Walmsley’s brother is 10 years older, which means he was out partying in 2008 while eight-year-old Walmsley stayed home. It’s these formative years, the late 2000s and early 2010s, that Walmsley references in his designs – pulling together super-skinny jeans, slouchy tops, dirty plimsolls, “questionable-but-amazing” V-necks going lower than they should, pea coats and military jackets. “It was just a really rogue time in fashion that also collided with the music scene, and I have so much nostalgia for it,” he says. “It was kind of a horrible era in fashion, but I think it’s great because it’s horrible.”
During our call, Walmsley DMs me a series of photos of his brother and his friends from back in 2008. “My brother was very – I hate to say it – but Skins -y,” he says. The photos look like they could have been pulled from almost any British millennial teenager’s Facebook photo album. In them, his brother has long side-swept hair and wears a green military shirt with black skinny jeans and a dog tag necklace similar to the one Walmsley wears now. But he didn’t inherit his brother’s military tees and skinny jeans until years after the photos were taken, when they were completely out of fashion. His reverence for them didn’t grow until much later, and it’s something he says his teenage self would be surprised by. “If he saw me now talking about how I realised there were all these amazing imperfections in the hand-me-downs, he would freak out,” he says. “At the time, I don’t think I appreciated it, but looking back I can.”
Walmsley pauses and seems to have a small realisation. “Damn, it’s kind of crazy,” he says. “I feel like I’m constantly glazing my brother. He was really good at skateboarding, and I wanted to be but I was rubbish.” Walmsley even planned to study chemistry at one point because his brother did. When he didn’t get the grades he needed, he did a foundational diploma in art – because his sister had. “My sister works in fashion and I think that was the reason my parents were OK with me doing it as well,” he says. “They were like, ‘This is a lost cause.’”
Growing up in Brighton, Walmsley says fashion played almost “no role” in his teenage life. He would spend his free time building film props for makeshift films that “never really happened” and says he was into clothes in the same way his peers around him were — he wanted to get the shoes that everyone else in class had. When he ended up at Central Saint Martins doing fashion, his perspective completely changed. “I didn’t like the idea of creating some pristine, perfect thing, where there’s five of the exact same thing on a rail,” he says. “For me, it’s all about the imperfections and the stories.”
If, as Walmsley suggests, the clothing of the past can carry their stories into our present, then the mid00s pieces currently recirculating on vintage resale apps tell a tale of hedonism and debauchery. It was an era filled with horny club culture, greasy-haired men in The Strokes or LCD Soundsystem band tees and high-flash photos of Alexa Chung smoking a cigarette in a Peter Pan collar and ballet flats. Sure, there was a reckless pretentiousness to the spectacle of a bunch of ultra-skinny models, fashion it-girls and celebrities running around with dishevelled hair and smudged eyeliner. But it was also a moment in time deeply connected to New York’s indie-rock scene and to gathering in person – which may be the main draw for its apparent revival.
Walmsley first applied to the London College of Arts because his sister was there (of course). “That was my top one at the time because I thought it was so cool, but then I looked at all the other big ones and found out about CSM,” he says. On his first try, he didn’t get accepted into the highly competitive fashion programme, so he went to the London College of Fashion. “But I’d already had a taste of being so close to CSM because I got an interview when no one else from my city college had,” he says. Without telling his parents, Walmsley secretly reapplied to CSM, got in this time, and dropped out of LCF. “When I told my parents, they weren’t too happy,” he says. Neither was the Student Loans Company, which quickly realised that he wasn’t going to school any more and asked for a chunk of money back. “I had to work all summer in a call centre,” he says, “but my parents forgave me.”
“I wanted every single look in my collection to be a pair of skinny jeans, but my teachers wouldn’t have it”
In hindsight, Walmsley believes it would have been “horrible” if he had got into CSM immediately, because he wasn’t ready. During his deferred year, he says, he learned a lot about himself as a designer. “This whole thing of taking a bit more time has really stayed with me,” he says. By the time Walmsley made it to CSM, he’d spent years thinking fondly about his childhood clothes – the way his brother’s old clothes would hang off his body and the tiny signs that they’d been worn before. “I wanted to anthropomorphise the clothes themselves and capture this moment of how my brother would style them, or [how] they’d accidentally sit on him. Then how they sat on myself as I was handed them down.” The memories were preserved in his debut collection, which was loosely based around each line of his love letter.
Although his design career is just beginning, Walmsley isn’t afraid to get strange with pattern cutting. He has figured out a way for jeans that fit too big to stay stacked and almost floating; created a button-up pea coat that somehow sits off one shoulder; shown his affinity for too-tight tuxedo jackets; and hemmed his ultra-baggy T-shirts diagonally. He’s also more than willing to distort his materials, using chemicals to fade his denim pieces before “dirtying” them and embossing hints of belts and dog tags into the fabric using a two-piece wooden mould and steam at high temperatures. His polyester pieces come permanently embedded with memories.
Walmsley himself dresses like the clothes he’s drawn to making, from the era he’s nostalgic for. For our call, he wears a half-zipped, baggy grey hoodie with a pair of skinny jeans – one of the three pairs of jeans he owns, all skintight. “They [skinny jeans] are like the forbidden fruit for me because for a long time I rejected them,” he says. “I said, ‘I’ll never wear skinny jeans, I hate them,’ but then I started indulging in it, and it felt so good.” He’s been wearing skinny jeans nonstop for the last year and a half. The transition was gradual, but now he’s feeling more daring and buying some pairs that he considers “borderline jeggings”. “I wanted every single look in the collection to be a pair of skinny jeans,” he says, “but my teachers wouldn’t have it.”
It comes as no surprise that Walmsley started wearing and designing skinny jeans again because they’re so “emblematic” of his brother. “I owed it to him to do them,” he says. “When I was a kid, I wore them too, but then people strayed away from the dark side. I wanted to go back.” In the midst of what Walmsley wincingly describes as the “indie sleaze return” – where the mass re-adoption of skinny jeans feels like only a matter of time – his connection to the era feels far more related to a deep longing to relive his adolescence. “Thinking back, it just sounds like I didn’t want to grow up. With how much I was obsessed with the past and what my brother wore, graduating was pretty hard, to be honest.”
Since then, Walmsley has been working for a major brand in Paris, but he’s unsure how long he’ll be there. He’s already nostalgic for his time at CSM. “Graduating is so grim,” he says. “You hate school at the time but in retrospect, you love it.” He’s also already yearning for a previous version of London. “I always thought I would live in London because (surprise, surprise) my brother was there, and I was so impressed. But moving there wasn’t as fun as I thought it would be when I was a kid.” He recalls making family trips to visit his brother in the city. Sometimes he’d stay over, and they’d go to Camden Market. “His halls were so gross but I thought it was all so cool,” says Walmsley. Now, his brother has moved to Antwerp, one of his older sisters is in Barcelona, and things aren’t the same. “We only really all get together at Christmas,” he says. “Which is probably why the move has been lonely.”
Part of Walmsley’s biggest charm as a designer – and as a person – is the very thing he apologises for most: his deep feeling for the unrelenting nature of time. He regrets every hand-me-down he’s ever given away, although he’s managed to keep most of them. “They are going to stay with me; this is where it ends,” he says. “Maybe one day a miniature Roly will get them, but the moths might get to them first.” At the end of our conversation, I’m drawn back to the closing line of his cheesy poem: “I can’t bring myself to say goodbye.” In true youngest-sibling fashion, Walmsley has managed to turn his longing for his childhood home – all of his siblings under one roof – into his driving source of inspiration. Somewhere in his mind, his brother is still wearing a Jackie Chan tee and lighting a cigarette in front of a digital camera. Yet the party is over, skinny jeans have been retired (for now), and there are Tumblr pages that haven’t been opened in years. In many ways, the spontaneity of the late-00s era Walmsley pines for feels like a distant and unreachable reality. “The nostalgia is just hitting more than ever, you know?” he says. “And I’m such a sucker for it.”
Hair SHUNSUKE MEGURO at FUTURE REP using SAM MCKNIGHT, make-up STEVIE SQUIRE, models ROHAN ALEXANDER at PREMIER, LUCAS LEE and SONNY ROUND at THE LAB, styling assistant EMELINE TAVERNE, production coordinator MEKDES ZELEKE, special thanks MARK & CO
