‘Having worked on other people’s creative vision for so long, I thought it was time to explore my own,’ says Danish designer Jasper Toron, who founded London-based label Toron Studio in 2022 after stints at Burberry, Givenchy and Brioni.
Toron grew up in Denmark, ’drawing incessantly’ as a child before discovering copies of Vogue as a teenager. ‘All that glossy beauty was a total escape for a boy in the Danish countryside,’ he says. ‘I decided very early on that I had found my calling and just worked away at it until I could move to London to study.’
Toron Studio by Jasper Toron
After Toron had completed a degree in menswear design at London‘s Ravensbourne University, roles at Mulberry and Tom Ford followed. In 2013, he became head of design for Brioni in Rome; later, he would lead the menswear studio at Givenchy, before becoming menswear design director at Burberry.
‘I have been incredibly lucky to work for some incredible houses and real titans of fashion,’ says Toron. ‘Each house comes with its own challenges, but I always saw it as a chance to learn. It’s exciting to see how creative directors obsessively work, how they constantly manipulate and build on ideas.’
Toron Studio was launched last September, a response to what the designer calls the ‘incredibly relentless pace of luxury fashion’. ‘I needed a break,’ he says. ‘I had a real urge to go back and revisit why I loved designing so much in the first place. At a house, you don’t always get the time for real research and design. I missed that terribly.’
Toron rented a small studio in the east London neighbourhood of Dalston, where he began working on the eponymous label. ‘It has been such a thrill for once to solely work with the things that I find beautiful in this world,’ he says. Such fascinations include silk – ‘I love the movement and sensuality’ – and print, which traverses Toron Studio’s collections.
Created alongside historic print house Ratti in Como, northern Italy, the motifs across his collection are largely drawn from ancient myth and statuary. ‘I did a full year of classical drawing of Greek and Roman sculptures in Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen,’ he says. ‘We would spend three to six months on each drawing, learning the traditional way of measuring up a sketch with strings and weights. It was one of the best experiences of my life.
‘My love for the Greco-Roman aesthetic has stuck with me since,’ he continues. ‘There is a real celebration of the human body in all its fleshy glory of enjoyment, wine, sex. For the first collections, we took a lot of inspiration from Greek vases and this enabled us to explore prints with male nudity in a way that didn’t feel pornographic.’
These prints are used across Toron Studio’s garments, which span diaphanous silk shirts, shorts and scarves, unstructured outerwear and tailoring, and breezy drawstring trousers. ‘I wanted a simplicity in the approach to the selection of styles,’ he says of the purposely compact collections, which are manufactured in London by Maes. ‘The main thread running through all the garments is that they are of generous volume and unstructured in their make. I wanted simplicity and comfort, and shapes that could be worn by and flatter all body shapes. Nothing restrictive, uncomfortable, or tight.
‘I hope more than anything that people will feel free in Toron Studios,’ he continues. ‘I love that the collection sits in a realm between fantasy and reality for me. When I wear the collection, I move differently. The is a lightness, ease and extravagance – it alters my mindset. That makes me happy.’
