Angus Cockram and George Oxby weathered an outside toilet and a rice-and-peas diet to bring their brand, AGRO Studio, to where it is today. Now with their comprehensive first ready-to-wear show hours away, they’re finally reaping the rewards.
Orthodox routes into the fashion industry are as rare as a season in recent times without creative director upheaval. Whether that’s a blessing or a bane of the industry is up for debate, but one thing is for sure: there’s nothing linear in the rigmarole.
AGRO Studio founders and couple George Oxby and Angus Cockram know this all too well, as they tell me on a February weekday at their studio, nestled in the heart of East London. Ensconced in a discreet side street a stone’s throw from Hackney Central station, it’s a rather unassuming location for an engine of nascent British fashion, and one that tests my Google Maps capacity to breaking point. But once I step over the threshold, I’m enveloped by a harmonious AGRO symphony – the bass of industrial sewing machines, the trills of scissors snipping through fabrics and rails running legato across oak floorboards. My previous navigational woes are drowned out.
Despite being just weeks away from their second London Fashion Week show, they’re dealing with a custom order from none other than Charli XCX. She’s ordered a bespoke piece that morning and, naturally, needs it by the evening. But this is AGRO studio we’re talking about, and this is definitely not their first rodeo. In fact, they’ve become the constant answer for the costuming of our generation’s biggest music stars, from Beyoncé and Lady Gaga to PinkPantheress and Zara Larsson. Custom looks that don’t just meet but outpace their fans’ wildest imaginations.
“I think we deliver,” says Cockram when I ask why AGRO resonates so much with pop’s it-girls. “We take pride out of it, and we sketch for the person and for the stylist. Working on TV and film, we understand the language and the rhythm of [commercial projects], so we learned to go with that, and I think it’s quite easy to work with.” Their reflections ring true. The pair are veritable chameleons, adapting their design language to fit Naomi Campbell’s Cruella-fueled Halloween outfit or JADE’s tartan leotard for a summer festival appearance. And, as Cockram notes, their background extends to screen projects, too – director Tom Dream’s quasi-documentary Shy Radicals featured their handiwork, as did Maya Jama’s corseted look on a 2025 episode of Love Island.
Having established the brand in 2021 amidst the strains of COVID, Cockram and Oxby’s journey here hasn’t been without blood, sweat and tears. The brand’s inception came five years after Oxby graduated from London College of Fashion, winning “Collection of the Year” for his collaborative graduate effort with Sam Thompson, and gaining the attention of Rihanna. “We loaned [the graduate collection] for The ANTI World Tour, but I never managed to get the snowball rolling at that time, so there was a massive anti-climax after that. It was actually really difficult to process, and it’s taken me 10 whole years after that to feel any kind of success again in the fashion industry,” says the Brussels-born designer. Having grown up in England, as Cockram puts it, in “the middle of four fields”, his own adjustment to the London fashion game, also via London College of Fashion, presented its own turbulence. “[It felt like] a fish in a big pond kind of thing. I took a year out, came back, finally felt like I cracked the code of university, and then COVID hit, so we didn’t even do a collection or anything like that; it was all digital.”
Studies out of the way, by AGRO’s early days, the struggle to break even brought with it its own personal compromises for the couple, including the consumption of a rice-and-peas diet and the racking up of their overdrafts. Enhancements to make their now-beloved studio what it is today were also put on hold. “There were 18 broken windows,” Cockram recalls. “The floor was sticky and like… [there was] no toilet. We had an outside toilet for about a year.” Those sacrifices only make the star-studded VIP resume and their upcoming spot front-and-centre of the opening day of the LFW schedule sweeter. “Only now is it paying off,” adds Cockram. “Nature’s recovering.”
“I feel like we are both calling this our debut,” Oxby admits. “Last season, we were presented with the opportunity to show with Fashion Scout. That was what sparked the idea, and that was an amazing platform to have, but we actually only had two and a half weeks to make the collection. We didn’t have any creative control over the environment, the models, the hair team or whatever. We’re super grateful for everyone involved with that, but it didn’t feel to us like the honest truth or a true expression of what we wanted to do.” The condensed lead time is quite something when you consider this was the brand’s first attempt at a full ready-to-wear offering.
This time around, their firepower’s suitably increased, with time on their side, full creative control over every aspect of the show and even a footwear collaboration with Untitlab incorporated. Autumn/Winter 2026 builds on the interpretation of the tarot cards that have become a recurrent theme for the brand.“The last collection was Prophet, which was a zeitgeist of where we want to go and what we want to say. Then this one, The Wanderer, is about how we’ve got to this moment, how we’ve wandered into where we are now – an endless journey,” explains Cockram. “It’s the dark side of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, just without the fantasy side.”
Several characters embark on this limitless expedition, ranging from a wandering melancholic to a wandering widow and even a wandering delinquent, with a sense of aimlessness and void as each character takes on a utilitarian mindset to survival. Said characters parlay anything they can get their hands on into attire – spanning bin bags transformed into jackets or Icelandic sheepskins picked up for insulation.
With this being only their second venture into ready-to-wear, AGRO’s mode of expression in the arena is still unravelling. This season, there’s a clear and cohesive gear-change with silhouette – Prophet’s flared, sleazy edge is replaced with bulkier cuts reminiscent of arctic military shapes, with a heft up top balanced by robust bottoms, including in the collection’s denim, with printing inspired by the Russian Pre-Raphaelite-era artist Léon Bakst.
“We’ve used various different references to create the universe, one of which is Bakst,” Oxby explains. “He did lots of ballet backdrops for the iconic Ballets Russes.” The pair have remixed his paintings through recolouring and rotating, acting as the brand’s take on camouflage. The St George’s Cross and Union Jack are also interpreted, with an AGRO-conceived, “bastardised” hand-painted motif.
The Wanderer also puts a sharper focus on menswear done the AGRO way. “One of the things that we feel was almost missing from the last collection was that touch of showbiz. We didn’t have any sparkle, so there will be pieces even across menswear this time that do have camp in there – but in a very masculine way, weirdly,” Oxby tells us. They’ve dominated the pop girl stratosphere, and now, they’re turning their attention to the boys. “We love people like Jordan Hemingway who are really cool. Josh O’Connor is actually kind of almost-muse-level. Paul Mescal – [Josh and Paul] together,” says Oxby, on the ideal male talents to headline their menswear push.
Although they’re not quite where they want to be, they’re on a decidedly promising path. “It all worked out – well, so far,” smiles Oxby. I recalled meeting them back in 2022 in their first year in the business, picking up clothes for a styling gig at the time. Through all the hardships – the scrimping, seemingly impossible deadlines and the incalculable expectation put on young designers, they seem to have come out of the other end as optimistic as when I first met them. An emblem, perhaps first and foremost, of the trust and confidence they have in themselves.
How does one define the AGRO DNA? “I think that it’s very British,” Oxby says. “I think that it’s in on the joke. Playful. We’ve always said it’s a bit punky, and I think we’re rooted in some historical silhouettes, with a very modern twist” – descriptors that don’t feel out of place for the duo themselves. And those human qualities are perhaps why they are where they are: eagerly in line to become a cultural mainstay at London Fashion Week, and then some.
George and Angus wear fashion throughout by AGRO Studio.
Photography
James AnastasiStyling
Luke Day
