“I never went for a job interview,” Esh relates. His hiring by AllSaints CEO Peter Wood came out of a conversation that started when they happened to sit together at the Fashion Awards in London in 2024. “I wrote him this manifesto for the business, saying it should be ‘real life not runway.’It’s a for a new tribe of people—a mixture of age and body type. It’s not about being stick-thin in Paris.” It was the opportunity to up the design ante at a brand that does £100 million, has 300 stores internationally, and does about half its sales in the United States that really excited him. “It’s how the economy and the market’s going. To me, to be able to make that kind of change at a high street brand is way cooler. In America, we’re put next to Coach and Rag & Bone.”
Esh could talk for hours about what AllSaints meant as a teen growing up around London in the ’00s. “ To me, it was when Kate Moss was going out with Pete Doherty—that time. AllSaints was really prevalent in British culture on the high street then. They’d created something that was part of that type of Brit pop thing,” he says. “It’s a very British sensibility, but not about whimsy and the countryside. It’s a brand that’s authentic to London.” He’s been pushing the relevance of that authenticity from AllSaints’ spacious headquarters in Spitalfields in London’s East End, a converted red brick building housing a team of 40 designers, an atelier, management offices—and, at the top, a separate space for Esh’s own-label studio, “They’ve been really amazing about giving me that. With no strings!”
He describes the intensity of months of rigorously re-fitting what already existed, upping the quality, and amplifying the messaging across women’s and menswear. “It’s about cut and nuance, working on the body. I want it to be approachable but desirable—whether it’s amazing denim, a silk trench, a bomber jacket, or a peacoat. Keeping the lived-in nature of the leather.” Working closely with his muse, mentor, and collaborator Katy England, who started her storied career as Alexander McQueen’s stylist in 1994, the two have come up with a wardrobe Esh believes “is a much for a 50-year-old woman as an 18-year-old boy.”
