The Designer Making Exquisite Clothes From Brillo Pads and Plastic Fruit

New York Times

05-03-2025

The British designer Harry Pontefract's clothing often starts with a very specific obsession. Last year, for example, his fixation with vintage faux fruit led him on a six-month search for plastic grapes, which he incorporated into his latest collection in the form of a sleeveless dress hand-embroidered with cascading bunches of them in shades of black and deep Bordeaux. He describes the aesthetic of the piece as 'cheap opulence.' Several garments — including a slim-fitting, hand-sewn corset dress that pools below the ankles and a cloudlike matching stole — consist of longhaired sheepskins, which he selected from the flocks of two female shepherds in Wales and England's Peak District. One of the animals, he says, was named Dilys. 'It's really about if something moves me or about bringing things into a new light,' says Pontefract, 36. He admits, however, that 'everyone's been sort of calling me crazy.'
A native of Sheffield, Pontefract now lives and works in an old shoe factory in East London's Hackney neighborhood. He began collecting unusual materials — 'hoarding,' he says — as a child, and the attic and basement of his parents' home are still crammed with boxes of his accumulated treasures. As a teen, he and his friends would customize their jeans using his mother's sewing machine, a hobby that became a vocation when he enrolled in the fashion design program at London's Central Saint Martins. His 2016 graduate collection featured deconstructed underpinnings — upcycled bras and silk negligees — that slipped suggestively off the body and were styled with layers of skin-colored tights. Post-graduation, during his six-year stint on the design team at the fashion house Loewe in Paris, he continued to experiment with his one-off creations on the side before formally launching Ponte, which is sold exclusively at Dover Street Market, two years ago.
In addition to the sheep fleeces — which were blow-dried, teased and sprayed by a hairstylist to create the effect of 'blurred memories, so you can't really see where the dress ends and the background begins, like a Gerhard Richter painting,' Pontefract says — the new collection, his fourth, will include a gown of sorts made from hand-shredded Brillo pads molded into trailing lengths of metallic rope. 'It's important that you can't tell what it is,' he says of that dress, which one would never guess was made from steel wool. 'That's much more interesting: It leaves it up to whoever's looking at it to feel something.'
Along with such museum-worthy looks (the Costume Institute at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art just acquired a pair of Ponte tights, which are padded with polyester stuffing from old toys to look like jodhpurs), there are also more wearable styles, including reconstructed denim jeans, a leather suit stitched together from eight different salvaged trench coats and a precisely tailored black suit made from dead-stock wool. A single-breasted, drop-shoulder jacket paired with wide-leg knife-pleat pants, it has a slouchy, modern fit — and, of course, a back story. A large silky patch sewn onto the seat of the trousers is 'made out of an old satin dress that I found somewhere,' Pontefract says. 'There's a slight, sexual nature to it. You won't see it in a photograph, but I know it's there.'