Man with a Mission

Multidisciplinary creator Samuel Ross delivers poignant cultural observations via highly covetable objects.

By Stephen Wallis

issue 3 2021

For Samuel Ross, design has always been a vehicle for exploring ideas around culture, class and identity through form and material. The creative force behind the luxury streetwear label A-COLD-WALL—which he founded in London in 2015, at age 25—Ross quickly made a name for himself with asymmetrical, boldly sculptural looks inventively crafted with utilitarian and tech-forward materials, projecting a British working-class sensibility through a high-fashion lens. “I was interested in how invisible layers of society could be reflected in the highest end of runway fashion,” says Ross, who grew up in Northampton. “There was a pocket to engage with and add some value to the industry, which is why the brand slingshotted from quite early on.”

Today, A-COLD-WALL has a team of 30, producing four collections a year—plus a more accessible ACW line and collaborations with companies like Nike and British outerwear firm Mackintosh—selling at some 200 retail outlets worldwide. The clothes have evolved too, retaining an unconventional edginess while becoming more streamlined and functional and, as Ross himself has said, more optimistic in spirit. It’s a shift from the almost dystopian vibe of earlier years, amplified by Ross’s theatrical, multisensory runway presentations, which have deployed such effects as shifts in temperature, wind tunnels, grating sound- tracks, even dancer-actors seemingly struggling in shallow pools, menaced by a barking Rottweiler.

Incorporating elements of performance and installation art into his shows was a way of “making runway storytelling about what is felt emotively versus what is told,” as Ross puts it. It also reflects his love for environmental design and object making, and his desire to be a multidisciplinary creator—not unlike his mentor, Virgil Abloh. Now the artistic director for Louis Vuitton menswear, Abloh handpicked Ross to apprentice at his fashion label Off-White and on projects for his then creative partner Kanye West when Ross was fresh out of graphic design school. At the time, Ross had been making street art, doing sound production and creating abstract films while working a day job at an ad agency—a career path he says he immediately recognized “would not fulfill the pursuits that I had in mind.”

Like Abloh, Ross possesses a relentless creative ambition that defies conventional professional boundaries. Despite his lack of conventional training in fashion, Ross says it was something that he engaged with instinctively, because “it was the voice of the creative zeitgeist for millennials and Gen Z.” From the time he went out on his own and started A-COLD- WALL, Ross operated his studio like an experimental artistic practice, which included a range of creative and commercial collaborations. With his designer friend Jobe Burns, he founded Concrete Objects, making Brutalist-inspired tabletop items such as cups and incense burners in cast concrete and resin. He designed custom outfits for artists Takashi Murakami and Daniel Arsham. He also began experimenting with larger sculptural objects, including his conceptual point of refuge Terminal One—an arresting open-work structure containing blankets made using an upcycled fabric developed with Nike— that was awarded the 2019 Hublot Design Prize.

As Ross continued to ramp up his design and art initiatives, he launched a new studio, SR_A, to be complementary to but independent from A-COLD-WALL. One of SR_A’s first projects is a group of furnishings that Ross had been quietly developing for a few years and will officially unveil at Design Miami/ with the New York gallery Friedman Benda.

It’s a major new direction in Ross’s design portfolio, one that he says came naturally, partly inspired by his artist parents’ engagement with craft. “My father is a stained-glass artist, so there’s always been this exposure to hand skills, production and making,” Ross says. “Though it did take time to come to grips with how to articulate anything in a form related to furniture.”

The initial series of three pieces, all chairs, are deeply personal, rooted in the African diaspora experience and the dislocation Ross has felt in Britain, where only three percent of the population identifies as Black. His Trauma chair, which riffs on traditional West African chairs, marries elegantly stylized form with an emotional gut punch. Crafted from steel and charred OSB board, the chair is finished in a coating of molasses lacquer—evoking the sugar cane trade’s dark history of slavery, colonialism, and environmental degradation. “When the hot molasses fuses with the wood and the plastic polymers in the OSB, you almost get this scar tissue which forms,” says Ross, who also pierced the backrest with several steel-ringed holes, a gesture that might be read as abstracted wounds from a whip or bullets. Standing five feet tall and weighing more than 70 pounds, the chair—which Ross clarifies is not intended “to tell a political story” but merely serves as “accurate documentation”—is literally and symbolically a hefty piece.

A second series, quite different visually, combines creamy white Carrara marble with geometric steel elements powder coated in a vibrant orange color Ross describes as embodying a sense of warning and vigilance. The dialogue between the natural and the man-made materials is at the crux of these works. “There’s a tension between how the marble is treated like this soft amorphous and quite an organic form versus this linear, reductive and heavy industrial steel, which represents modernism and the West to the 10th degree,” explains the designer.

Arguably the most spectacular of the four pieces in this group is an asymmetrical X-form lounge chair that calls to mind West African birthing chairs, its white marble seat and dramatically elongated back attached to a minimalist orange steel structure. “Because of the illusion of how weight is dispersed on this, it has a velocity and a sense of movement,” says Ross. “The skewed portions are extreme and they’re quite beautiful but they’re also very respectful of the reference points, of it being fundamentally a piece of African furniture heavily distorted through a Western modernist lens.”

And there’s more to come. Ross is working on large-scale soft sculptures that tie in with his fashion work by “recontextualizing fabric,” he says. Some of those works are included in a new book— one of three he will have put out this year documenting his work, process, and inspirations—and Ross hopes to include examples in his first solo show at Friedman Benda, slated for next fall.

Ross acknowledges that a lot is happening at once, though he’s taking it in stride. He describes his relentless schedule—workdays can run from 7:00am to well past 10:00pm—as “moderately” rigorous. “I’m aware that these are the formative years,” says Ross, who is charging ahead like a man with a mission. And he’s got some serious momentum.