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About eight years ago, the actor Jeremy Strong, who plays Kendall Roy in Succession and who is known for his esoteric, romantic tastes in fashion, which match the more verbose aspects of his character, found himself in Brighton, a seaside town on the south coast of England. Brighton is home to a sizable university, a thriving array of LGBTQ venues, and the secretive shoemaker and fashion designer Paul Harnden, whose vintage-looking, vaguely Dickensian pieces are made by some of England’s oldest mills, in traditional tweeds, or silks or sturdy Ventile. Strong decided to use the occasion to track Harnden down. He tried an LLC address, tried Google Earth. He did everything he could, he told me, “in the hopes of getting a pair of coveted P.H. boots, but to no avail.” Harnden was undiscoverable. “The trail went cold. A riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, made with extreme care and artistry,” Strong said.
To Strong, this only added to the appeal. “He is reclusive, un-self-seeking, and committed to the work exclusively—those values, to me, seem immanent within the garments,” he said of Harnden, who is known for being intensely specific and controlled. He sells to only a handful of stores, usually no more than one or two in each city. He rarely changes his shapes. He insists that his clothing is not discounted on sale, never loaned for photoshoots, never sold online. “He is doing something that is almost the exact opposite of what Walter Benjamin termed ‘Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’,” Strong said, citing the theory that replication can undermine an object's “aura.” He called what Harnden does “ineffable and real,” noting that in “a world of increasing noise,” he is trying to create his own, clear sound. “Someone who does that, in any field, is as rare as a snow leopard these days and as vital.”
Harnden’s clothes are also worn by Brad Pitt. By Daniel Day-Lewis. By John Galliano, who once claimed, in 2010, to “buy all my stuff from him.” “He’s very Greta Garbo,” he told WWD. “I can’t get hold of him. I believe he lives in England by the sea.” WWD ran a separate article, “The Mysterious Paul Harnden,” in which Adrian Joffe, the spouse of Rei Kawakubo and head of the retailer Dover Street Market, which sells Harnden’s work, said that it was “beyond fashion.” This inspired a piece in New York magazine’s the Cut, “The Mysterious Designer John Galliano Loves” in which the reporter, baffled and awed, noted “Nobody’s actually met him.”
The first day I try to contact Harnden is a gray Wednesday in January. That week, the Italian luxury brand Bottega Veneta announced a takeover of the Great Wall of China, emblazoning a stretch of the structure with its tangy green branding. After months of backlash against fashion’s scale and speed—its relentless championing of the new, the opulent—and various pious-seeming, head-hanging promises to rethink, post-pandemic, the industry was already grinding back into its usual rhythms. Brands were, once again, flying journalists across the globe for fashion shows. Stores were taking delivery of new stock, marking down what had arrived just a few weeks before. And public relations specialists from Paris to New York were soliciting attention for their designer clients. Harnden, on the other hand, did not seem to want to talk.
I searched fruitlessly for a phone number, an email address, anything. His website has no contact details; just a white page, with a jumble of text: ^8m*+,J1/4%?@p=~#3Kf. I punched this into Google, hoping it could be a clever clue, and found nothing except a blog post, from 2010, by someone else complaining about how impossible it is to contact Paul Harnden.
Finally, I tried Instagram, surprised to find that Harnden has an account (he follows no one and posts only occasionally: grainy images or stills from the often impenetrable or spooky short films he creates to showcase his clothes). As I typed, a message laced with the breathy desperation of someone trying to entice an ex after being ghosted (“I’d just like to talk”), I realized that social media was probably the least likely channel to endear me to Harnden.
Those who wear Paul Harnden tend to speak about the clothes, like Strong, in philosophical terms. For those who do not know: The thing to understand is that Paul Harnden’s pieces never, ever look new. The toes of his shoes tend to curve upward, as if shaped, over time, by foot and gait and toil. That is not to say that Harnden’s pieces seem merely old or worn—though they always do—more that they look like relics from another time. They seem to have crossed forests and hills and woodlands, seen governments rise and fall, seen customs changes, seen things you can only imagine, precious things, from times when things were good, and honest, and pure. If you could bring a sepia photograph to life, or manifest a physical object through the sensation of nostalgia, you would have a pair of Paul Harnden shoes. And if you were still not sated, you could buy a jacket for $3,500 or a coat for $4,000.
By late January, my Instagram DMs unanswered, I turned to StyleZeitgeist, an online hub for fashion obsessives with a taste for the semi-gothic fashion that came to prominence in the late 1990s: designers like Carol Christian Poell, Carpe Diem, and Rick Owens. On the site’s forums, the Paul Harnden thread has some 80 pages, 1,644 unique posts. Some excitedly inform fellow obsessives of new drops of Harnden stock. Some bemoan the fact that the mainstream—celebrities, press—have caught on. Others mock the bemoaning as lame in itself. Does it “ruin the fantasy of ‘I’m a Victorian chimney sweep’?” goads one post. There is much gossip, much theorizing, much gushing. One user supplies a photograph purporting to show Harnden in the flesh, in a pub in Brighton. “Bloody legend,” a user called Silver writes. Another quotes Harold Pinter talking about Samuel Beckett: “The more he grinds my nose in the shit the more I am grateful to him.”
The website’s founder, Eugene Rabkin, told me that back in 2006, when he launched the forums, Harnden appealed because he seemed to exist “outside of the fashion system.” Harnden’s model—his refusal to engage with fame or the march of digital—read as a rejection of everything that the modern fashion world was, in its growth from cottage industry to fully fledged pop culture pillar, coming to laud. “He was really unique at the time; no one else was doing the kind of 19th-century peasant look, but really expensive,” Rabkin said. “It was the opposite of facile luxury.”
“I actually once interviewed Wim Wenders,” Rabkin said, referring to the celebrated German filmmaker. “And the first thing I commented on was the fact that he was wearing a Paul Harnden blazer, and he gave me a dirty look, like, ‘You know we’re not supposed to talk about this.’”
What we know for sure about Harnden is this: He was born in Canada in May 1959. Before setting up on his own, he worked briefly for shoemaker John Lobb. He lived in London, then Scotland, and now Brighton. He has an interest in filmmaking. His brand began in 1987, with shoes, but expanded to clothes under the guidance of his then partner, Elena Dawson. That collaboration ended a few years in, though the production of ready-to-wear continued, and Dawson now runs her own label, from East Sussex. Like Harnden, she works with only a handful of retailers, and her designs are driven by cloth, rather than sketches. “My goal was never just about doing the clothing, it was also about the way in which we did it,” she told me. Press is not a part of her business model, she said, noting that this was her fourth interview ever. “The focus should be on the clothing,” she said, adding that, over the years, journalists have simply stopped asking. She was diplomatic when speaking about Harnden, confirming their former partnership, but saying that she sees their work as quite separate now.
There are rumors, as well as facts. That Harnden has a temper. That he has a penchant for fancy cars. That he has a riotous sense of humor. But those who know Harnden are reluctant to speak. One former employee said she could not talk, as she had signed a nondisclosure agreement. One said she’d need to ask permission from Harnden’s ex-wife and then never wrote back again. Those who did talk, such as his stockists, often requested to check quotes ahead of publication, claiming they didn’t want to offend, or say too much. “He just doesn't give a fuck about the limelight of it,” said one buyer, before stressing, as if he’d just revealed a state secret, that his comment had to be anonymous.
Myung-il Song, the founder of Song boutique in Vienna, first came across Harnden’s work around 2003 at Leclaireur in Paris, and spent years trying to find him in order to buy his clothes. When she finally made contact, he tried to talk her out of buying too much. “He asked to look at my order form, and kept saying, ‘Are you sure you need that dress?’ I wanted to order menswear and womenswear, but he was reluctant,” she told me. He eventually agreed but then canceled her menswear order just before delivery. “I’d just come from Celine, where they were saying, ‘Last season you ordered this much, this season, you should add more.’ They only want to see the numbers. But Paul, if you put his work on sale, would stop working with you,” she said, adding, “He is even more radical than Margiela.” The buyer Ruth Spence, of Envoy of Belfast, who has sold Harnden’s clothes for over 14 years, agreed. “He just doesn’t veer,” she said. “A lot of designers try and can’t maintain that, but with him people just accept it.”
A few years ago, just before the pandemic, Song visited Harnden’s home in Brighton. He’s not a rich man, she told me, but he lives well. “He has an apple farm. He harvests the apples, he makes cider. And on the other side of his house, he has a space for his collections.” I asked if she considered them close now; friends, even? “A little bit. But I will never know who he is,” she said, “And I don’t want to know.”
Deep online, I saw mention of someone who might know Harnden well: an Australian shoemaker, Andrew McDonald, who runs his own footwear brand from Sydney. It was 1988, he told me by phone, when he first met Harnden. McDonald was skateboarding on London’s South Bank, and saw an intriguing figure. “I thought, This guy is like a cross between Fagin and Steptoe and Son,” he said, referring, respectively to, the Oliver Twist character and a British sitcom about an impoverished father-and-son duo running a rag-and-bone business. “We just got talking. We smoked a joint. We became friends. He made a pair of shoes for me.” McDonald was then working as a photographer, but he retrained as a shoemaker and ended up working with Harnden for a few months in Scotland in the late 1990s, living alongside Harnden and his family in a small rural village inland from Aberdeen. In the day, they would make shoes, at night they would play games or cycle to the pub to drink whisky. They kept in touch for a long while but haven’t spoken for about five years. “He never talks by phone,” McDonald said. “The only time I get to see him is when I go to the U.K. The best way to see him is just to go and drop in.”
I asked what McDonald made of Harnden’s secrecy and he laughed. “It’s very strategic,” he said. “His father owned an advertising agency, so he had a very keen sense of how to advertise his own image.”
The photographer Stuart Pitkin, who has worked with Harnden on photo shoots and films on-and-off since 1987, said a similar thing; "With most fashion houses, there is usually an emphasis on presenting the clothes in an accepted way. Paul was more interested in creating a beautiful mystery,” he said, referring to “glimpses… the sheen on a fabric, a detail emerging from a shadow.” Pitkin was nervous to reveal more. “We have a history of intense periods interspersed with a little distance,” he said.
I told McDonald that I still hoped to speak with Harnden directly. “Getting an interview out of Paul? He would never do an interview with anyone,” he said, calling this principle “very clever” and part of Paul’s image.
I decided to write Harnden a letter, sourcing his address through a lengthy trawl of public financial records. I chose my materials carefully—heavy, deckle-edged white paper—and explained that I just wanted to ask a few things. As I walked to the post office in the rain, I began to feel a vague sense of resentment. Who even is this guy? Should it be this hard to talk about shoes? I felt the whole thing was pretentious, try-hard. On the walk back, I began pondering doing a Strong, and getting a train to Brighton to find Harnden in person, before remembering that turning up at his door would be an invasion of privacy, and that Brighton is a city of nearly 300,000 people, and the notion of running into someone I would barely recognize in the pub or on the street was insane. It was not lost on me that I had now managed to get the Emmy-award-winning actor Jeremy Strong to talk to me about Paul Harnden but could not persuade Paul Harnden to talk to me about Paul Harnden. My view pivoted; whether his committed secrecy was a sincere quest for privacy or a constructed ploy for intrigue, Harnden was a genius.
Richard Miles, the retail director at London’s store-cum-gallery Blue Mountain School, describes a “feeding frenzy” each season when new Harnden pieces arrive. He feels that Harnden is as relevant today as ever. “Paul looks to small British manufacturing. He uses one of the last English pattern mills in the U.K. The looms he works with are over a hundred years old—after the current people retire there won't be anyone to take on this legacy. But Paul is trying to hold on to a tradition. There is no mass production. It doesn't come off a conveyor belt dripping in marketing and trends,” he said. “He was a pioneer. And he has sustained, partly because of the relevance of that idea of slow reward, slow fashion, something personal.” I thought of younger designers promoting that same ethos in response to the terrible waste issues that have only swelled since Harnden started his label: Aogu Otsuka, of Andrew Driftwood, who makes new garments from a stash of hand-spun yarns found in an abandoned U.K. warehouse; Emily Bode, with her thrifted materials; and John Alexander Skelton, who develops the majority of his fabrics from scratch, and who regularly collaborates with various handweavers and lone knitters.
Skelton, who graduated from Central Saint Martins in 2016, does not let his clothes be sold online and refuses to let retailers discount them, terms that are often like “trying to get blood from a stone,” he said. We met at his studio in East London. His black trousers and jacket were his own but looked like antiques. He admires ’80s designers, like Harnden, Dawson, and the House of Beauty and Culture, who didn’t want to be “corrupted” by the mainstream, he said. But, unlike Harnden, he doesn’t want to be a “hermit” or “a complete separatist.” While Skelton loathes overproduction and anodyne P.R. spiels, he doesn’t believe that talking or communication are pointless. Younger consumers, understandably, want to know a brand’s values, he said. “It’s good for people to understand how clothes are made,” he said. “To know why certain techniques take time, why the fabrics matter, the time we take in making pieces as good as they can be, in not cutting corners.”
A few days later, my letter to Harnden still unanswered, I visited the studio of Celia Pym, another champion of slower, less-wasteful fashion, whose focuses are darning and embroidery, and whose work recently appeared in the Margiela fall 2021 couture show. She talked about the importance of discussion and education. “People don’t always know where fabrics come from, how things are made or should feel. They are removed from the process by which cloth is constructed,” she said. We drank tea and looked at a jumper she was mending for a client, using bright blue thread; it had been hand-knitted by the owner’s mother, who had since died. Pym would give it a new life, reignite it, rather than merely fix it. She intended to work on it for days.
When I left, I saw a missed call from an anonymous number on my phone and presumed it was a scam. I walked home across North London and thought about secrets and meaning and wistfulness. I thought about Pym’s happy colorful stitches, thought about memory, and about how, beneath the giant umbrella of the fashion industry, there are people on the fringes, working hard to preserve tenderness and connection. I thought about something Elena Dawson had told me about how clothing can make you feel: “You can look at images of it online, can see pictures. But it’s really not until you try it on that you feel it—feel like it’s part of you.”
Later that night, my phone rang again. It was a woman’s voice. She asked if I’d recently written a letter to Paul Harnden. I sat up in my chair; I gasped as if being contacted by royalty, or the recently deceased. She asked what I wanted. Her voice was matter-of-fact, firm—like a pharmacist or schoolteacher. I told her that I really wanted to speak to Paul Harnden. I asked her, please let me speak to Paul. This man making these great clothes that mean so much to the people who wear them, I want to speak to him. I worried I sounded a bit manic. I toned it down, trying to sound professional. I told her I knew he didn’t give interviews, but I thought it was a great story: this great designer, beloved by other designers, and yet “nobody knows who he is?” she said, finishing my sentence.
“Exactly,” I said. I asked if there was a chance she could set up a quick call, a handful of questions. She said nothing. I told her it was such a unique way of operating, to refuse to bow to pressure. She wanted to get off the phone. I wanted to stay on it. I told her that, to me, it was highly unusual. “Yes,” she said. “It is.” She wished me a good evening. And right before she hung up she said that, maybe, she’d be back in touch.
Lou Stoppard is a writer based in London.
A version of this story originally appeared in the April 2022 issue with the title "Searching for Fashion Most Reclusive Designer."
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PRODUCTION CREDITS:
Emily Mott; Produced by Paola Moretti
