Conner Ives is Building a Business With Instinct

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Born in the leafy enclave of Bedford, New York, designer Conner Ives, a self-professed “country mouse,” grew up in a household that taught him two things early: that quality is worth protecting, and ambition is worth following.At 16, a connection through his mother's dental practice landed him an internship with Wes Gordon, and soon after he moved to London and set about becoming a designer.In his first year on the BA at Central Saint Martins, a garment from a school project — a duchess satin duster coat adorned with swans — was requested and worn by model Adwoa Aboah to the 2017 Met Gala. The moment announced him to the industry before he graduated, but back at school, the reception was rather cool:“I remember my tutorial after [the Met Gala], being sat down and told, ‘It’s nice that you can make dresses for people’ – reducing doing the Met Gala as a 20-year-old first-year BA student to that – ‘but school has to come first,’” Ives recounts.Now, almost six years into building his label, the designer is navigating what it takes to turn creative instinct into a functioning business. His label began with one-of-a-kind reworked vintage pieces and deadstock materials — a proposition that gave the clothes their character, but was not always easy to translate into the wholesale system.“We would do 1,500 T-shirt dresses and no two were the same. That was always the selling point of it, but that is a very difficult business pitch to get to a Net-a-Porter, let alone a Net-a-Porter buyer, or a Net-a-porter customer,” he says. This week on The BoF Podcast, Conner Ives joins BoF CEO and founder Imran Amed to discuss what it means to build an independent fashion business without losing the instinct that made the work resonate in the first place.Key Insights: Ives’ brand is built on an American idea of high-low dressing: Ives describes his label as shaped by family memory, American fashion imagery and a belief in clothes that can carry time. His mother’s care for old Frye boots and his father’s instinct for wearing things until