS
Model VIVIAN HASSE at Girls Club Management
Hair ATTILA KENYERES
Make-up PEGGY KURKA at Uschi Rabe using GUCCI Beauty
Photographer’s assistant JOHANNA KIRSCH
Fashion assistant TOMMY DOWLING
Casting WHITE CASTING
Production SONYA MAZURYK
Production assistant MARISSA LEITMAN