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From bodybuilding to sculptural latex design – the BFC NEWGEN recipient crafts worlds we’ve never seen before.
Photography by Rosella Damiani
Words SOPHIE WANG
“The reason why I picked design was not because I was passionate about it,” London-based designer Harri tells me. It’s the first thing he says when talking about his career and an anomalous sentiment for the fashion industry where unstinting passion often seems like a prerequisite to survival. “It's just because I knew how to sketch, how to visualise things.”
As a child growing up in India, Harri often watched his father, a graphic designer at the time, sketch billboards and number plates by hand. Despite giving up the profession to take over their family business when Harri was still young, witnessing his dad at work left an indelible imprint on his younger, wide-eyed self. “When I was like three, four, five years old, I used to see him sketching,” he remembers. “It was always there in my head. I was very good at memorising things and recreating. If you gave me something and five days later asked me to sketch it, I would be able to sketch it with all the details. That's something that I knew about myself, so I was like, ‘Maybe I should keep trying to design, maybe I should apply for design school.’”
While his skill was embraced via an acceptance to India's National Institute of Fashion Technology, it was in the gym – not the studio – that he first found an excitement and drive to create. A self-described introvert, Harri began seeking refuge from the social aspect of his course in a place where he could work on goals insularly. “I wanted to be in a place where I could be with myself,” he explains. Quickly, he became “obsessed with working out,” competing as a professional bodybuilder within just two years. By the time he ultimately took a step back to focus on his academic career, the teenage student was contending with people in their 30s and 40s.
“With bodybuilding, it's about creating this body that you've never seen before. You are the canvas. Do the cooking, the sleep, the workouts and six months later, your body starts changing. And, as you go forward, you go into extremes of it, and then you present yourself with choreography, which is performance art.”
Photography by Rosella Damiani
“I still have a bodybuilder's mindset,” he continues. “The kind of discipline, dedication, opposition, desire within myself to create something that’s never been seen before. I took that energy into my design space, I started putting that approach into my work. Every season it's about creating things that I've never seen. The silhouettes I push for are always on the extreme side.”
When he says extreme, he really means it. Following his undergraduate education with a Menswear MA degree from the London College of Fashion in 2020, and a coveted spot as a British Fashion Council NEWGEN recipient in 2022, he has built his label on non-conformity and boundary-pushing. He’s known today for his use of latex, experimental, sculptural silhouettes that redefine the material and his theatrical storytelling that blends performance art and runway shows.
Harri's Spring/Summer 2025 collection – his fifth London Fashion Week presentation – pushed his imagination and pattern-making skills even further. Exploring the idea of separate deflated and inflated sides to a story, Chapter 5 focused on the possibilities of latex and how it can be used to provide “character moments” to wearers. “I don't approach the material for its sex quotient or for its cultural relevance or its symbol. Rather, I approach the material from a pure material point of view and the potential of it,” he explains.
“Let's say I create a form and inflate it – that is very straightforward.” He pauses as I wrap my head around his process. “The real magic is that when you deflate that form and drape it around the body in a different way, it gives you a completely different idea or image. The inflation is more predictable. For me, when I work on a pattern, I know how it's going to come out. But when I deflate it, it's out of my control.”
Photography by Rosella Damiani
Harri worked on this process with the models, collaborating to design pieces that felt good on their skin and facilitated a transformative power to perform on stage. “We spoke to them, asked them what they like, what they don't like, analysed their body, how they walked and what was special about their character. And then we designed for their body. They weren't designs that had been put on them but rather ones that complemented the way they perform.”
Following that initial ideation stage, Harri retreated to the solitude of working directly with the material. “It's a long process,” he shares, describing steps including cleaning, gluing, rolling and polishing. “You can do it all by yourself. I can just sit there and do it forever. I don't need a second or third person to work with me on it, so, in a lot of ways, I feel like I'm in a relationship with the material. And I have been for nine years.”
While this almost-decade-long entwinement seems like a healthy and by all accounts a prosperous one, Harri does acknowledge leaning on his team to keep the stocks of joy and creativity he receives from the business up. One of his standout pieces from the SS25 collection, in which models are conjoined by an inflated three-person suit, is a homage to this collaborative environment and the first two colleagues who joined him and his business partner at the brand. “When my design became a business, I kind of lost the fun of designing,” he admits. “The moment it turned into a business, I was like, 'Okay, it's repetition.' You're asked to create more and more. But when I hired my first two [staff members], I almost felt like I had a new life. I wake up and I have a new reason to come to the studio. There's a collaboration and it's not forced anymore. There are these two young people who like to learn from me, who I get to learn from and who genuinely I'm very happy with.” While he initially aimed for the triplet piece to be a quartet, restrictions from the runway size forced the look into a three-person pursuit. “It’s an ongoing story,” he promises. “It will come back.”
“This season, we really wanted to think, what is it that we do that brings value to the client or the person who is wearing [our garment]?” Harri pauses. “Out of everything, when somebody steps into our clothes, they get into a character – it either amplifies theirs or gives them a new one. We realised that’s what we stand for. If there’s anything we want to give a client or customer, it’s that character energy.”
