Interview: How Harris Reed became fashion's superstar

From Beyoncé and Adele to Harry Styles, the A-listers love his extraordinary clothes – but the journey to gen-Z style supremo has not always been smooth, he says.

The willowy Harris Reed stands 6ft 4in, with a long mane of red hair. Even in a fashion industry chock-full of eccentric, glamorous personalities, Reed is unique. The family photos in his debut book, Fluid: A Fashion Revolution, reveal that fashion fortune and fame were seemingly predestined early on. In stiletto-heeled, thigh-high boots, lipstick and lashings of mascara, the nine-year-old Reed was already both an anomaly and a pre-teen, self-made superstar. Nearly two decades later, those formative explorations in fashion and going against the (gender) grain are borne out in his professional roles.

More like this:

-          Iconic portraits of glamorous stars

-          The return of a divisive lingerie brand

-          How the 'beauty of fluidity' went mainstream

"'Fluid' is a wonderful word," he writes at the beginning of his book. "For me, fluidity encomes both gender expression and gender identity. It can be one of the other, or it can be neither… What you wear can reflect the way you want to be seen by the world. Just because you are a man wearing a suit in the day doesn't mean you can't be a man wearing a dress at night."

At Tate Modern last autumn, the British-American designer revealed his glamorous, gender-fluid Duet collection, which kicked off 2023's London Fashion Week. Duet was a study of contrasts in oversized, curvaceous silhouettes, couture-style embellishments, bared shoulders and nipped-in waists. The only thing tame about Reed's collection was its pared-back palette of black, white and touches of Champagne gold. Like Reed the person, the collection was a study in Romanticism and old Hollywood glamour that – on closer inspection – is intricate in its subversion of traditional male and female fashion details. Bows that seemed feminine and lush from afar are actually rigid and tailored, much like Savile Row jackets; soaring, wing-like shoulder silhouettes might equally serve to hide breasts, expose a long neck or emphasise muscular shoulders.     

Fundamentally, Duet pieces could be worn by men, women, trans and non-binary people. This is Reed's modus operandi: gender-fluid fashion that is unafraid to embrace traditional tropes of feminine and masculine. Harris Reed designs – for his own label and for Nina Ricci, where he is now creative director – are eye-popping, artistic, and celebratory of the body and of of sexuality.

On the morning we speak, Reed is in the London apartment that he shares with husband Eitan Senerman, surrounded by moving boxes as he awaits renovations to be completed on the couple's new home. He is dressed in a black tuxedo jacket, shirtless, and habitually twisting the ends of his long, auburn hair around his fingers as he talks. His speech is rapid, ionate and unguarded. This is, he its, why he entrusted writer Josh Young to translate his lengthy voice recordings to create the final manuscript of Fluid.

He recalls the invitation from Abrams books arriving in his email during a staff meeting. The publisher was asking Reed if he might want to write a book. "I was writing back, saying 'thank you, we'll do this in 30 years when I'm, like, Tom Ford'. Then my whole team was saying, 'What are you talking about">window._taboola = window._taboola || []; _taboola.push({ mode: 'alternating-thumbnails-a', container: 'taboola-below-article', placement: 'Below Article', target_type: 'mix' });