The 2025 LVMH Prize: Steve O Smith

Blurring the line between fine art and fashion, Steve O Smith’s designs immediately demand your gaze. The imagery first transports you—soft lighting, porcelain-like figures, details that recall another time period—before your eyes shift to the linework, heavy, emotive black strokes that move throughout the outfit and sometimes create false edges and silhouettes that feel surreal. Finally, you’re simply absorbed by the culmination of it all: a drawing come to life. That’s the underlying concept behind Smith’s label. He draws regularly, repeatedly, fervently, until he’s ready to transpose those drawings onto fabric, quite literally bringing artistry to fashion design.

Despite the focus on his drawing, which admittedly is a captivating selling point, it’s still only part of what characterizes his work, which earned him the Karl Lagerfeld Prize in this year’s LVMH Prize. He’s proficient in technique, trained in fashion at both the Rhode Island School of Design and Central Saint Martins, and his designs necessitate the application of all that know-how. Take his arch dresses, for instance, which have become a key silhouette for the brand. To draw it is one thing; to make the shape in real life requires a different level of commitment. “You need to be loyal to what you’ve done on the page,” he explains. “When you draw, you’re not really necessarily factoring in gravity, and so often you will draw a shape that feels like it’s floating.” To capture that feeling, Smith has to be both technical and precise. “For the arch dresses, which are totally flat at the front but have a sort of bustle that’s actually historically quite prevalent in French fashion and in European court dress, taking those engineering things to create the gowns as weightless as they appear on the page is an example of change that you have to do. It’s about looking properly and committing to what you’re looking at and not watering it down.”

Much of Smith’s inspiration comes from the historical context, and part of his practice is to rely on a well of art references to provide a framework within which to work. “There’s so many incredible depictions of clothing in our history, and that’s something I’m so interested in incorporating into what I’m doing and seeing how doing it in an oil paint would change the results, would change the way that you would do it in fabric. I always think about like if [Frank] Auerbach made a jacket, it would be about constructing and ripping apart in the same way that he would work on the page.” Smith has cited George Grosz’s artwork, as well as the broader German Expressionism movement, as a source of inspiration over the last few years. “It’s this period where in the background fascism’s really growing,” he adds. “I think there’s reasons why things resonate with you. It feels like we’ve kind of come in a hundred-year cycle, the twenties do feel weirdly, worryingly relevant.”

More recently, Smith has looked to the influential and radical magical realist artists of the early twentieth century, including Paul Cadmus, George Platt Lynes, Pavel Tchelitchew, and others who defied norms with queer depictions. “I was really interested in that period. There’s this obsession with abstract expressionism in America. 
It’s very straight. It’s like Rothko and Pollock,” he explains. “But at the same time, there were these queer artists in New York doing these really beautiful, realistic drawings and very tender work. There’s a way that that work at that time was looked down on, and I find it so interesting. I thought there was a parallel between the way people treat illustrators, like René Gruau, as if the work he did is not art.”

For Fall 2025, Smith looked towards one of Tchelitchew’s drawings of a group of sailors. “You can just feel that he was so engrossed in this depiction,” he says. “it’s all done in sepia ink and it’s wet and the wetness of it really has a very obviously sexual innuendo to it. So that’s something I was interested in looking at, something that carnal and direct.” He sought to contrast that with a forties and fifties æsthetic informed by Gruau’s illustrations for early Christian Dior (“the simple brief was to draw Dior like Tchelitchew would draw an orgy scene”), resulting in a collection that feels otherworldly. Smith sees this as the last of a three-collection arc that can be grouped as a body of work, each exploring monochromatic drawing. “There’s this idea that drawing is abstract in a way that painting isn’t because you’re inventing linework. Linework doesn’t exist when you look at something; it’s all tonal, it’s all shadow and depth. But when you draw, it’s sort of a total fiction that you’re creating.” While Smith began drawing the previous two collections with graphite and pencil, he used ink and brush for this one, which created the layer of tonal depth he needed to bring to each piece. He would appliqué layers of tulle to go from sheer white to gray to black on check suits, tunics, and gowns, while his more pronounced linework remained present in trompe-l’œil flap collars and on the borders of sailor’s hats. The final look featured his signature arch dress, ethereal in its weightlessness and grand in its posture.

Developing a practice that is so detailed and intensive results in these expressive bodies of work comprised of delicate pieces that feel truly unique—and in a way, they are. Smith’s designs are made to order, and though he’s dabbled with commercialization with early iterations of his brand, his latest work demands a more personal relationship. “We’re at capacity, we actually have a waiting list for orders, but what it does allow us to do is create a relationship, and really, this is the traditional way that luxury works,” he says. He knows his work can be commercialized, especially with new techniques he’s developing, such as printing his drawings at scale, but admits that continuous development of his technique and process is his immediate priority. “Fundamentally, I think of my pieces as drawings and so they shouldn’t exist in large amounts,” he says. “I think that it would devalue them for there to be that many.” And thus the line between designer and artist remains blurred.

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