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In a season full of designer debuts at established labels—there’s 15 if you’re keeping count, which we are—only a few have an air of mystery about them. Such is the case for Nicholas Aburn, the new creative director at the New York label Area. Aburn has taken the reins from Piotrek Panszczyk who co-founded the label with Beckett Fogg a little over a decade ago, and turned it into a fulcrum for American glitz, glamour, and fantasy. (Fogg is still Area’s CEO). The 37-year old newcomer may not yet be a household name, but he arrives at Area with over a decade of experience working at Tom Ford, Alexander Wang, and most recently Balenciaga’s couture studio. Perhaps most important of all, Aburn arrives at the label as a fan.
“I was recommended to Beckett by a friend who knew I really liked the brand,” he explains on a recent morning at Area’s temporary Tribeca studio. “She was like, ‘I have this crazy thing to propose to you, would you be interested?’” He was announced as the new creative director in February of this year, and a month later began working on the collection. “I don’t want to change everything, I think it’s more about layering in characters and living in reality.” He pauses to think. “I mean, New York is a fun reality.”
His New York reality is, admittedly, slightly tinted with rose-colored glasses. Aburn grew up in Maryland, but has spent the bulk of his adult years in London and Paris, and he currently resides in Milan where most of Area’s production is set up. “The plan from the beginning was that I was going to be 50/50 between New York and Milan, but the reality is that there’s always a fitting, there’s always something, so I haven’t been here that much,” he says. “I’ve been in New York a lot in my life, but I do kind of feel like I have this Hemingway, American-from-afar relationship with the city.”
The first glimpse of Aburn’s vision came in August, when the Area Instagram account shared the message, “Area is reconsidering everything, in the meantime consider…” followed by over a hundred images of cool girls from the last 30 years. Think Debi Mazar in the ’80s, early-aughts Rihanna, ’90s Gwen Stefani, and current-day Lily Rose-Depp, Bella Hadid, and Taylor Swift. Images of 1980s Park Avenue ladies in their puffiest, most jewel-toned finery appeared next to IYKYK types like the singer-songwriter Okay Kaya, the stylist Helena Tejador, and artists Jamian Juliano-Villani and Julie Verhoeven, among many, many, others. Viewed individually on social media, the images brought to mind a specific kind of downtown party girl, but at the studio, where all of the images had been printed and taped up on giant inspiration boards, they were just cool women (and ok, a few men) with their own inalienable sense of personal style, who seem to love—no, need—to do things their way.
Aburn knows a thing or two about doing things his own way. Growing up in Maryland, he fell in love with fashion while watching Elsa Klensch on CNN with his mother. “My mom used to watch her, so I watched with her and afterwards I would drape my mom’s clothes and scarves around my younger sister and do fashion shows,” he remembers. When it came time to go to school, though, his parents had other ideas. “They wanted me to apply to Ivy League schools, but I secretly applied to Central St. Martins,” he explains. He didn’t get into any of the Ivies, but he did get into CSM. “I was like, ‘look, there I can be the best at this thing,’ and I figured out that it was cheaper to go to school in London.” They remained unconvinced. “They said if you want to pay for that, you can pay for that, and so I got a job; I worked full-time at the Prada store while I went to college. I would literally run across from the Bond Street store to school in my Prada uniform, and I was at odds with [my classmates] in that sense, but it was a good thing because it made me an observer. It made me very serious about work and about fashion.”
He graduated in 2010 and stayed on to take the MA course with the legendary Louise Wilson, famous for being exacting and demanding of her students. Wilson, as it turns out, failed him. “She really liked me, she gave me a scholarship, but then the dynamic shifted because I wanted to make quite real things—or at least things that referred to reality—and she just was not on board,” he recalls. Luckily, he was still able to show his collection in the exhibition, “hidden in the back.” That’s where David Bamber, Tom Ford’s longtime design studio director of womenswear found him. “He actually said that he knew Louise hid good students in the back, but I think he was just being nice,” he laughs. He went from having failed his course to being the first one in his class to land a job. “I still have the sheet that says I failed, I’m weirdly proud of it.”
At Tom Ford, Aburn worked for four years as a VIP designer, creating some of the custom dresses that celebrities wear on red carpets and at premieres. “The head of women saw what I was doing and was like, ‘do you want to do some stuff for the collection? And I was like of course I do,” he recalls. And so after “clocking out” of his day job, he would set about creating sketches for the main line until the wee hours. He adds, “I really wanted it.”
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