Conner Ives was told his trajectory as an upstart young fashion designer would go something like this: “You’ll do this for however many years, you’ll develop your viral product, and then everything will change,” he said on a Zoom call in August from his flat in the Seven Sisters neighborhood of North London.
The soothsayers were not wrong.
Mr. Ives’s viral product wasn’t the ivory duchess satin duster and upcycled sequin minidress that the British model Adwoa Aboah wore to the Met Gala in 2017. It wasn’t the dresses made from spliced deadstock T-shirts, like the “Scarface” style Rihanna wore around the time she hired Mr. Ives, now 29, to help her introduce Fenty, her short-lived LVMH-backed fashion brand, in 2018.
His life-altering design came when he wore a simple white T-shirt printed with the words “Protect the Dolls” in all-capped Big Caslon font for his bow at his fall 2025 runway show during London Fashion Week in February.
The slogan tee, a call to action in support of trans women — commonly referred to as “dolls” in L.G.B.T.Q. culture — was the result of a last-minute surge of activist energy and guilt the night before Mr. Ives’s show. As an American living in London, he said, he “felt like my trans friends’ lives were being threatened by a country that I’m from.”
He was moved to create the Protect the Dolls T-shirt a few weeks after President Trump signed an executive order on the day of his second inauguration that withdrew federal recognition of transgender people and ceased federal funding for gender-affirming care, among other provisions that rolled back transgender protections.
The response to Protect the Dolls was swift and high profile.
Troye Sivan and Addison Rae wore Mr. Ives’s Protect the Dolls shirts at Coachella in April. A week later, Pedro Pascal wore the tee to the premiere of “Thunderbolts.” Haider Ackermann, the creative director of Tom Ford, posted a photo to Instagram of himself wearing the shirt with Tilda Swinton. She subsequently bought several tees and took her own selfie wearing one.
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The post There’s a T-Shirt for That appeared first on New York Times.
