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Between 2017 and 2021, Art School — a seedling counterculture label with a USP of luxury non-binary fashion — was by some distance the buzziest brand in London.
Rave-loving Central Saint Martins kids worshipped it; Kylie Jenner was buying it; queer community figureheads were its supermodels; and its catwalk shows acted as a foghorn for the lost and ostracised across the country. Taking to its runway was a creative status symbol — some hoodies read “I walk for Art School”, while big, boxy blazers, torn silk slip dresses, inverted lapel leather coats and the odd skin-tight leopard-print strapless mini made up the Art School wardrobe, which packed the rails of Matches Fashion, Dover Street Market and Selfridges.
If the capital’s queer fashion scene was a kingdom, co-founder Eden Loweth was its gender fluid monarch — until June 2021, when everything came tumbling down.
What began as a handful of disgruntled Instagram stories from unpaid models rapidly snowballed into a number of allegations of exploitation and misconduct levied at Loweth, which he at first ignored, then denied. In a matter of days, the LGBTQIA+ community Art School was supposedly made for had turned their backs on him. He left London, and within a month had signed for the liquidation of his label.
In his first interview since, Loweth, 31, reveals he has spent four years living and teaching in a small town in Rutland, broke, broken and burnt by the job he had longed for.
“For a big chunk of time I didn’t want to engage with life. I found it very, very difficult to operate. I’m not ashamed of that. It’s just something that I have to live with daily. That’s my cross to bear with all of this,” Loweth says, softly, solemnly and dressed predominantly in black, as we take a seat by a fire in The Standard hotel library.
He has returned to London, and a week before our conversation, on January 31, he filled the Raphael Court of the Victoria and Albert Museum for a show as part of the Fashion In Motion series, designed in collaboration with, and in honour of, his friend, the 79-year-old British artist Maggi Hambling.
Watching it took me back to the Art School days. The clothes were similar in form and silhouette — this time the blazers, overcoats and bed-sheet gowns came with Hambling-inspired block prints and cigarette burns — while the casting was a typically dazzling mix of ages, sizes, ethnicities and gender identities which made the national papers the following day. It opened with a black funeral gown from the final Art School collection, “then evolves into a narrative that’s of my own,” he says.
“I think a lot of young creatives that have been in the spotlight can come away from it feeling like you haven’t done everything the right way. You wish you could go again and learn from it,” Loweth says. “That’s what I’m trying to do. Learn from the good things, the bad things and make the right choices for me — as opposed to the right choices for a huge amount of people around a buzzy brand.” He says he does not want to return to the industry with a commercial label today, instead wishing to work on “one-off cultural moments”.
Loweth was raised between the small, quaint town of Stamford and the farm his mother ran “in the middle of nowhere”, near Kings Lynn in Norfolk. His father, an architect, died when he was young. After severe bullying he was taken out of school aged 13, raised without access to the internet, and did not return until he enrolled on an art course at Stamford College, where the fashion studios captured his imagination. “You have to become fiercely independent when you’re homeschooled because you won’t get anywhere if you don’t do work,” he says. “I realised I was good [at fashion] but knew I couldn’t do it from there. It was terrifying because I’d never been to a city before, and I’d never been to London.”
He packed up and trained at Ravensbourne College nonetheless, got his foot in the door by interning with Grace Wales Bonner and “worked the whole time”. He soon met Lulu Kennedy, the director of talent incubator Fashion East. “It happened so quickly. Within a week I was at Fashion East and had my own PR,” he says.
In September 2016 he showed his graduation collection, the first look of which was modelled by his partner Tom Barratt, a CSM student he had met at a club night. Together, the pair founded Art School, and in January presented its first season. “We were so incredibly young and we had so much hope, probably a lot of naivety,” says Loweth. “We always said if Art School’s here for five years or 50 years, as long as we’ve tried our best and made a mark, that’s enough.”
Ultimately, it would last for four. By the time the freelance casting director Lucia Blayke began publicly calling out Loweth for putting off payments in June 2021, “Art School and I were already in a challenging position,” the designer says. “Tom and I had separated. I was very unwell and mentally not in a good place.”
A seamstress claimed she worked on an “illegal contract”, was degraded in the workplace and fired without proper compensation. A trans photographer alleged he was “made” to “get naked” in a casting. An Art School model claimed to have witnessed Loweth refuse to cast an Asian model because “he looked too much like a sushi chef”. At the time Loweth responded with an apology for delayed payment but lashed back at other comments he said “attempted to jeopardise the integrity of an ally”.
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He has made peace with them today. “Things were said that I found very difficult … but things happen for a reason. I was just lucky I had people to pack a bag for me and get me away.” He got a job teaching at his former local college. “Working with children made me trust humanity again and believe that I had a place in the world,” he says.
In 2022, the V&A contacted Loweth in regard to the Art School archive, part of which he has donated alongside looks from his graduate collection. The conversation developed into the show which he is still coming down from, and which marks the start of Loweth's next steps.
“I’ve learned a huge amount and I’ve intrinsically changed as a person for the better,” he says. “I would like to think that a lot of people will be able to look at the body of work and the positive change me and Tom achieved — and, maybe, be a bit forgiving.”
