Matty Bovan

Matty Bovan (born 1990) is a British fashion designer. He founded his eponymous label in 2016 after graduating from Central Saint Martins, and has presented it at London Fashion Week while running the business from his home city of York, England. In 2021 he won both the International Woolmark Prize and its Karl Lagerfeld Award for Innovation. Working in hand-crafted knitwear made with local suppliers and deadstock fabrics, he has also created fashion installations for Somerset House, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, and NOW Gallery.

Early life and education Bovan was born in 1990 in York. His grandmother taught him to knit when he was eleven years old, On the MA he was taught by Louise Wilson, who advised him to document how he dressed in photographs. After three seasons with Fashion East, he made his solo London Fashion Week debut in February 2018 with a show opened by Adwoa Aboah. His entry, "Ode to the Sea", grew out of his Fall 2021 collection and was built around intarsia knits made with local suppliers in York and end-of-roll cloth from the Yorkshire mill AW Hainsworth, screen-printed with images from his own archive. That month he also presented his Spring 2023 collection at Milan Fashion Week, invited by Dolce & Gabbana after Stefano Gabbana began following him on Instagram. Shown in the city's Navigli district, the collection used corsetry and denim reissued from the Dolce & Gabbana archive, which Bovan hand-painted; the house also lent him seamstresses, production resources, and funding without involving itself in his process. His Fall/Winter 2024 collection appeared in February 2024 as Hello My Old Talismanic, a film shot at Burton Agnes Hall in which Bovan modeled the 26-look, largely tweed collection himself. In May 2024 he made an installation for a basement of the new Dover Street Market store in Paris. His Fall 2025 collection drew on the female protagonists of David Lynch's films and on Nolan Miller's costumes for the television series Dynasty; the lookbook featured his mother, Plum Bovan.

Design approach Bovan has kept his label in York rather than moving to London, saying the space and flexibility there make the work possible. His studio hand-dyes yarns in small batches, sends them out to knitters in the city, and hand-paints the returned panels; its knitting is done on domestic punchcard machines and by hand-crochet. He frequently builds collections from deadstock and end-of-roll fabrics. He has argued against mass production in fashion, saying that "craft is more important than ever". His references include science-fiction films such as Blade Runner, Mad Max, and Alien. Hannah Marriott of The Guardian has described his work as mixing "sci-fi dystopia with kitchen sink craft".

Awards In 2015 Bovan received the L'Oréal Professionnel Creative Award, shared with Beth Postle, and was one of three winners of that year's LVMH Graduate Prize. He was nominated for Emerging Designer Womenswear at the Fashion Awards in 2018 and again in 2019. In 2021 he won both the International Woolmark Prize and the Karl Lagerfeld Award for Innovation.