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“Is Conner Ives also a ponzi scheme?” read an X post following the London-based designer’s debut show at New York Fashion Week on Saturday afternoon.
Ives broke through as the name behind the viral Protect the Dolls T-shirts from last year, which, worn by Addison Rae, Pedro Pascal, and Tilda Swinton, helped the designer raise over $600,000 for Trans Lifeline, a nonprofit that serves as a hotline for and by trans people. But in the fashion bubble, Ives is one of the industry’s fastest-rising names.
“The first thing that I do after a show is go online and find the vitriol,” says Ives, calling a few days after his show. “I’m a sadomasochist. But, ‘Is Conner Ives also a ponzi scheme?’ That kind of made me giggle.”
The show took place at The Grill, a favorite location for wealthy Manhattanites that boasts a trio of Warhol paintings in its lobby and features a square pool in the center of its main dining room. Walking the runway were an assortment of Ives’s friends, fans, and muses: socialite Olympia of Greece, stylist Dara Allen, and actors Hari Nef, Dominique Jackson, and Jack Cameron Kay.
Conner Ives at the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party.
Dia Dipasupil
Pedro Pascal attends the Thunderbolts UK Special Screening in London in 2025 wearing Ives’s viral tee.
Karwai Tang
“He’s obviously not American,” read a text from a fashion publicist I received after the show. He was remarking on how Ives’s show appeared to have a sense of glamour and humor that New York shows often lack, particularly for designers in Ives’s generational cohort, who like to be disruptive and grittier. But Ives is, indeed, American.
Late last year, Ives’s visa to stay in the United Kingdom expired. He returned to New York to work on his renewal and took meetings with private clients who kept telling him they thought he was British. “I was like, okay, we have some course correction to do here,” he says.
Ives, handsome and with a lithe frame, is given away by his American accent. He was born and raised in New York, but became a designer in London following studies at Central Saint Martins, the acclaimed fashion school. After an internship in New York with Wes Gordon, now the designer of Carolina Herrera, he launched his label in London. But now, five years in, 75% of his clientele is stateside.
Showing in New York this season is the realization of a dream. “Since I was 15 years old, my dream was doing a show in the Bryant Park tents at New York Fashion Week,” he says.
Most people outside of fashion have heard of Ives’s name because of his viral tee. “I love being the guy that made the T-shirt,” he says. But Ives has also quickly become a favorite of a certain crop of the fashion establishment—a group of fabulous, formidable, and, yes, well-to-do powerbrokers who hold the keys to many kingdoms.
Two of his biggest supporters are women whose influences reach far beyond their day jobs: Lauren Santo Domingo, the owner of Moda Operandi, and Sara Moonves, the editor in chief of W and daughter of Les Moonves, the former chairman and CEO of CBS. He has famous friends, like those on his runway, and seems to enjoy the spotlight they shine on him.
Ives has many fans, but he also has skeptics. Those I spoke with, some of whom are friendly with him, agree on two things: first, they did not want to be named in this story; second, that despite their skepticism, Ives has created something inescapable.
Ives does not appear defensive or bothered by the commentary. Rather, he seems amused. But he does feel the need to explain himself.
“Let’s set the record straight,” Ives says, back during that post-show call, “I’m not a nepo baby.”
He pauses. Then smiles. He sees how people might assume that.
“I’m a cis, white male from upstate New York,” Ives says, “Bedford [a wealthy town], more specifically. It’s very easy for people to fill in the blanks there.” But Ives’s father is a minister, and his mom “is a self-made pediatric orthodontist who put herself through 12 years of medical school,” he says, “that work ethic has been embedded in me.”
Does he think people think he’s a nepo baby because he has nepo baby friends?
He laughs. “Well, yes,” he says, “But we’ve been having this conversation for years without moving the dial in any kind of way.”
Does he care if people think he’s a social climber? It’s one very American trait, after all.
“No, I don’t,” he says. “I came up in an era where that relationship,” between a wealthy patron and a young, skilled designer, “was maybe more common than it is now. But it is a symbiotic relationship.” John Galliano had a supporter in Portuguese aristocrat Sao Schlumberger. Karl Lagerfeld’s muse was a baroness by marriage, Amanda Harlech. And Lee Alexander McQueen was chummy with socialite Isabella Blow.
“I will always seek out inspirational, powerful women,” Ives says. “That is a beautiful archetype for a woman. I don’t think my woman is quiet or that she is meek. When I think of Sara or Lauren, I think of elegant, chic, powerful women who have moved heaven and earth for me. I love watching them get dressed, and talk to them about fashion. If you have a friend who likes what you are doing and has the power and means to support it, why would I turn that down?”
Perhaps Ives’s willingness to get closer to power is what ticks off his cohort. Designers of his ilk and generation like to say no to the establishment. It gives them a sense of purpose. “It just feels so strange to do fashion in 2026 in this edgelord kind of way,” Ives says.
Lauren Santo Domingo at the 2026 Vanity Fair Oscar Party wearing Conner Ives.
Neilson Barnard/Getty Images
Sara Moonves at W Magazine‘s 2026 Best Performances party, wearing Conner Ives.
Phillip Faraone/Getty Images
Clout aside, Conner Ives, the brand, is very much a real thing.
“We cannot keep his clothing in stock,” Santo Domingo says at Moda Operandi, which has carried Ives’s collection since the spring-summer 2026 season. The retailer saw the demand for Conner Ives accelerate starting with his fall-winter 2026 collection earlier this year, having done nearly $500,000 in sales off their fall trunk show in March, which a representative for the retailer says “is an extraordinary result for an emerging independent designer.” It helped, of course, that Santo Domingo, an online influencer in her own right, wore a look by Ives to Vanity Fair’s Oscar Party around the same time. Only one week after Ives’s fall collection went live in Moda’s channels earlier this month, it’s already at 75% sell-through. It’s the retailer’s strongest fall collection launch of the season so far.
“The world moved away from ‘luxury’ and more towards ‘fashion,’’” Santo Domingo says. “Independent designers like Conner Ives remind me of fashion when I started in the early aughts. It was never about brand names, status, or shopping in airports.”
She first heard of Ives when she saw Moonves wear one of his famous vintage silk and reconstituted fur robe coats. Moonves met Ives when, in 2017, she was working at Vogue as a fashion editor. She had called in one of his looks for a shoot, his first-ever Vogue request, which he hand-delivered to set. “We instantly fell in love,” she says via email.
Years later, in 2025, she wore the jacket Santo Domingo speaks of to a dinner she hosted alongside Jacob Elordi for Cartier in Paris. “When the party pictures went up, I cannot tell you how many messages I received about the jacket,” she says. “I think we sold 30 jackets that night!”
“We are doing pretty well,” Ives says of his business. “I think to be selling any clothing in 2026 is a miracle. But we have found our space.”
That would be one for affluent women who like to have fun with their style. “When you put on Conner’s clothes, they make you feel amazing,” Moonves says. “Every time I wear them, I want to go dancing. His clothes have an ability to make you feel sexy and cool and effortless all at the same time. Wearing his clothes, you know you will stand out in a crowd, not in a peacocking kind of way but in an everyone wishes they were wearing what you are wearing [kind of] way.”
Ives has been considering making the move back to New York. “I think it’s also good to meet the customer where they are,” he says. His fall-winter 2026 collection was so well received that he saw something of a 350% increase in wholesale and private clients, he says. “There was this injection of money into the company just from us selling clothes,” he says, somewhat astounded by the idea. “We’ve never taken any kind of external investment. It’s all self-funded,” he says.
Despite some of what his detractors had to say, Ives’s show and his well-attended after-party, which included supermodels like Anok Yai and Paloma Elsesser and the singer Troye Sivan, were a success.
His universe revolves around a sense of old-school glamour meeting contemporary frisson: trans women, known as “dolls,” on the runway, and 2000s pop and hip-hop on the soundtrack rather than a string quartet. “In retrospect, a big fuck-you show at The Grill is a bit too on the nose,” Ives laughs, “but the good thing about fashion is that you get to do it again in six months.”
Perhaps the biggest misconception about Ives is that his world is exclusive and that the establishment guards its gates.
But for every socialite on his front row or aristocrat on his runway, there’s someone just like Ives, who dreamt a little too big and managed to sneak into the chiffon trenches.
“Whether you believe what I’m saying or not, everyone has a seat at the table,” Ives says. “Everyone is invited. And the bigger the party, the bigger the table.”
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