Biography - Heron Preston is an artist, creative director, content creator, clothing designer and DJ who has become a youth culture phenomenon in the
Instagram generation, collaborated with Kanye West and Virgil Abloh , and debuted his namesake label at Paris Fashion Week in 2017.Born in San Francisco,
Preston moved to New York in 2004 to earn a BBA from Parsons School of Design. After he started documenting characters from New York’s downtown
scene on a blog, he connected with fellow designer Virgil Abloh, who was contributing to another blog at the time. Preston then began working at Nike as
global digital producer. But in 2012, Abloh, along with Kanye West crew members Matthew Williams and Justin Saunders, came calling. They launched
streetwear label Been Trill, during which time Preston began collaborating with Kanye West as an art director, where he designed everything from tour
merchandise to invites for Yeezy fashion shows.However, during a trip to the Mediterranean, Preston saw first-hand the effects of pollution and
subsequently became an advocate for sustainability and better environmental manufacturing practices. Preston collaborated with the NYC Department of
Sanitation on a collection of zero-waste clothing and accessories, which sold out immediately following its launch in 2016.
When Abloh started Off-White and Williams started Alyx, they introduced Preston to the New Guards Group, the Milan-based production and distribution
company working with Off-White. Preston signed a deal for his namesake label and made a debut at Paris Fashion Week in 2017. The line is stocked
internationally at Ssense, Browns and Barneys New York.
The designer has also collaborated with brands such as Gap and Nike.How Heron Preston Went From Making Invitations for Kanye West to His Own Fashion
Label.Once a drone in Kanye West’s Yeezy operation, Heron Preston, encouraged by Virgil Abloh, is giving streetwear an eco-conscious spin with his own
acclaimed label.At any given moment, Heron Preston is working on a handful of self-initiated projects that swing between, and often straddle, the worlds of
art and fashion, both digital and IRL. Among his current preoccupations are a unisex-clothing collection launched at Men’s Fashion Week, in Paris, this past
January (more on that later) and a zine filled with photos that his father, a retired San Francisco police officer, took on the job.
Preston recently dug up hundreds of those pictures, which portray convicts and crime scenes. One particularly graphic image shows a man with a gaping
gunshot wound. “He always carried a camera with him,” says Preston of his father. “But he eventually stopped, because he was tired of taking sad photos.
”About two years ago, Preston had a similar come-to-Jesus moment, albeit under far more glamorous circumstances. He was swimming in the Mediterranean
when a plastic bag brushed up against him. Back then, Preston was turning out wildly successful “bootleg” T-shirts, which he covered in myriad corporate
logos, like those of Coca-Cola and Nascar. He was selling them via Instagram and, wary of potential lawsuits, flipped the Nascar logo upside down, concocting
a story that the shirts were factory rejects found in a Tennessee thrift store. He was also DJing at parties and working as an art director for Kanye West,
designing tour merchandise and creating the vacuum-sealed garments that served as the invites to West’s Yeezy fashion shows—a thankless job for which
Preston stayed up all night, stuffing 800 jackets into a FoodSaver from Target in order to get that perfectly scrunched-up look that Ye liked. Then came
the swimming incident, whereby Preston experienced firsthand the sad fact that there is a lot of garbage in the world. Soon thereafter, he discovered that
the clothing industry is the second-largest polluter of the planet.“I didn’t want to contribute to that,” he says. “I love designing, but I wanted to do better.
We should all be doing better.”As the son of a cop, Preston, 34, grew up with a deep admiration for uniforms. He had long dreamed about collaborating with
NASA and with the United States Postal Service. (When the French collective Vetements came out with a DHL shirt, he immediately shelved that plan.)
“Then I realized that the New York City Department of Sanitation has a uniformed force that cares about the same things I do,” he says. As it turns out,
the DSNY was the first municipal organization to have an artist in residence, beginning in 1978: Mierle Laderman Ukeles, a performance artist obsessed with
maintenance, is famous for the piece Touch Sanitation Performance, which entailed shaking the hand of every one of the DSNY’s 8,500 workers and telling
them, “Thank you for keeping New York City alive.”Preston tracked down Vito Turso, a self-appointed “deputy commissioner of explaining stuff” and the man
who brought Ukeles on board all those years ago. He sent him an e-mail with the subject line “Big Idea,” and pitched a collection of reworked DSNY uniforms.
Once the department realized it could make money off the project to support 0x30, a citywide initiative to eliminate waste sent to local landfills by the year
2030, the officials were sold. “It was actually Vito who suggested we present the collection at Fashion Week,” says Preston. “Apparently, he always thought
it would be a fun idea.”And so this past September, Preston and the DSNY set up shop at the Spring Street Salt Shed, an architecturally striking concrete
building that houses the salt used for de-icing streets in the winter, and presented Uniform, a collection of pants, hoodies, jackets, and shirts that had been
decommissioned by the DSNY or sourced from Goodwill and printed with Preston’s name and the DSNY logo. The event was a feel-good affair, with models
and hipsters mingling with municipal employees and posing together beside Ukeles’s futuristic-looking mirrored garbage truck, The Social Mirror, which
originally debuted in 1983 at the New York City Art Parade.“The collection sold out,” says Preston. “And with some of the money raised, we created the
Foundation for New York’s Strongest”—a nod to the department’s nickname—“which will continue to educate people on environmental issues, push the 0x30
initiative, and eventually help the DSNY open a museum.”
Indeed, the project garnered him a lot of attention. But then, Preston, who started his first clothing line in high school, calling it Heron Preston (his first
and middle name) instead of Heron Johnson (his actual name) because he thought it sounded more “regal,” has long known how to make a name for himself.
In 2004, after moving to New York to attend Parsons School of Design, he started a blog documenting the colorful characters of the downtown scene.
Through it, he connected with fellow designer, DJ, and creative consultant Virgil Abloh, who was a contributor to another blog, called The Brilliance!“We
were these nerdy streetwear dudes posting on the same message boards,” Preston recalls. He also caught the attention of Al Moran, founder of the
contemporary-art gallery Ohwow, who, in 2008, published The Young and the Banging under the gallery’s imprint. That official “unofficial” downtown New
York yearbook features Polaroids of some 200 cool kids, including the artist Lucien Smith and members of the DJ collective Misshapes.
For the launch party, Preston’s friends at Nike, where he would end up working for a handful of years as a marketing specialist and social media director,
lent him the store on Elizabeth Street. There, he installed a mock high school set, complete with bleachers and a back-to-school photo booth. The line to
get into the event stretched all the way down the block.Heron Preston – The Man Behind the Brand Artist, designer, content creator and DJ Heron Preston
may have been born in San Francisco, but New York City made him. During his early twenties, the designer moved to The Big Apple to attend Greenwich
Village’s Parsons School of Design: a private art and design college which counts Tom Ford, Marc Jacobs and Emily Adams Bode as alumni. Whilst studying
at The New School college, Preston ran a blog documenting the style of New Yorkers, especially those who lived in the Downtown suburbs. The blog swiftly
gained traction, which led to creative networking with two notable figures: Al Moran, the founder of West Hollywood’s Morán Morán and a man who needs
no introduction, Virgil Abloh. The former offered Preston a publishing deal – which is how the designer’s photography book, The Young and the Banging,
came to fruition – and the latter invited him to join Been Trill circa 2012.
Been Trill was a fashion and music collective that consisted of Virgil Abloh, Matthew Williams, Justin Saunders, YWP and Heron Preston. After working as
Marketing Director and Social Media Specialist for Nike, he joined the crew which led to him securing the role of Art Director and Consultant for Kanye
West. In 2014, Heron Preston finally started to design pieces under his own moniker. First up was the “FLAMES WAVES” collection, created for Nick Knight’s
fashion website, SHOWstudio. This project allowed Preston to trial different motifs and details, including the Russian word for style, СТИЛЬ, that's now
indivisible with the brand.
Two years later, the designer teamed up with the DSNY (the New York City Sanitation Department) for his first collection. Titled UNIFORM, the limited-
edition, zero-waste collection was officially launched at the Spring Street Salt Shed in New York City. Heron Preston’s preoccupation with uniforms stems
from his childhood: his father is an ex-police officer who was always suited up for his shifts. Whilst growing up on the West Coast, Preston became fixated
with the concept of workwear, which explains why he’s concerned with creating a uniform for streetwear subcultures.
Soon after the DSNY collaboration was released, the world’s style connoisseurs were scrambling to secure a Heron Preston piece. To cater to the demand,
the designer created his first seasonal collection for his namesake brand and debuted it at Paris Fashion Week Men’s. Titled “For You, The World”, the
2017 collection caught the attention of everyone in the fashion capital at the time. The entire line was made available on Preston’s website HPC Trading Co.
later that year.Ever since, the Heron Preston brand – now part of the New Guards Group – has gone from strength to strength. Keep reading to find out more
about the Heron Preston collaborations and the sizing and fit of Heron Preston pieces.
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