Dolce & Gabbana has a complicated history when it comes to issues close to Reed’s heart, including L.G.B.T.Q. Reed had not at that point agreed to the commission. Wintour had proposed an unusual collaboration: Reed would dress himself and another guest-as yet undecided-on behalf of Dolce & Gabbana’s couture line, Alta Moda. “It was a crazy phone call,” Reed said, adding that it has been a dream of his to attend the ball, which wasn’t held last year. She invited him to participate in the Met Gala, on September 13th. The morning we met, Reed had received affirmation in the form of a message from the office of Anna Wintour, the editor of Vogue. Paget was, Reed said, “shamelessly his truest self.” Paget, who had a pronounced fondness for furs and bejewelled headgear, became the fifth Marquess of Anglesey in 1898, at the age of twenty-three, whereupon he converted his family’s chapel into a theatre in which he starred in productions of Oscar Wilde’s plays. The 2020 collection, he told Vogue, was inspired partly by the lavish garb of the Victorian aristocrat Henry Paget, whose history Reed had discovered while exploring the archives at Central St. Reed’s looks, which he calls demi-couture-they are handmade but, of necessity, use relatively affordable materials-are often finished with what has become a signature accessory: an outlandishly outsized hat or headpiece. He likes to combine traditionally masculine forms-say, jacket shoulders that echo Yves Saint Laurent’s “le smoking” tuxedo-with draped layers of satin and sculptural skirts that bring to mind the gowns of Charles James, the mid-twentieth-century Anglo-American designer. Despite the brevity of Reed’s career, his aesthetic is well established. The look previewed the sensibility that Reed put on display this past February, on the eve of London Fashion Week, when he showed a collection in which elements of men’s suiting were sometimes embellished with spray-painted tulle erupting at the hip, shoulder, or rib. He created a black suit with exaggerated square shoulders and trouser legs as wide as sails at Styles’s waist, a ball-gown skirt exploded, with white tulle and fuchsia ribbon draped over an architectural frame of black crinoline. Last fall, Vogue asked Reed to design an outfit for a cover shoot with Styles. “Every frill is there to be played with, and an overwhelming sense of freedom shall rain down upon you.” “To wear Harris’s clothes is to be having fun,” Styles told me, in an e-mail. The top was paired with a tiny black vest and pants with wide, flapping flares, giving him the look of an earl’s wayward son stumbling out of a brothel at dawn. Not long after, the stylist Harry Lambert commissioned Reed to make garments that Harry Styles could wear on tour, including an outfit that went viral on social media: a taffeta blouson shirt with puffed and ruffled sleeves and a dishevelled frilly collar. While still a student, he was identified as a promising talent by a stylist of Solange’s a photograph was taken of her wearing Reed’s white ensemble with the jacket turned back to front. But he is receiving widespread acclaim from fashion gatekeepers and forging the kinds of collaboration that provide financial support for a young designer’s creativity. His output has so far been very limited: the designs could almost fit onto a single garment rack, and would if they were less voluminous. Reed graduated from Central St. Martins in the spring of 2020, and began using money that he made from modelling to start his own clothing line. In a series of Polaroids taken to show off the collection, Reed, who is tall and slender, modelled the garments himself in silver high-heeled boots, his face framed by cascading long hair, whitened like that of an aristocrat from the ancien régime. Reed has explained to reporters that the white outfit was inspired by a story he had imagined about an eighteenth-century aristocratic boy who, after being thrown out of his home for being gay, lives backstage at the Royal Opera House and plays dress-up with the costumes. The collection had only three other looks, but each was equally dramatic: an outfit of black matador pants, black jabot, and frontless jacket amber metallic pants and a matching top with flounced, detachable sleeves and a white ensemble that included a frilled bustier jacket, with a plunging square-cut décolletage, and a hat with a brim the size of a bicycle wheel. Martins, the London arts-and-design college, whose alumni include Alexander McQueen and John Galliano. Reed’s pink outfit came from a collection that he produced in 2017, while studying at Central St.
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