A track jacket with pockets sewn deliberately thinner than they need to be to hold anything, and a button covered so precisely that no thread shows at the seam: these are the two details Aaron Esh reaches for, unprompted, when asked what actually occupies him inside his own studio. Not a silhouette. Not a concept. A pocket's thickness. "The way we work is quick," he's said of his process. "It's not over contrived — it's very 'yes' or 'no,' and move on."
That's an odd thing to hear from a designer who spends this much time on a covered button, but it isn't a contradiction. Precision and speed aren't opposites in Esh's studio; they're the same discipline pointed in two directions — decide fast, finish exactly.
Esh grew up between Hackney and Islington, in a family of tailors and dry cleaners — the trade was already in the house before he enrolled anywhere to study it. He went on to Central Saint Martins, where his MA collection drew attention in 2022, the same year he launched his own label. A year later he was a finalist for the LVMH Prize and a participant in the British Fashion Council's NewGen program — the two most conventional proofs that a young London designer's work has registered with the industry that trained him.
That same precision is now being asked to operate at a different scale entirely. AllSaints itself started in 1994 as an East London wholesale menswear line, selling into Harvey Nichols and Harrods before it opened its own Carnaby Street shop in 1997 — named, depending on which half of the story gets told, after founder Stuart Trevor's nickname "the Saint" or after All Saints Road in Notting Hill, where he spent most of his time. In October 2025, AllSaints named Esh chief creative officer, reporting directly to chief executive Peter Wood, with responsibility for both womenswear and menswear collections and the brand's full creative identity, while continuing to run his own label alongside it. His first reset reportedly landed at 220 stores worldwide in a single overnight changeover: leather rebuilt across new colors, finishes, and weights, denim reorganized around five core fits rather than a shifting seasonal offer. The campaign accompanying it, shot by Alasdair McLellan and styled by his longtime collaborator England, sets seventeen portraits of what the brand calls its community — muses Esh already works with, like Kiki Willems, alongside England's son Lux Gillespie and Londoners cast straight off the street — with no visual hierarchy separating the professionals from whoever was found that day. A companion fanzine, free at AllSaints stores and released in limited numbers during London Fashion Week, extends the same instinct outside the clothes entirely.
Esh has talked about wanting his own label to reflect "the clothes I see when I'm at a house party, or the clothes someone would wear to do an off-license run" — democratic in the literal sense, not the marketing one. Applied to a chain with hundreds of doors instead of one showroom, that instinct becomes a bet: that care and speed scale together, rather than one getting sacrificed to reach the other.
At the till in any AllSaints, the fanzine sits free, no barcode, waiting for whoever picks it up — cut from the same instinct as a button finished so precisely that no thread shows at the seam.
