RUNWAY
Harris Reed on Searching for a New Femininity and Inclusivity at Nina Ricci
BY MARK HOLGATE
March 2, 2023
Harris Reed might be about to bring the drama to Nina Ricci, but on Monday afternoon in Paris the drama came to him. Heading to a preview of Reed’s debut for the house, to be shown at the former Air France building in the shadow of Les Invalides on Friday, the Avenue Hoche was shut down—cops, patrol cars and crash barriers galore—all because of FIFA. Go figure.
Six floors above, in an anonymous office building on the street, Reed was busy whipping his collection into shape: checking on some of his more extravagant showstoppers (there are plenty of them, as you will soon see), supervising fittings, and generally keeping everything (and everyone) upbeat and positive with his ebullient energy. That said, he found time to sit down and chat about his plans for Nina Ricci, and how he hopes to transform it.
Reed is an engaging interview: thoughtful, confessional and funny, armed with a self-deprecating sense of humor. Our conversation ran the gamut, though one thing we didn’t get round to was how he wants to make the pricing of Nina Ricci more accessible; a natty blazer, all lapels and shoulders and not a million miles from that worn recently by Harry Styles, will retail for around $700. But what follows reveals that’s just one way Reed hopes to make Ricci more inclusive.
Mark Holgate: Before we go any further, Harris, it’s four days and counting before your Nina Ricci debut; how are you feeling?
Harris Reed: I’m feeling nervous and excited! I’m not usually a nervous person, but I think being a foreigner in Paris comes into play a lot more when I’m now doing a show that’s... not for the French, but for the French public, for French people. I got here a week ago, so I had a week to come into the office, see the updated finale gowns with the sequins and the pieces that we’re going to be working on today. But it all feels a bit greater than I thought it would; bigger than expected, I guess. Maybe that’s also just going from always doing quite salon-style shows in London, with never more than 120, 150 people to a 400-person show showing in Paris during Paris Fashion Week. But I’m feeling excited because Harry Lambert [Reed’s show stylist for Ricci and his own collection] showed up today, so that’s brought the humor and the Englishness that I deeply was craving to the city.
MH: So what’s left to be done in the lead up to the show; how are you spending your time? I know I saw quite a bit of the collection in January…
HR: I try to keep everything extremely structured. I think because the last time I saw you was in the commercial showroom, that was probably 30 to 40% of what’s going to be in this collection. The rest of it are things that are extremely similar in terms of styles, colorways, fabrications, but grander silhouettes, grander shoulders, kind of everything a bit more exaggerated. The days leading up, I would say, especially now being Monday, we’re starting to focus on the more show looks and the more…well, they’re all show looks, but more the looks that are a bit more gravitas, that are going to need more work in the atelier. So more of the sequins, more of the feather pieces, the fake fur. We'll be getting the lineup quite zhuzhed together and formulating a 38-look new beginning for a brand that I think really needs a clear start.
Then we go into Wednesday, Thursday, which is going to be nonstop casting, which for me has always been probably my most precious moment. Because I think it’s always the best way that I’ve been able to express the inclusivity and the fluid aspect of what I do by showing girls, non-binary individuals, transgender individuals as well as an array of people obviously with different backgrounds and races. So for me it’s always the most important two days because I really get to put this sense of identity alongside the clothes that are quite loud and quite dramatic and quite red carpet.
MH: Other than some celebrity dressing, Friday’s show will be your first big statement about Nina Ricci, your vision for it. Can you talk me through what you want to say with that?
HR: I think that the word I keep saying is feminine, but I think bold is a word that also keeps coming into play. And I don’t know if it’s part of me saying in my bad Franglais on a daily basis to be more dramatic, more expressive—so I’d say it’s this boldness that you’re seeing from all these jewel tone colors that really, without saying too much, nod very heavily to the archive; the ’80s and ’90s collections from Ricci were without a doubt my favorite. There has to be a sense of youth too, but I don’t want to say that in the sense of, “Oh, I’m trying to hit a young clientele.” It will span across ages, but there’s a youthfulness and a kind of playfulness that I think Nina Ricci had lost. And something that I really loved in all the old archive images was the finale. The women were smiling and laughing and pushing veils and pushing colors and giggling and being very playful and feeling their personality in a way that I think hasn’t been showcased on the Ricci runway in probably the last 15 years.
MH: Was all that part of your pitch for the house? What way did you want to go?
HR: Super bold. I literally told them in my pitch, ”She is very bold. She’s very unapologetically Ricci,” is what I kept saying. I had this feeling of this girl that was super confident, that that personality is in the Ricci archive, but it has been something completely lost in time, but she was already there. As I’m seeing now the first day of doing the lineups [for the show], she is very much someone who takes risks. Everything, even with the suiting, with the massive shoulders and very big lapels, and the kick of the flare is quite dramatic. I was asked, “What are your references, where is the modern art?” When people who are hiring a young, I guess, yes, young designer, they want cool edgy touchpoints of what you’re bringing. And I kept being like, “No, no, no. I’m the young cool, edgy touchpoint!” What I want to bring is already there; the house is this treasure trove. Most of the silhouettes in this collection are almost all based on necklines, lapels, and archive gowns, quite literally. And then they’re reimagined in modern fabrications. All of this fits into my idea of being bold and French, but it’s a French/American take. It’s how I have always dreamt being French could be, back when I was in LA, back when I was in Arizona….
MH: Harris in Paris!
HR: Exactly. [Laughs.] It’s very Harris in Paris. And funny enough, the first person to respond to the things I’ve been teasing about Nina Ricci, just me in the atelier on Instagram, was Lily Collins. And she then became a really close friend just through Instagram while I got this job. And her take on being Emily in Paris felt very much like me being in the office. And even words, I mean not to make this about that, but even words on a daily basis that they would use here that they couldn’t translate into English. I was actually texting her that there were similar things in her character on that show. The humor and the youthful...ignorance is not the right word, but a youthful “I’m not scared just to jump in.” I really resonate with that kind of idea. But everyone just calls me, especially in the atelier, they’re like, “Oh, it’s Emily.” Whenever I come up and knock on the door, all the women in the white coats are like, “It’s Emily.” [Laughs.] I took it as a bit of a term of endearment after a while and I was like, actually I kind of love that.
MH: It’s interesting, the notions of boldness and bigness, because the predominant image of the house is very romantic. One thinks about something like L’Air du Temps, the softness and wistfulness. For your research, were you just googling Nina Ricci and came up with this whole other aspect to the house?
HR: 100%. When you first Google Nina Ricci, it is all just L’Air Du Temps ads. It’s super poetic. It’s very me actually; the softness and chiffons—the ads were beautiful. When you look, that’s all you really find. But when I was up for the job and I actually did a deep dive into research and a lot of that was going back to the Central Saint Martins archive library and sneaking in with my friend’s pass [laughs] and I found this rich history that’s not been documented. So I started cross checking Pinterest and so many of the images that I thought were Saint Laurent, Lacroix, Dior, were actually Nina Ricci. So all these big bow dresses, all these actually quite bold silhouettes that were completely mislabeled on Pinterest happened to be Ricci. I looked through the Nina Ricci coffee table book at the library—it’s actually quite hard to find, and quite expensive—and I had to go through it with the gloves and everything and it was all these silhouettes that were very bold and very daring and didn’t fit this kind of quick little Google search of what was mostly poetic and sweet. I still hope though that what we will show will still have poetry and this idea of it still being very feminine.
MH: Can you talk to me more about this idea of femininity, because ’feminine’ can be such a loaded term. So I’m interested to know what you think feels feminine or what says femininity today and then how is that going to filter through into you Ricci?
HR: It’s something that I’ve actually been asking myself a lot, me and my partner have been talking about at dinner, because it’s also a thing of going from being my gender-fluid brand in London, which it’s very kind of easy to then have not just non-binary individuals, but put a man in a dress and really challenge gender in a very obvious way. When I come to a brand that’s literally based around femininity, even before this quote unquote, I don’t want to say rebrand, but new beginning, new start, it was a space where I was like, OK, what actually is femininity? At the end of the day I had to say, what is it to me and what is it to this brand? Because I can’t try to define it for everyone. It’s the same way that I’ve always struggled sometimes with male designers being like, “This is the female wardrobe,” or giving their own interpretation of what a woman should be. And I’ve never wanted to do that.
So for me, when I looked to femininity, not to repeat myself, but it was much more linking this idea of boldness and being this trailblazer that I put into the silhouettes and took that spirit of femininity rather than trying to be like, ”Oh, femininity is very sexy. Oh, it’s very soft”. I went much more with—excuse my language, here—but a bit more of a ”f*ck off”; to be a strong, powerful individual. I know everyone says that, but I do think looking at the board [of runway looks], I do think my words do match what I’m doing here. So I do think I took the boldness and the daringness that I hopefully will then also put into the casting. When I’m finding femininity, it will probably be a couple boys that for me represent femininity. The same with a couple women who represent it as well. But I’m really looking at this idea of a bold ”f*ck off” attitude. The same way that I’ve come into Paris being very bold and unapologetically me is what I’ve also tried to do with Nina Ricci.
MH: It’s almost femininity first, whatever that means, and gender second, right?
HR:100%.
MH: How about the casting, because I’m interested in hearing more about that. We had a brief conversation about it in January and you were talking about challenging things and it’s something obviously that really continues to be, and rightly so, a talking point about the shows, about fashion…
HR: Oh my God, it was my main thing. It was actually one of the bigger conversations when I was applying for this job, where I was nervous I wasn’t going to get it because of that. The people at Ricci had three keywords—poetry, femininity, romanticism—and I was like, ”Okay, great.” But I think that can be represented with boys. Casting, like I’ve said, is everything, and that is where the individual shines. And to your point, Paris shows have always struggled a little bit because there’s a lot of white cisgender girls who are a bit underweight, walking in shows in pieces that are way too big for them or way too grand. And I think I’ve always felt a little bit uncomfortable with that. So when it came to this I was like, ”I’m really going to push the envelope.” From the beginning, I was like, ”I need to have curve models in the show.”
It’s also funny as well, just to preface, maybe it’s not important, but when I’m in London, I feel very much a fabulous out queer person because everyone says ”he” or they say ”they” or whatever, whereas when I’m in Paris it’s always, ”Oh madame, oh sorry, madame.” When I get off the Eurostar, it puts me in this different headspace. Every time, it’s probably not every time, but half the time when I go to meet the driver there, because it’s a car, they’ll be like, ”Oh, is your husband coming?” And I’m always like, ”No, no, I’m Mr. Reed.” So just prefacing that to the fact that then you go and you see the shows [in Paris] I don’t really see that many openly queer individuals, especially now that the type of Instagram models have a big profile on the catwalks. I don’t really see that many non-binary individuals. Jean Paul Gaultier is probably one of the few brands, and Mugler, that’s really challenging that. I want Nina Ricci to be a brand that you actually see people represented, communities represented. It’s the thing that I’m most excited about.
MH: I’d love to know how your working life has changed, because I’m thinking it’s a tiny team you have in London, and here you are in Paris, with all these incredible technicians and artisans…
HR: It’s yin and yang. In London for my show, I was sleeping literally almost in the studio sewing the things myself, whereas now [with the Nina Ricci atelier] it feels a bit weird if I’m in there doing it because these are women and men with probably 20 to 30 years of experience, some of whom have been at the house for 15 years. It’s a weird thing to have these amazing resources. Yes, we’re very small in terms of the other houses in Paris, but massive compared to what I’m normally used to. It’s interesting because of course it also means you have to go upwards to get things signed off on. My CEO, Edwin [Bodson], I really love him, and this is a completely transparent thing and I’m the first one to always be real, but I think him also being a queer man in Paris, who is originally from Belgium, so he’s not from here either…there’s a lot of trust there. It’s like there’s now 30 meetings in one day and I’m still a 26-year-old designer that’s trying to get a vision together and there’s all these things bopping in. But at the same time, I’m not the one in the studio at 3:00 AM sewing!
MH: That must be liberating.
HR: It’s amazing because I think for me there’s two big things in that. There’s one that gives me a massive sigh of relief of being now at a ready-to-wear brand. So when I have to do jeans and when I have to do blazers, when I have to do T-shirts, hoodies, I’m not going into it blindly. I get to have people that have... Like my right hand, Nana, she was at Saint Laurent for 20 years, so when we talk about a jacket. she’s like, ”Do you want a smoking jacket? Do you want an evening jacket? Do you want...” And it instantly gives me the sigh of like, ”Oh my God, I’m in good hands,” to explore ready-to-wear in a way that feels super elevated because people have the experience that I’ve never been able to have or harness to make it successful. And then from a creative standpoint, I have people overlooking a dress in the background. This has been weeks and weeks and weeks of work that I could have never afforded before. That has also pushed the creativity to a level that feels like the dream world that I’ve always imagined with my own brand.
MH: Part of your mission at Ricci is to broaden the appeal and to make it more inclusive. Will that extend to its sizing?
HR: Yes. Having come from London, where I’m like, ”Every collection’s 70% sustainable, it’s gender-fluid, it’s made in London, it’s demi-couture so it can be for any size,” and then coming to a commercial brand with three months to design, and rebrand everything, instead of the six-month period you normally have. Every day I was like, ”Can we get deadstock fabrics? Can we do a bigger size run?” Sizing is something we’re doing this season, and while it’s not as large as I would like it to be, it’s already been the main topic going into the second collection. But that conversation is something that we’ve definitely started with this collection, because I also never want to be, nothing I ever do, is about being performative. It’s about being authentic and real to exactly what I stand for. The nice thing about Nina Ricci is that they are very aligned with that. We’re planning to open with a curve model, because I just kept flipping through, in a polite way, Vogue Runway, and looking at the French shows and I was like, ”I don’t see femininity expressed in a way that feels curvaceous.” And that’s deeply important to the inclusivity, to the femininity, that I want to bring to the helm of this brand.
MH: This conversation is meant to preview your vision of Nina Ricci, but we’ve already had a few sneak peaks on Adele, Harry Styles, and most recently, Florence Pugh….
HR: Florence is one of my favorite actors at the moment. In this era of Instagram, I tend to get quite obsessed and fall in love. I followed her, she followed me back, and we just kind of immediately had this connection, and we met in Paris while I was working on the first looks. I probably got a bit, if I’m being honest, a bit drunk at dinner one night and just showed Florence the full lineup, and she was like, ”Oh my!” She fell in love with the orange look [she wore to the BAFTAS]. It was a two-piece, but we made it into a dress for her and she fell in love with it. That dress happened to be the first dress that I put forward for my job application for Nina Ricci, and it was based on this 1988 archive piece. There was all this micro-pleating, in a quite faded orange with these flowers everywhere. It was very dated but beautiful. I reimagined it as one of the three silhouettes that were in my proposal.
When I started at Nina Ricci, because the show was going to be in March and [my appointment] was announced so early, I was like, ”I want to give people a little bit of a taste of what’s to come.” I also wanted, ahead of the showroom sales taking place in January, for there to be pieces that everyone could see on other people, especially as a brand that has gone through a lot of different creative directors. It started with a cheeky little nod to Adele, with the polka dots, and Harry Styles at the Brits in the tailoring. Since Florence was so into that dress, I thought of her in it, so it felt like a perfect moment. And because I was in London in the lead up to my show, I could fit everything on her, which was nice, because…I don’t want to say that it will be the last time that I’m going to be hand-fitting a dress on someone, but it felt quite amazing to be on my knees putting her into this dress that got me the job at the French fashion house that she’s going to wear at the BAFTAs!
MH: Harris, let’s end with the show on Friday. How’s that shaping up?
HR: I was back and forth on the show in terms of what it looks like and if there’s a surprise, is there a celebrity? What do we do? And it was so funny because where it started, in all transparency, was with a lot of props and a big production, and some kind of surprise at the end. And the more that the collection started getting designed and the more I was sitting with it, the more I kept stripping back to the fact that now, I think we can say it, but it will be a striped runway and [laughs] derelicte is a word from Zoolander I like to use [laughs], but quite a derelicte space. The focus is really on the clothes, and the individuals on the runway.
Talking with my stylist, and to the Nina Ricci team and even my partner, I was often asked, “What’s your biggest fear?”And I’m like, ”Sometimes my biggest fear is the clothes.” Because I’m really good at bringing a world and bringing in energy and bringing individuality, but sometimes I’m nervous when the clothes just have to speak. Then everyone was like, “Well then you have to just make sure it’s just the clothes speaking.” And I was like—please excuse my language, again—’Yeah, f*ck it.’ One of the main things has been for me, can I do commercial clothes? And hitting our sales targets in the showroom shows that I can. The idea is to show a collection that is super concise, super clear, and touches on the important points—femininity, representation, and boldness, without a bunch of fireworks and smoke and lights.
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