Conner Ives closed London Fashion Week in the Art Deco ballroom of Claridge’s, with a spotlit monogram on the back wall, house music shaking the room, and Kim Cattrall in the front row. The whole thing had the energy of a Bryant Park show from the turn of the millennium — which felt entirely appropriate for a collection that moved through various notions of American glamour across the decades while remaining thoroughly of the present moment.

The collection was titled El Dorado, after the Weimar-era Berlin nightclub that served an LGBTQ+ clientele and offered a space where people of all genders could dress and express themselves freely. Ives described it as “almost looking to the past to try and resolve the present” — though he acknowledged he didn’t find much resolution there, given how that particular story ends. What he found instead were themes that keep repeating: power, control, the impulse to make other people smaller. “These are themes that have been repeating themselves for hundreds of years,” he said. The frivolity of the show was real, but so was the weight underneath it.

The opening look set the tone for the high-low intelligence that defines Ives at his best. One of his current bestsellers — a lavishly embroidered coat upcycled from Qing Dynasty tapestries — was styled not with an evening dress but with jeans trimmed in gold and a T-shirt reading “I work nights.” A second tee read “AI betrayed me,” part of a collaboration with comedians Kate Berlant and Jacqueline Novak of the podcast Poog. “The irony of this is that it’s the most expensive piece on our line sheet and it’s also our current bestseller,” Ives noted of the coat. Pairing it with denim was the kind of move that only works when you know exactly what you’re doing.

Rugby shirts evolved in purple and royal blue, now emblazoned with what may or may not be the Ives family crest — found online, provenance uncertain, which Ives found more interesting rather than less. “That tongue-in-cheek kind of pomp and circumstance, that could actually be faked,” he laughed. Upcycled silk scarf pieces took a new psychedelic turn, pleated and stretched diagonally across the hip or tied at the neckline. Evening looks were cut from slinky velvets.

The arguable standout was a bias-cut dress in layers of chocolate brown silk chiffon worn by Debra Shaw, its surface decorated with 500 hand-cut and hand-painted fall leaves. The inspiration came from a trip to his aunt’s house in New Mexico, where Ives was struck by dead leaves still clinging to trees after an unusually warm autumn — a detail that, for a designer who keeps sustainability and climate at the centre of his thinking, carried obvious resonance. It could have tipped into sentimentality. The execution kept it well clear.

Behind the scenes, Ives has been doing the less glamorous work of building something durable. Part of his 2025 BFC/Vogue Designer Fashion Fund prize went toward hiring an experienced managing director — a decision that has, among other things, cut the line sheets by more than half to focus on core pieces. “Beforehand, I was probably spending 80% of my time on the business side, doing things I probably wasn’t that well equipped to do,” he said. He’s already feeling the difference.

The final look drew the biggest reaction: a bridal gown inspired by a Marc Bohan-era Dior couture piece, cut from satin organza with a fur-trimmed hood — a winter bride getting married in Aspen, as Ives put it. “It’s so on the nose, and so campy, that I think it just works.” He was right. As always with Ives, the eclectic vision holds together because underneath the wit and the references and the joyful irreverence, there’s a designer who genuinely knows what he’s doing.