Aitor Throup: is the business model a design model?
The AZ Academy mentor on commerce, integrity and building a system that protects the work.
We need new roadmaps in fashion. Leaving school with a mountain of debt and a dream is a strategy few designers can rely upon in 2026. As fees at prestigious design schools continue to climb, we’ve partnered with AZ Academy, a free Milan-based fashion course born out of the late Alber Elbaz’s AZ Factory – his brand turned fashion incubator – and overseen by Richemont, Creative Academy and Accademia Costume & Moda (ACM), to democratise access to fashion business education and a roster of esteemed industry figures.
By Joe Bobowicz
In the two decades since his breakthrough MA collection, When Football Hooligans Become Hindu Gods, Aitor Throup has never called himself a fashion designer. Now, as he re-appraises his business model for a new era, the title might finally fit. “It’s in the making,” he says mysteriously, teasing a strategy for what he sees as his first proper fashion brand. Video-calling from his London studio, Throup is wearing an oversized asphalt hoodie with wired circular glasses, a tidy beard and moustache. He talks in a soothing Lancashire lilt, gesticulating in deliberate, controlled explosions to explain his ideas the way a scientist might.
At points, our conversation feels like a masterclass in industry survival. He orates his theories and applies them to real-life examples. Fitting, given that he will be returning as a guest lecturer for AZ Academy – Throup’s no-nonsense creative realism makes him the perfect mentor. Over the course of his career, he has positioned himself as a product designer cum artist, largely eschewing the runway format and seasonal collections for sculptural presentations, films and ever-evolving design capsules. Amongst the menswear cognoscenti, his work is like gold-dust, collected and studied for its anatomical articulations, seam-allowance-less constructions and the kind of fastening devices that make the humble button hole look primitive. The cult of Throup is strong.
Born in Buenos Aires and raised in Madrid until he was 12, Throup’s story begins in his hometown, Burnley. There, on the football terraces, he discovered technical sportswear labels. “As a kid in the early 90s, I used to spend all my money buying Stone Island and CP Company jackets,” he says. “That was like an education for me. I knew there was something otherworldly going on in these garments.” Chasing the scent, he made his way to Manchester Metropolitan University to study fashion design, eventually coming to London’s Royal College of Art for his postgraduate in menswear. One of his external tutors at the time, stylist Simon Foxton, had tipped off Stone Island and CP Company’s then-parent label, Sportswear Company, so a few representatives came down to his final show, culminating in an introduction to former Stone Island president, Carlo Rivetti. By AW08, Throup had already launched a collaboration with his favourite brand – a single coat, painstakingly modularised so that each segment connected and responded to one other like a human body.
The AZ tutor’s MO, for those unacquainted, is tightly distilled design that puts the reason first, not the end product. Then, he resolves a series of chronological issues, eventually landing on a garment that is free from fluff but charmingly futuristic and ergonomic. This systems thinking is not just a design philosophy, but also a broader operational model that has defined his approach to manufacturing (expensive fabrics, small runs), his launch methods (cerebral exhibitions) and his funding pipeline (consult and collab). Similarly, guest designer roles and long-term positions at brands have all seen him respond to a set of constraints, honing a foundational design language that he now feels is ready to tackle capital-F fashion.
Along the way, he’s toyed with his own “pseudo brands” – New Object Research, launched in 2013, was one esteemed example – while also widening his skillset to cover art direction, film and creative direction, flitting between gigs for Kasabian, Umbro, Topman and beyond. To his core, he believes that integrity is the most valuable commercial asset you can build, and because of that, he’s never given in to the expectations that come with perceived success: huge wholesale orders, merchandising plans, bloated inventories and fabric compromises.
Has it paid off? In the following conversation, we unpack his hard-headed approach, charting his journey as the stalwart designer’s designer who made a seemingly sustainable business, rewriting the playbook for selling your trade without selling out.
How you approach your design decisions is also mirrored in the way that you’ve approached your business. From the get-go, you’ve understood your profession as product design, adapting to problems in succession before landing on a prototype. Let’s fast-forward to now. How do you think this methodology has shaped what you’re doing today, both as creative and as a businessman who needs to finance his company and maintain good cash flow?
To be perfectly honest, it’s a never ending learning cycle. I realised early on that I had an interest in fashion, but from the outside in. My work became adopted by fashion, but it wasn’t created as fashion. I wasn’t interested in playing the game of fashion, which is all about time. It’s a temporal concept. I was more interested in product design and timelessness. For a fashion designer, success might look like consistently good sales and being consistently relevant through time. For me, it was more about reflecting a fundamental truth and being conceptually and philosophically timeless, as well as materially and aesthetically. I get the impression people don’t typically know where to place me. Do people think I have some sort of brand, somewhere, that’s kind of expensive, that’s weird, that you can’t always buy? The reality is, for the last 20 years, I’ve just done a series of experiments – with my own work, but also through collaborations – to figure out how to exist within the fashion industry. Even though it wasn’t the reason I studied fashion, to become a fashion designer or have a fashion brand, it became an itch for me: how to have a consistent point of view in the industry without compromising my primary interest to only create things of value. I think I’m now at the intersection where I’ve worked it out. We’re now preparing to show the world the conclusions of 20 years of experiments, which will be a version of a brand – as close as I can get to one.
Exciting news.
Yeah. The fashion industry [functions like] any industry. The attributes that constitute an industry are the things that make it difficult for creative expression to evolve because it has to have parameters that are industrialised. With industrialisation comes standardisation, which creates a convention. So, there are pre-established formats and systems to how you make something. A factory will tell you how a seam or a shoulder is constructed. “This is a set-in shoulder or you’ve got a raglan shoulder.” And, “This is a flatbed [sewing] machine.” And “By the way, once you finish your collections based on all the silhouette types, you need to show it on a runway and make two or four collections a year.” Don’t get me wrong, it’s important to have parameters, but from an outside perspective – I always feel like an outsider – I find it too limiting.
It’s an unshakeable format.
When you start looking at how technology has evolved and how we’ve challenged conventions of commerce – think about how disruptive Uber or Airbnb were; we’re exploring new ways of getting from A to B or ways of staying in a different city. Somehow, fashion is stuck in the Dark Ages. For me, it was always about unlearning that stuff. That stuff, to me, does not look like success: following the rules, wholesaling with these silly margins and burning out because I’m creating deeply philosophical collections twice a year and putting them on a runway. It’s not workable for me. I knew what I didn’t want to do, but I was trying to make my own system. We all need a system and our own standardisation, but how do I build one that reflects my message?
When you were studying, you and the young designers around you were pushed to think big, creatively. But, graduating from your MA, did you feel financially and operationally prepared to step into work?
Well, for me, the concept of work looked and still looks very different to that of a conventional fashion designer. There’s a trajectory: you go to fashion school, try and get awards and press, and then you get a platform. If you’re lucky, the industry opens the door and you start churning out collections. I got those opportunities, those doors opened, and I felt an expectation. You know, you’re showing at London Fashion Week, now you’re at Paris Fashion Week, you now have to make money. But I was on my path. When I talk about it, I can sound a bit, “Wow, “I’m such a hero” because I fought the temptation, but it isn’t like that. I literally had no option.
The idea of me designing a hoodie? I buy T-shirts, I buy hoodies, I buy fashion, and I appreciate people who can design nice hoodies – and that’s not me. Looking back, I can see it clearly now. Basically, I ended up in an industry by accident. I went to fashion school to learn how to make garments because I was obsessed with football hooligans. And then that made me obsess over [Stone Island and CP Company founder] Massimo Osti; Paul Harvey, who became the lead designer for Stone Island; and Moreno Ferrari, who was doing this very futuristic conceptual, anthropological work with CP Company in the late 90s, early 00s. I was like, “I need to go and learn how to make a jacket.” When I finished my studies, I’d already become an expert in pattern-cutting, construction and storytelling within garments. But I’ve got no interest in the runway. A fashion designer is more like a chef running a restaurant, changing the menu every six months. They’ve managed to do that because they’ve got access to all the ingredients that have ever existed at their disposal. Like, “Oh, if we put this cut on this kind of fabric, that’s the new combination, and then that says something different.” To master that process, you have to essentially use other people’s ingredients. That’s the magic, that’s the skill, the craft of the fashion designer. But at the core, the artists that inspired me were doing something a bit different.
Building a collection as a fashion designer is kind of like being a stylist – a bit of this, a bit of that. I started thinking, “Well, that looks like fun, but my priority is to refine my message and optimise how I bring it out to the world.” Through those 20 years, that meant [sharpening] my ability to make product of the highest level through construction and pattern cutting, but sometimes, it meant learning to become a film director, a graphic designer, a photographer, or a sculptor. Through growing those skills and becoming a multidisciplinary artist, what I’ve inadvertently achieved is my own collection of ingredients – a hermetically sealed aesthetic system. It’s like a framework, if you will, but that framework also contains very specific components, whether it’s the masks that I’ve invented and systems of how to connect those masks to hoods or gloves onto sleeves or feet onto trousers, or seating articulations, like the one that I put in the [CP Company 20th anniversary Mille Miglia 2009] goggle jacket [which allowed wearers to sit in a car seat with minimal bunching]. Because I’ve got this solid foundation, I can add seasonal things into it. The variable is temporal and the constant is timeless.
You mentioned never wanting to have to make a hoodie or, basically, engage in tight merchandising plans or range building. Do you think that gave you more resources and freedom to play with?
Absolutely. Take someone whose objective is to launch a brand and survive and sell and have merchandising plans and all that stuff. Already, they are crushed by these limitations and expectations. I wasn’t building a range. Just over 16 years ago, I was given the opportunity to be on the Paris Fashion Week schedule. I’d only just graduated. In the leadup to that opportunity, most people would be figuring out their fabrics and making sure they had a good selection of products. I wouldn’t even have been able to design a collection. What I came up with was the idea of flexing in the industry as this new kid in town, saying “I’m not playing by your rules.” We did this multi-room exhibition in an art gallery. We had like 45 life-size sculptures for this exhibition. It was really cheeky because I called it Legs and subtitled it, “A retrospective of trousers”, which is the most punk thing.
I’m saying I’m that confident in my own work that, firstly, it’s just trousers. I’m going to show you every single pair I’ve designed from being a student to now. I concluded all of those archival toiles with a collection of three trousers that you could buy. We did a huge installation in Selfridges. They were my first retail order, made in the most expensive wool – British worsted from Yorkshire – with an outer and inner. The inner wool was Super 120s [one of the finest]. It was like silk next to your skin. On the outside, it’s too fragile, so I had a more stable wool – still luxurious. The material just to make one pair of trousers was astronomical. Even then, 16 years ago, these trousers were £1,200 at retail.
So how did you make that financially viable?
Well, if you get a chart of my career and look at all the things that I make and how those trigger collaborations, it’s this constant path. Like, “He’s not making a merchandising plan. He’s giving us these art products, collectibles that are making us scratch our heads.” Of course, these things are expensive, and people buy them, and they tend to sell out. And that’s great, but the short version of the answer is I developed a reputation for inventing and innovating, but also for having an artistic integrity within the system and not being bullied into selling a certain way because I wasn’t ready. It’s not that I didn’t want to; fundamentally, I just wasn’t ready to. I feel ready to now because of the ingredients. The more I did that, the more brands wanted to work with me because the approach to design is translatable. I could take how I reinvented a pair of legs – becoming this anatomical object – to an England kit. I can take the philosophy and bring it into your brand because your brand already has certain fundamental parameters. While I was working on my own and bringing those [signatures] into other brands – which worked really well – they were becoming more and more solid. So, they were becoming a brand in themselves, and that couldn’t be rushed. That’s what I’m the most proud of. When I do launch a brand, those components are pure.
In the past 20 years, we’ve seen massive changes to the retail landscape. Now that you’re looking at it anew, how will you approach that?
You know the Simon Sinek thing: the why, the how, the what. As an individual and as a brand, are you prioritising the what or the why? The best brands in the world that shift culture, like Apple, for instance, are fundamentally why brands. You become amazingly commercially successful, but you don’t compromise on your why, on your reason. So, even as I start building a plan, a system around building a brand, the priority and the reason is still the same: invoking some sort of emotional action with the viewer, the wearer, through the objects that carry the message, using product design principles to carry artistic values.
I actually think that retail is incredibly important because it’s the physical interface we need now more than ever in a technologically saturated era. It’s an opportunity to connect and engage with the audience. Even when I was doing experiments and explorations with New Object Research, I only ever wanted to work with retailers that were excited about and could accommodate an experience informed by the concept. That was very successful, and retailers were very excited about me coming in as a curator and turning their space into a gallery momentarily, so that’s still important to me. Working with the wholesale system, as long as they provide a very useful space for visibility, I think it can be 50/50 beneficial. However, churning out wholesale purely for wholesale numbers – that doesn’t work for me. It has to be strategic, optimising visibility. In the conventional model, the margins are all off. Like, “We’ve got a massive global retailer, and they can put it in X amount of doors, but they’re going to need further discount, even though they’ve got these huge margins.” That system just doesn’t work. Are you crazy? I think direct to consumer is incredibly important, but one has to figure out a system [of doing it] without bankrupting you through inventory. How can you make money out of direct [to consumer] without having the orders? It’s an interesting challenge that I think I have an answer to.
What is it, then?
There’s different aspects to it. I guess it’s about capitalising on the services that you can bring to an audience. I’ve been in the background refining all these skills that allow me to have a certain value to an audience. The old-fashioned, “Here is a garment on a hanger, and that’s worth this much.” And, “Okay, here, have this money.” It just seems as arbitrary as the runway. You see these young kids that have streetwear brands – they gamify some code, and they’ve got kids queuing around the block. That’s exciting to me. They’re just listening to the people, the culture, the streets.
Speaking of value, when some designers come out of school and start pricing their garments, they often do so according to what they think they’re worth, failing to take account of profit margins and target market. Is that something that you’ve learned about over time?
For me, it’s always been very clear that I’m working from the why, not the what. So, it’s a chain of events that end up resulting in certain decisions, including how much something costs. In those first 20 years, there were aspects of knowing and understanding the parameters of an industry – who sells what for how much. Like, “Let’s look at a product category. Let’s look at a shirt or a hoodie. What designers are selling it for what price?” I defaulted to learning what the most expensive hoodies are in the world. You know, I was like, “I really want to make this with a weird seam that we’ve invented, which is not commercially viable at all,” because I’d literally invented a system that allowed us to stitch garments without seam allowance.” That seemed like a really great thing to do to me; it makes no sense on paper. You lose so much money by preparing the garment to be constructed in that way. But the learning was exponential because I was able to develop not just an aesthetic, but also a philosophy of construction that people have referenced since.
Because I was always creating very expensive things, so as to not compromise my integrity, I had to play the game a bit and figure out: if our version of a hoodie goes in that store, what it’s going to be next to? We tried to keep it as close as possible to the price that it should have been, but it was never going to be. We could never have priced it as we should have priced it because we wouldn’t have sold a single unit. So, to force ourselves into having a point of view on a rail, we had to make certain compromises as we were developing this aesthetic and product language. Saying that, when I’ve worked with brands, I worked as a creative director, so I’m very versed in understanding the margins that are necessary to make something viable and how to compromise in an effective way without losing the product integrity. I’ve been able to bring those skills into my own brand as well.
Right. So how would you go about editing and dropping pieces from a collection to ensure it was conceptually tight and profitable?
Mmm... I don’t think I’ve ever ‘dropped’ anything. I just think you work in an essential way. Just make what needs to be made. My first ever collaboration with Stone Island, I spent one year working on one jacket. It’s my process. You’re working from the inside out, right from the why, outwards to the what. So you protect the concept, you protect the integrity of the idea, you protect the design. And then you’re like, “Okay, what do we need?” So you go from my first collaboration with Stone Island to the second collaboration [SS09] – a little range. We did a jacket, a trouser, a top and a cap. It feels very under control. And then it grows organically. You don’t go beyond your means. You only ever have to edit out if that process one day goes [exploding gesture with hands]. Like, “Oh shit. We’ve got 1000 jackets. Why do we have 1000 jackets?” It’s just stuff.
When I was creative director of G-Star, that was an observation for me. You’re making a lot of stuff. So the first thing I did was establish an Innovation Lab where I could show them how to go back to working in a small, controlled way. I just made three denim pieces in my studio – I think I was a consultant at the time – and it was an experiment. It wasn’t informed by merchandising, last season’s sales or this, that and the other. There were just three pure expressions of the best attributes of the brand. So the whole G-Star Raw Research [line] was a platform to allow newness to come out powerfully but quietly. Then, when it comes out, and it shouts, you start learning, like “That’s really powerful. Let’s make five of those. Let’s make 10 of those. Let’s make one of those.” So, it’s about organically growing.
Following that nugget of wisdom, if you could give a young designer one piece of advice regarding the balance of commerce and art, what would it be?
Prioritise the art always because that is the value that commerce seeks. That means two things. Refine the art, because I think art is communication. That’s all an art is: communicating something without necessarily being tied to a linguistic system. But the commercial thing: know your audience, understand them, because then the message will land. As much as I have learned about my products from the inside out, I’ve also understood how to refine them as a message so that they land in the fringes of the fashion system. Otherwise, it’s pointless. You know, you’re just shouting in an empty field.
Sage advice. Thanks, Aitor.
