Man About Town spoke with designer Antonio Vattev ahead of his brand’s debut London Fashion Week presentation and film.
You’ve seen A.V. Vattev’s lace-up Viper cardigan clinging to a muscular Paul Mescal during his 2024 Gladiator II press tour and Bad Bunny on his “No Me Quiero Ir de Aquí” Puerto Rico residency in 2025. You’ve seen it worn by Noah Jupe at the Newport Film Festival this year, and by Tom Holland in promotional videos ahead of the Spider Man: Brand New Day press blitz, too. But until this weekend, you’d never seen the brand officially showing up at London Fashion Week.
On Sunday, the label, founded by Bulgarian-born designer Antonio Vattev in 202, following positions at Wales Bonner and Yves Saint Laurent and previous stints presenting collections in Paris, made its British debut. Its Spring/Summer 2027 collection was unveiled via a film format at the Underground Cinema at 180 Studios – a catwalk is something he will only do when it makes sense for the brand, he told us ahead of time.
The film, titled Encore, puts club culture at the fore, highlighting the liberating properties that can arise after a big one with your friends against the shifting and diminishing nightlife landscape in the UK capital.
Courtesy of A.V. Vattev
“We want to [present] something that makes people want to dance and makes people feel like nobody's looking at them, just feel a bit more free.” The outdoors also becomes a central character to his exploration of raving culture, from his personal experience partying outdoors this summer, courtesy of a long-lasting heatwave. “Combining this kind of rave in nature, but also having a club element in one, I really enjoyed the way one of the models was dancing because he felt so free,” he continues.
Starting out with two protagonists in a forest, and later in a field, we follow them as they recollect on the night, from intense club connections to passionate whole-hearted expressions. He proposes “a male character who moves between cinema and music, between desire and danger, sophistication and instinct. He does not belong entirely to either world. That ambiguity is the point,” read the accompanying show notes.
Vattev was drawn to the hedonistic, and often mood boarded eras of the 1970s and 1990s when it came to the clothes – both periods in time that saw subcultures and their ascribed style flourish, be it punk, hip-hop, grunge, or rave movements. “But was this kind of a dream about freedom and exploration of the world, and being free and chic. And I feel like people were dressed so well back then, and not only for a specific occasion, but [just when they] were on the street. And I think that's what we're missing nowadays,” says Vattev.
During the making of his SS27 collection, the designer, a fan of New Wave French Cinema, was watching a lot of À bout de souffle, inspired by Jean-Paul Belmondo’s dangerous and romantic portrayal of Michel Poiccard alongside the eclectic rocker style of Keith Richards’, influences that appear throughout the lineup.
In the brand’s latest offering, this arrives through ribbed lace-up Viper cardigans (that viral knitted grail favoured by the starry guys mentioned above), super baggy tailored trousers featured alongside leather scale-like iterations, as did shirting and polo shirts branded with the label’s trademark belt-loop “logo” (only recognisable to those that know the brand), as well as slim-fitting Mandarin collar tuxedo shirts which Vattev sees Belmondo wearing himself if he were around today. “I want to make sure that it still follows and carries our signatures because I think for the past few seasons, I managed to create a few signature elements for the brand that deserve to be shown again and just represented into a new perspective, new point of view. But they're still there,” he shares.
Clearly for Vattev, this consistency is working. It has helped to carve a slower, sharply defined brand known for its subtle tweaks on reliable men’s fashion staples. At a time when guy’s fashion is in danger of being overrun by the homogeneity gremlins, A.V. Vattev is an easy-to-recognise antidote to sameness that doesn’t attempt to reinvent the wheel nor tip into try-hard territory. And who knows, perhaps London Fashion Week just gave us a first look at Bad Bunny’s next fashion banger? If so, we called it first.
