When Everything Changed for Matty Bovan

My name is Matty Boven, and I'm a fashion designer, and I'm based in York, Yorkshire. Growing up, I was very influenced by my mum and my grandma. They were both quite glamorous, but not really into labels or into the status of fashion. So I think I approached it from much more of a creative point of view. I'm originally from York, and I'm still based in York, actually, but I did come to London to study, and I went to Central Saint Martins to do fashion design knitwear. I had my own first solo show nearly 2 years ago, which sounds crazy, and I think that's when people actually started to kind of realized it was more than just a very brief moment. There's like a seismic shift in people kind of being more interested in the brand. You're on like such a personal journey. You want to challenge your own ideas of taste, of fashion, of creativity. Being a designer in 2019, like the internet's an incredibly important tool and having a website's an incredibly important tool. I like to have the record of the work because if people are interested in the brand, they engage with the website and then they see this kind of progression, you know, and each season's a very different character for me. Designers in sort of 2019 are much more like polymaths about it. They are doing a lot of different things. It's incredibly important for people to see it in one place. For me, a really integral part of working is taste and levels of taste and questioning what is tasteful and what is— what's good taste, what's bad taste. I think really it's kind of almost my job in a way to present people with things they would necessarily not like, whether it's a colour, a texture, a shape. My idea is to really challenge and push what I think is tasteful as well.