Words by glenn waldron
Photography by Ben Harries
What is Matthew Miller’s proudest moment to date? Although the rising 30-year-old designer is quick to downplay his achievements, there are still a good few to pick from. Perhaps it’s his widely lauded shows and presentations at London Fashion Week? Or maybe his McArthurGlen Spirit of Fashion Award? Or his collaboration with the British Olympic sailing team? Or the fact that his intelligently realised menswear – picked up by Selfridges in only its second season – is building up a significant and steadily growing fan base?
No. According to Miller, none of these holds a candle to his finest hour: a small feature in Stoke-on-Trent’s local newspaper, The Sentinel. “It was more important to people who know me than if I’d been in Vogue or something,” he says, chuckling. “Never mind that I had a show at London Fashion Week. It was like, ‘Oh, you’ve been in the paper now… Epic!’”
A designer with his feet firmly on the ground, Miller is nonetheless thinking big. Past seasons have seen him riffing on ideas of science, nature and society, creating clothes that are highly conceptual yet also fantastically covetable. “For me, it has to be innovative to be luxurious,” he says. “I can’t compete with Bottega Veneta or Gucci, in many ways – I’m not gonna be handcrafting things in Italy. But they might not have the dexterity to move very quickly on ideas.”
With an intriguing mix of streetwear and tailoring, Miller’s signature style employs the latest fabric technologies and digitally engineered prints to bold effect. “If you can injection-mould a coat instead of sewing it together, then I’d find that amazing,” he says. “I want to collaborate with car companies as much as fashion houses. I’m always interested in new techniques, new ways to develop things.”
Not surprisingly, his work has been well received by the kind of guys who like their fashion intelligent and masculine, as opposed to retro-flavoured and flamboyant (Miller’s last collection featured industrial-strength rock-climbing carabiners as fasteners; Fashion East’s Lulu Kennedy has called his approach “geeky in a good way”). Describe Miller as a “guy’s designer” to his face, however, and the response is a barrage of laughter. “If I go back to Stoke-on-Trent, people definitely don’t see me as a ‘man’s man’,” he says. “But then you come to London and… well, I guess it’s horses for courses.” Man’s man or not, Miller acknowledges that the majority of his ideas stem from his own particular background. “You can only reappropriate what you know – and the thing I know is growing up in quite an industrial area,” he explains. “So for me, it’s all about industry, football, mechanics… even getting my first computer when I was seven – that was a really big thing. It was a Spectrum but, for me… oh my God! It was like the dawning of the digital age.”
Born and raised in Stoke, it wasn’t the most auspicious of starts, according to Miller. “At school, I was automatically labelled ‘trouble’, simply because I lived on the run-down estate where all the crime was,” he says. Attending a Catholic school in a posher part of town, Miller felt a certain distance from his contemporaries – something that he used to positive effect. “It always made me think, ‘Am I supposed to go with the label that I’ve got and become, I dunno, a mechanic or something?’ Even going to art college was seen to be weird. People were like, ‘What are you doing, what are you messing around with art for?’”
It was only during his foundation year at art school that Miller began to seriously think about fashion… sort of. “I know it’s a bit of a cliché but there were loads of girls in the fashion class – that’s how it started!” he says. “Until then, it was a toss-up between ceramics, because Stoke-on-Trent’s really famous for all that, and industrial design, which is quite boysy. But then that class came along and got me thinking…” Around that time, Miller was also a regular at the infamous Stoke club night, Golden – a place that also had a big impact on his visual education. “I used to go there loads and was interested in the way that everyone would go out at night and became completely different people,” he says. “I think it was then that I started thinking about the idea of identity.”
After “going off the rails a bit” while doing his BA at Manchester Metropolitan University, Miller won a place on the prestigious Menswear MA at the Royal College of Art. He still seems slightly in awe of the experience. “That course is amazing,” he says. “They taught me to really value the collaborative process; to go and work with other people, see what they’re on about, see what their methods are.” It was there, as well, that he acquired a refreshingly unprecious approach to his work. “From day one, the tutors told me, ‘Don’t keep your ideas locked inside your head – get them out there and then get new ones,’” he recalls. “To this day, I don’t like protecting ideas. You see it quite a lot with the creative industries – sign a clause, do this, do that. You know what? You can just have it. Put it out there. If you like my idea, manage to change it and use it, then good on yer.”This relaxed attitude extends to his latest collection. “I can tell you whatever you want to know… although it’s not actually finished yet.” The central idea for this season apparently came about after Miller experienced a serious case of designer cabin fever. “The last few seasons, I’ve just been working indoors and I’m quite an outdoorsy person by nature,” he explains. “So I thought, ‘How can I design a collection while being outdoors?’” The solution the designer came up with was a series of “daily expeditions”, as Miller puts it. “I would start in the centre of London and at every opportunity I would just get my map out and walk and look at everything that was around me,” he explains. “I essentially spent four months walking around London trying to find the collection. It’s always about exploring what’s around me.”
The resulting work, showcased later today in the Portico Show Space at Somerset House, references everything from road surfaces to camouflage-like trees in Regent’s Park to create a print-focussed collection that is emphatically urban and, in some ways, rather whimsical. “Every look is made up of a different surface that I found in London,” he says. “It’s about hopefully finding a bit of beauty in everyday life.”
Naturally, the technology geek in him couldn’t resist adding an extra layer of cleverness. “We’ve used QR codes so that when you scan the surface of your clothing on your smartphone, it will take you to the original location,” he explains. “It’s all about the print interacting with the viewer and, in turn, making the wearer think about their immediate surroundings.”As with previous collections, sportswear remains a key component. “It’s always a big thing for me, because I basically grew up wearing tracksuits. It was a shellsuit in the Nineties, then, when I was 16, it was an Adidas “3 Stripes”, or a cream one with matching trainers – that was when it started getting more elegant,” he says, chuckling. “But I think my tracksuit days are kind of numbered now.”
The collection also sees Miller collaborating with shoemaker Oliver Sweeney, creating some seriously weighty footwear. “Their making is simply amazing,” he says. “It’s the kind of collaboration that really works.” Having recently sparked the interest of a major sportswear brand, and with plans for his next collection already taking shape, 2012 looks decidedly bright for Miller – even if success seems to have taken him by surprise. “Can I tell you, I don’t actually know what I’m doing,” he says, laughing. “I started doing what I’m doing simply because it was the recession and the job that I got offered after uni fell through. I was working in a dead-end job and I thought, ‘F*** this, I’ve got to do something.’ That’s how it started. I had 500 quid to make a collection and it’s simply gone from there.”
Indeed, there might not be much of a masterplan in place, but here is one designer consciously looking to the future. “All I know is that I’ve always got a new idea. And if I don’t have a new idea, then I’ll just stop,” he says plainly. “That’s the plan and there’s nothing past that. Is that so bad?
Matthew Miller’s A/W 12 collection is being shown today at 5pm in WC2. Stockist: Daniel Jenkins
