August 7, 2025 |
Subversive femininity sits at the heart of everything Liza Keane touches. Her eponymous label, launched in AW22 with the raw, brooding debut collection Beast, has quickly carved out a visceral niche in London’s fashion scene. Moulded leather garments – part sculpture, part second skin – fuse sensuality with structure. The result? Something she calls “physiological armour”. Each piece is an artefact from her inner world, mined straight from the subconscious and cast into intriguing form.
“Tension, thresholds, polarity,” is how Keane describes the thematic undercurrent that binds her collections together. It’s a mantra of opposites – protection and exposure, sensuality and structure – mirrored not just in her philosophy, but in the tactile reality of her work.
Keane’s creative path wasn’t always a straight line to fashion. “I actually wanted to be an artist first. Then a film director – I was always making up stories,” she says. “Daydreaming was a full-time job. But being a designer felt more ‘sensible’. Artist sounded like a euphemism for unemployment, and ‘film director’ was as far-fetched as ‘astronaut’.” That instinct for visual storytelling, however, never left. “With how I’ve built the brand, I feel like I’m doing all of it anyway: storytelling, direction, performance, sculpture.”
Beast, AW22
It shows. There’s a cinematic tension to her collections, where garments appear like frames from a forgotten film – sensual, eerie, arresting. There are trompe l’oeil nipples. There are condoms. There are silhouettes that cling and collapse in all the right places. It’s at once confrontational and deeply personal.
Keane describes her process as making clothes for herself – or a male version of herself – drawing from a “deeper, less edited” part of her psyche. “The more dramatic pieces come from a place that’s harder to access consciously. They’re like inner world snapshots, I guess.”
There’s a method to this madness, of course. Keane trained at Central Saint Martins, where her sculpture-meets-fashion approach sharpened into a signature. “I sculpt with clay and leather to experiment with pattern cutting and mould-making. It’s about mimicking the natural contours of the human body.” A ferocious trompe l’oeil effect is the end result. Across bodices, dresses and skin-tight trousers she warps the human form in pure illusion.
So where do all the uncanny ideas come from? “Film, always,” she says. “Lars von Trier is probably the biggest influence. Nan Goldin. Francis Bacon. And true crime photography – I’m a huge true crime junkie.” She says, then adds, “There’s something powerful in what’s left behind. The marks and objects, how they imply an action through absence. That kind of ‘negative space’ communication – that’s what I respond to. I like building from what’s missing.”
Ruined, SS25
It’s hardly surprising then that her colour palette is just as stripped back. Think blacks, greys, flesh tones – nothing more. “I don’t wear much colour myself. Colour often feels like decorative excess. I’m more concerned with silhouette and texture. The only saturated shade I can accept is black,” she admits. “The blacker the better.”
Materials are chosen with equal care. “Silk and leather, mostly. Also graphite and clay. Silk is fragile. I like fucking with it, then reinforcing it. Leather is structural but can be incredibly sensual. They’re opposites, but both feel like second skin when handled right.” Her process – meticulous and intimate – is rooted in sustainability, too. She works with deadstock and upcycled materials, and limits new textiles to 100 per cent natural fibres only.
Keane’s studio isn’t the chaos you might expect from someone who conjures such wild emotional topographies. “It’s organised but messy. I’ve got delegated spaces for spillages and experiments,” she says. “People-wise, I mostly prefer working alone. Interns or friends help out when I’m working on something bigger. But I really value the silence. I guess it’s about protecting my headspace.”
She describes her design journey like unspooling a film. “It always starts with a feeling. It’s mostly autobiographical, emotionally. The collection builds in my mind like a film – fragments, visuals, characters. I read, draw, sculpt. There’s no neat beginning-middle-end. It unfolds intuitively in loops.”
Liza Keane
If the collections are emotionally autobiographical, then sex is one of the key recurring characters – from those aforementioned condoms and printed nipples to Poker playing cards printed with debaucherous photography. “I use work to digest personal experiences,” says Keane. “I’ve got a heavy preoccupation with death, so maybe that ramps up the eros drive? Probably just a big case of FOMO, wanting to feel it all before it ends. The usual stuff.”
But beneath the provocation is something tender. “I see the way we express our sexuality as really close to expression of power – or lack thereof. So whatever you say through that lens, it ends up revealing a lot about a person. I like to think I dress people to step into a sense of personal authority without losing touch with their vulnerability and sensuality.”
Throughout it all, she remains grounded – albeit in her own deeply private universe. “I never had a mentor really,” she admits. “More like muses. People I meet IRL who make me think differently – sometimes they end up modelling or collaborating in the work.”
As for what’s next? “I want to anchor the next collections more firmly within LFW,” she says. “But mostly, I just want to keep refining what I’m doing – pushing it into stranger, sharper territory. Artistically, technically, philosophically.”
And personally? “Well… there is one thing I’d really love, but I’m a believer in not sharing dreams before they sprout. Feels like it jinxes it. Ask me in a year if it worked out.”
Photography courtesy of Liza Keane.
