In the week leading up to Conner Ives’s late February runway show at London Fashion Week, amid a seemingly never-ending to-do list of model fittings and adding finishing touches to each look, the 28-year-old designer wrote himself a reminder in his phone’s Notes app: “make a T-shirt that says something.”
The night before the show, that was the one thing he still had on his list. He grabbed a white T-shirt from a pile of deadstock and used heat-transfer paper to print a slogan that described what he was feeling at the moment: “Protect the Dolls.” The whole process took two or three minutes.
He then wore that shirt — which uses an affectionate term for trans women — down the runway when closing out his show. The shirt went on to steal the spotlight.
“We woke up the next morning and our whole inbox was just people being like, ‘Where do I buy this?’” Mr. Ives said in a phone interview from his apartment in London. “It all happened so quickly.”
Since then, the shirt, which sells for roughly $99, has become a sensation, seen on celebrities like the “Last of Us” actor Pedro Pascal, the singer Troye Sivan and the designer Haider Ackermann. Most of the proceeds from the sales are being donated to Trans Lifeline, a nonprofit community group and crisis hotline. And demand for the shirts has thus far surpassed his team’s capacity to fulfill the orders.
Political slogans on clothing, particularly on T-shirts, have been a growing trend, creating a perfect opportunity for the “Protect the Dolls” shirts to thrive. “In the modern day, what is more ubiquitous than the graphic T-shirt?” Mr. Ives said.
The designer took some time out of the long Easter weekend in Britain to discuss how he was navigating the “overwhelming” response.
Your T-shirt is just everywhere now — did you expect this?
In a best-case scenario, I was like, “We’re gonna raise like 50, 60 grand.” And that would have been a great day.
But it has now gotten to a point, like this past week, where we were putting up like 1,000 units in the morning and by the midafternoon they were gone. We’ve just never seen that kind of response. Prior to this, we would do maybe 50, 60 orders a month. We’re literally so short of staff that we don’t even have the people to respond to these emails and stuff. So, the majority of it, I’ve just been doing myself.
How much have you raised in total?
So as of right now, net sales are at 190,235 pounds (about $252,600). The way we’re kind of doing the rough math of it is that we reserve approximately 30 percent for the raw material costs, production, the printing, shipping, all of these things and then everything else goes directly to Trans Lifeline.
It’s kind of gotten to a point where I wrote to my P.R. yesterday and I was like: “Do I need a board of trustees? Is there tax implications for this?” Maybe this is something that happens a lot in fashion, but we’re really kind of making it up as we go.
Your whole ethos as a brand is sustainability and slowing fashion down. So what does it feel like now to be ramping up production and dealing with a completely different pace?
It’s definitely tough. I feel like I’ve had a lot of conversations over the last few years where it’s people being like, “You just need to scale this.” And I would notice myself clamming up a little bit. I’m not opposed to scale, but just being like on the other side of things — understanding how margins work, all of these things — I know there are a lot of people out there who are really just stealing your money. I’ve always very purposely tried to create products that don’t really follow that business model.
The part of me that can get behind all this is that this is for a cause — I would probably have more of an issue with this if this was a viral designer T-shirt that we were pocketing the funds to.
Can you take me back to the moment when you decided to create it?
It was very reactive. I knew I wanted to say something, given what we’ve observed in the last few months with the U.S. government and the current political regime. There was a hesitation because I don’t think I love the concept of politics as fashion and fashion as politics. I can see how they can intermingle, but any examples that I could come up with always felt very self-serving. Being the head of my eponymous label, by definition, is a self-serving situation. So I think that that’s maybe what I’ve always been hesitant about with my work — I try to remove myself from it.
But we’re in very trying times right now — the world is changing in front of our very eyes and there was a helplessness that came with that. The girls who walk my show are trans and I have so many friends that are trans women in the United States. It reached a point where I couldn’t really remove myself anymore.
The slogan is so clean and catchy. How did you come up with that?
I love stuff like that. My boyfriend and I always joke that if I wasn’t in fashion I think I would be like an ad man or something. There’s something really fun about coming up with a jingle. Or something as simple as an Instagram caption.
We workshopped a few things and there was one rendition in the beginning that was “We Heart the Dolls,” almost like the “I Heart New York.”
But I knew that the T-shirt itself had to be the call and the response. And “Protect the Dolls” felt like it was better getting to the meat of what I was trying to say. My love for my trans friends — I don’t think that’s something that I have to promote on a T-shirt. Whereas the protection of my trans friends feels right now like something that is being taken for granted.
Given the overwhelming response, are you reaching a point where you may just stop producing this shirt?
I have this conversation with myself every night as I’m laying in bed. I think it would be wrong to stop. I spoke with my production manager yesterday and I said, “This is getting out of hand, we need to re-evaluate how we’re doing this.” So we’re definitely investing in the infrastructure that will accompany this. The end goal for me would be to keep this as something that we can continue to sell and can continue to raise money for Trans Lifeline.
It’s kind of hard to be excited about any of this. It feels so upsetting that this is the world that we have to be in, this is the statement that we have to make in 2025. Are you kidding me?
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
Alisha Haridasani Gupta is a Times reporter covering women’s health and health inequities.
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