The 2025 LVMH Prize: August Barron

It was a series of coincidences that led the designers behind the Paris-based line August Barron to their own brand. The pair, also a couple, met when Bror August Vestbø stopped by the 2015 East Village fête for Benjamin Barron’s brand new magazine All-In. “I went to the first magazine launch the week I moved to New York and found the event on Facebook. I went without really knowing anyone,” says Vestbø. “I asked Ben for a phone charger, not knowing it was his event. He told me no.”

The passing meeting grew into creative collaboration, with then-22-year-old Barron shooting photographs for then-eighteen-year-old Vestbø’s brand Bror August and Vestbø contributing to All-in. The two began dating. The brand was, for years, contained as a magazine and platform for creative collaboration. Then Barron and Vestbø started altering garments from thrift shops and flea markets to create new pieces for a 2017 editorial. Maryam Nassir Zadeh invited them to show the clothes on a runway in her downtown New York shop—stylist and now-collaborator Lotta Volkova was one of the first clients. And what started as cultural commentary, playful expression, and (sub)cultural experimentation suddenly, quite organically, became what is now one of the buzziest brands in the industry.

August Barron is known for its irony-caked, upcycled high femme garments, like a deconstructed gray sweater with an eighties polka dot silk scarf forming a bow at the collar, extra-extra-large pearl bracelets apt to turn any look extra girlie, and the wader-wide, laced-up Level Boots that have become a runaway commercial success. Each collection has a theme based on a character Barron and Vestbø dream up, often in response to the past season’s exploration. Take Spring 2024. The starting point was Allina, a fictional popstar fresh off her “fifteen seconds of fame” and subsequent freefall from grace, weaving in inspiration from Showgirls’s Nomi Malone and reality star Heidi Montag in a thirty-three-look collection full of beauty pageant notes and exaggerated adornments. John Waters-style humor is a constant, as are elements of pop culture fandom, the deconstruction of not just garments but the references that inspire them, and a heavy dash of reference-clashing fairytale magic.

“In each element which makes up a collection, we work with collaging contradicting elements,” explains Barron. “For example, our last runway soundtrack featured Pet Shop Boys’s ‘West End Girls’ mashed up with Peaches’s cover of Daft Punk’s ‘Technologic,’ a warped Sex and the City intro, and covers of David Bowie’s ‘Fashion’ and Cyndi Lauper’s ‘Girls Just Want To Have Fun’ by Smerz, who also make our runway soundtracks. The lobby music was sound extracted from eighties beauty campaigns.”

The garments are still made from thrifted and sourced materials, adding an element of lived history to the world-building and commentary-cum-fantasy of Vestbø and Barron’s creative process.

Designing was a childhood dream for Vestbø, who grew up in Oslo. “As a teenager, I had a silver lilac bob, would paint dark rings under my eyes to look like Christiane F., and also wore Cheap Monday skinny jeans—very Tumblr,” he shares. “I’ve wanted to be a designer since I was nine. I was always obsessed with the scene in Cinderella where the mice are making her a dress and the scene in Sleeping Beauty where the fairies make her a dress. Both times, they attempt to make the perfect dress, but it ends up getting ruined.”

Barron, a New York native who moved to Rome with his family at age ten, really got into clothing when he met Vestbø. One of the first pieces the couple made was the Ashtray Heels. Vestbø explains that they were inspired by Bernadette Peters’s character in Slaves of New York. “The character collects trash from the streets and makes fab hats from them,” he says. “From the beginning, people really responded to our shoes, so it ended up being the first category we decided to produce. In our third collection, Debutante, we introduced the Level Boot as the first item which was available to purchase in larger scale.”

Lately, Vestbø and Barron have started seeing their clothes on the streets. The concepts have moved from the page and the runway into the everyday. They note that they really just want to continue to make work that excites them. “It would be a dream to work with the archives of Cristóbal Balenciaga and Azzedine Alaïa, but also just the wardrobe of any fab lady who loved getting dressed up throughout the years,” adds Barron. “We’re interested in changing the embedded meaning in clothing and discovering material with connotations we haven’t worked with previously.”

This includes concepts of good and bad taste, starting with their own. “We are interested in shifting our own perception of beauty and what specific items of clothing represent,” says Barron.

For more information, please visit augustbarron.com. Read this story and many more in print by ordering our tenth issue here.