A fixture on the London Fashion Week calendar, Conner Ives is beloved by fashionable women across the Atlantic for his intermingling of classic "demi couture" glamour with playfully ironic slogans, delivered with a characteristic wink. The designer from Westchester County first moved across the pond in 2014 to study at Central Saint Martins. In the decade since, Ives has dreamt of a partial homecoming, a desire he expressed with characteristically Ivesian quotability when he declared, "New York is my Paris." In what feels like a full circle moment, Ives came home this season, making his NYFW debut by staging his Spring/Summer 2027 womenswear collection at The Grill in New York City.
Titled Across the Pond, the collection unfolded in the historic dining room of the old Four Seasons restaurant, now an opulent chophouse. Once home to what Esquire dubbed ‘America’s Most Powerful Lunch,’ it was the scene of many a long, liquored mid-century deal. Ives duly played with the masculine codes of its powerful lunchtime clientele. Made in collaboration with Savile Row tailor Gieves & Hawkes, two men’s suits appeared, complete with contrasting cummerbunds and patterned with bandanas. They offered a disheveled take on the uniform of The Grill’s heyday. A later look suggested a rumpled James Dean, while another veered towards the knowingly kitsch Danny Zuko: an artiste channelling the 1950s through a 1970s lens.
Elsewhere, louchely clutched silk and fox fur robes appeared alongside languid gowns cut on the bias and patterned with fish scales, drawn from mid-century American artist Robert W. Hines’s colorful depictions of rainbow trout. Princess Olympia of Greece wore a periwinkle gown with appliqué resembling water lilies: a fitting nod to the society doyennes of the Capote era who once commandeered the city’s most coveted lunch tables.
Ives’s models were also reimagined as matadors. Inspired by the glittering flamboyance of the traje de luces, the traditional "suit of lights" worn by Spanish bullfighters, Ives repurposed another hypermasculine uniform for the modern transatlantic woman. One look paired a scarlet satin jumpsuit embellished with gold embroidery with a white tank top, collapsing two masculine archetypes into one sultry, close-fitting silhouette. Another repeated this in striking turquoise, with the cropped matador trousers revealing Jimmy Choo x Conner Ives Mary Janes in a 1930s style. Ives’s love of contrasts continued in a look worn by Hari Nef. A fluorescent pink "Bring Back Shame" T shirt was paired with a knee length tasseled skirt, its fringe echoing the ornamentation of the bullfighter’s costume. Following the viral "Protect the Dolls" T shirt of 2025, the staying power of its successor remains to be determined. As apt as ever, however, is Ives’s ability to distil the zeitgeist into its most wearable form.
The collection’s urban references were mediated through an aquatic thread. Staged in The Grill’s Pool Room, models circled its artificial mid-century pool, making literal the collection’s movement Across the Pond. The watery language surfaced not only in the fish scale motifs but also in Ives’s closing look. The Conner Ives bride, named "Lady Liberty," concluded the designer’s sojourn through New York’s past in a resplendent, sheer sea foam gown with a dropped waist. Its cascading, asymmetrical hem recalled Nicole Kidman’s ocean bound bride in Jonathan Glazer’s Birth (2004), recasting the familiar Birth of Venus motif as a distinctly Ivesian ode to the strange and glamorous.
