Sweater vests and a Stella, please: designer Adam Jones is the boozer’s biggest fan
Welcome to CHEW THE FAT WITH…, our long-form profile series where we invite you to sit down with fashion’s next generation as they dig deep into their memories. To chew some fat - defined as an informal conversation brimming with small talk - we encourage you to pull up a chair and take a big old bite as we spill the tea on the life and work of the industry’s need-to-knows. Just remember to mop up after yourself.
Welsh designer ADAM JONES could probably drink you under the table. That’s if he hadn’t already stumbled across Alan Carr, Grace Jones, and Lindsay Lohan — his dream pub companions — hunched outside his local puffing on a fag. He’d definitely give it a good go anyway. After all, even by The Guinness Book of World Records’ standards, he’s undoubtedly the boozers’ biggest fan.
On the very rare occasion he’s not down the pub sipping on a crisp pint of Stella (kegs have been home delivered in lockdown), the 30-year-old designer is in fact magicking abandoned beer towels into sell-out sweater vests and striking slogan scarves. Like a magpie-gone-rogue he turns the ‘rough’ into diamonds, upcycling overlooked materials into cash-grabbing designs. Does this process give him a kick? “100%, that’s ‘the thing’ I think. It freaks me out at the moment that people are having clear outs. What is being thrown out?!” he exclaims down the phone from the home he shares with his boyfriend in Deptford, South London. “You can't take it to a charity shop, you can't take it to a car boot sale. Can people be bothered to put it on eBay or Gumtree? I'm just like, ahhh, there must be so many treasures being thrown away!”
On the surface, this boozy aesthetic all seemed to start from a happy accident. Jones found a gang of old beer towels haphazardly thrown into a skip right by his London studio, thanks to the closing of a local pub (“and I was like, okay here we go”). But with a bit of personal introspection, he realised this was a product of fate rather than good fortune. “I was thinking about it the other day, like why am I actually obsessed with pubs?” he muses, recounting his quasi-exotic trips from Froncysyllte, his “sleepy Midsomer Murders” hometown in Wales – “it really is like bake sales and literal tug of wars across the canal” – to England as a kid. “Weirdly I feel like there weren’t really restaurants in the '90s…you just went for dinner in a pub on holiday or any event really. Like a christening or a wedding, or a children's party, they all took place in the function room in a pub. I kind of hated that as a teenager and wanted some glitz and glamour, but then I fell back into these kind of old man pubs and saw the beauty in them.” Luckily, the flourishing love story between him and his beloved watering holes was never interrupted for long. When he finally moved from Wales to London in 2015, it only took him six months to retreat, tail between legs, from stuffy fashion parties to the city’s dilapidated pubs. Ironically, these archetypal British institutions have become his very own homeslice of Wales. “Now I've got a few favourites that really, you know, I could be in Wales if I didn't look outside,” he laughs.
EB: There’s a pub in Bethnal Green called The Dundee Arms that you’d like.
AJ: I've definitely gate-crashed a funeral in a pub round there. I've done this a lot weirdly, gate-crashing parties and weddings and funerals in pubs.
EB: Completely by accident?
AJ: Yeah! With like a buffet and a pool table. Everyone's dressed in black and there’s lilies everywhere.
EB: Has anyone ever been like, who do you know here? How are you related? And you’ve had to lie?
AJ: Yeah…that has happened!
Continuing to trace his design aesthetic back to his somewhat conservative childhood, Jones recalls how his mother would avidly rip out any “obscene” images from GQ, the only ‘fashion’ magazine available to him apart from HELLO. He quickly cites how “weirdly inspiring” the lack of stuff in Wales was, but emphasises how coming from a fashion-devoid town brought him a “point of difference” in design. “You just got little snippets of it; do you know what I mean? I didn't really know what fashion was...” he explains. “It just wasn’t something that was there, so you always felt kind of different. You couldn't wear anything strange or stand out. And I would do that as a weird kind of sick thrill so people would say something. I remember wearing a plastic barbed wire necklace, a denim jacket covered in badges, and those old trousers with all the strings. Non-school uniform day was the best day ever, you know?”
This kind of impish behaviour served him well as a newly arrived cash-strapped twenty-something in London. With a BA from The Manchester School of Art under his belt, followed by a brief stint making “sexy nun outfits” in a fancy dress shop on a barren industrial state back in Wales, he felt it was time for the big move – his finished first collection firmly in tow. What gave him the final push? An impromptu message from punk king and iconoclastic designer, Judy Blame.
EB: Could you tell me the story of Judy Blame discovering you on Instagram?
AJ: I think he re-grammed one of my photos which is just...it wasn't even my work. It was a paint splat on a piece of cardboard that I’d taken in the street. I was like, okay wow, that's pretty cool. I think he found my work through that. He started messaging me being like, ‘I really want some stuff’. I didn't really know much about him then to be honest, but I quickly educated myself! I sent him a scarf and didn't expect him to pay for it. You know, he can have it for free. I was moving to London, and I was just going to get job in a pub or whatever. And then he put my name forward to Christopher Shannon. He got me the job there pretty much. And then he turned up at the studio after like six months or something with a 50 quid note like, ‘here we go’.
EB: That's so nice.
AJ: So yeah, he was the first one to kind of believe in me.
EB: And did that make you believe in yourself more?
AJ: Yeah, definitely. He gave me a magazine and signed it for me with some advice on. I got it framed.
EB: What does it say?
AJ: "Darling Adam let the fur fly".
EB: I feel like you need to get that tattooed on your body.
AJ: I totally would.
And just on cue, as if scripted, one of Jones first jobs in The Big Smoke saw him pulling pints at The Jamaica Wine House in Bank. “I used to get in trouble a lot. There were loads of homeless people around the outside, so I used to steal crisps and fill up pints and take them out. I’d even bring them into the pub, and they'd take their tops off and start dancing. I basically befriended all these homeless old guys and would try and give them a nice time. Luckily the manager quite liked me, so I got away with it!” Jones even charmed the manager into letting him showcase his first collection there. His friends did the make-up, a flurry of models lay on top of the sticky bar. Unsurprisingly, for a first show, hardly anyone came. But fast forward to today, and his self-proclaimed “expensive hobby” has unwittingly turned into a full-time business. His made-to-order designs are currently available in 50M, APOC STORE, AKYN, and OPENER.
His recent SS21 collection is a Martin Parr-on-acid ode to the Union Jack. Think deeply distressed jumpers and oversized baker-boy hats plastered with the messy red, white and blue insignia. It’s a tongue-in-cheek jibe at the British Flag, which he believes has transformed from pop-culture icon to ostracised emblem. Is this a reaction to post-Brexit Britain? He sighs. “I’m just kind of fed up with Brexit. We've done it now, let’s just be proud of our flag again. It's more of a pop-culture image than anything and I just wanted to see that back again, and not to be scared of it. Even though my family would probably hate that!” he laughs. “Wales is quite anti-England and the Welsh dragon isn't on the British flag blah blah blah. But yeah, it's just something I've always been obsessed with. As I’ve mentioned, when I’d come on holiday to London I would buy anything with a British flag on. I’d buy postcards of the queen and put them on my wall. I just want to encourage people to feel okay and use it again.”
That task might take some time. But for now, Jones has no other big plans for the future. “I don’t know what else I want actually, I’m happy how everything is. I just want it to continue basically. I'd love to travel for materials. I just wonder what Berlin antique halls have. What’s lying around in the Paris flea markets? I'd like to travel to broaden my designs,” he says. Sadly, for now, he’s going to have to stick to his more regular hunting grounds: Spitalfields Market on a Thursday, Covent Garden market every Monday. “People are buying my stuff every day,” he continues. “And so, for me, I've already had success. I'm really happy with what I've done and where I'm at, and anything else is just a bonus now.”
Naturally, we digress back to the topic of the pub. He mentions how a man once spat in his drink down the boozer as a sort of “kinky chat-up line.” But that doesn’t put Adam Jones off his post-Covid reveries. The first thing he’ll do after lockdown? “Oh my god, pub crawl! I’m already planning it.”
@luke_million. Courtesy of @adamjones_mens_womens