By Cassell Ferere originally published on Forbes.com

In a new campaign paying homage to workwear and essential workers of New York City, Heron Preston and his namesake line return to the market with a deeper exploration of the category and trend. Workwear has been the catalyst for designer Heron Preston, launching his brand in 2016 through an inspired eye that identified blue-collar workers of New York City as "style icons and the faces of fashion". Preston notes. 

Queues of workwear live throughout the Heron Preston brand, often utilizing silhouettes and familiar materials while including a sense of usage tastefully embedded throughout. With a designed-to-last approach, Heron Preston represents an elevated language in workwear.

Preston describes this process as an “instant language that Im always trying to design into [each] collection, not to try and alienate but to invite. The face of fashion is all of us. All the exercises have been more of a styling exercise, less of a fashion exercise.” This exercise [or flex] Preston describes has already taken the fashion world and the blue-collar world by storm with his intricate collaboration and homage to the Department of Sanitation of New York. 

“It's about shining a positive light on them. It’s also reminding them that they are cool. Janitors, or people who clean up, or civil (service) workers, are overlooked. They only acknowledge when they’re in the way.” This Fall/Winter '22 collection and campaign define a passion for designing workwear for its functionality and utility - a workwear purest. 

Items like the fireman jacket, the quilted workwear jackets, and utility pants have an ever-evolving language dedicated to highlighting the mundane aspects of an innercity and its gritty appeal. Details protrude as a reference to the real world and the people that occupy and maintain the spaces we avoid in any metropolis in search of convenience through modernity. Reflective construction tape, tiled words, industrial firm texts, corporate logos, and “official” badges celebrate the bootleg culture and aesthetics that ubiquitously influence Heron Preston and the workwear-focused pieces.

He called in photographer London-based Garbiel Moses to New York City as part of an experiment to immerse the young creative in the blue-collar scene of the Big Apple. Preston says he was “really excited about working with Gabriel Moses. Working on set with him, given his lighting, his use of color, and his style, I realized you could put anything on set with Gabrielle, and it will look good. I was really fortunate enough that he agreed to work with me.”

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