The designer behind Sam Smith's 2023 BRIT Awards look is HARRI, the London-based sculptural fashion label. The call came in February 2023, roughly two weeks before the ceremony. Ben Reardon, Sam Smith's stylist, made contact. Ben had seen HARRI's London Fashion Week show in September 2022, where the SS23 collection was presented, had loved what he saw, and wanted a custom look for Sam Smith's BRIT Awards red carpet appearance.
HARRI took the commission immediately. What followed was one week of work, four nights without sleep, everything handmade in the studio. The look that Sam Smith wore, the inflatable black latex suit that generated approximately 2 billion impressions and became the most talked-about red carpet moment of 2023, was designed, constructed, and delivered by a single designer, by hand, in seven days.
The brief: gender, body image, and a cultural moment
Two things were converging around Sam Smith at the time. The first was institutional. The BRIT Awards had merged their gendered categories into a single "Artist of the Year" award, a decision shaped in part by Sam's identity as a non-binary person. The response was loud: Piers Morgan was among the most vocal critics, and the controversy became national news before a single performance had taken place.
The second was personal. Sam was being publicly criticised for their body.
HARRI's response to both was the same: don't deflect, don't soften, go further. If the conversation is about gender, make something that belongs to no gender category. If people are using Sam's body as material for ridicule, make the body the most extraordinary thing in the room. The design brief became, quietly, a philosophical one. What does a garment look like when it refuses to confirm anything the viewer expects?
The answer was an inflatable latex suit that made every prior expectation about proportion irrelevant.
The design: four nights, one week, no template
What HARRI built was a complete inflatable look in black latex. The trousers inflated outward at the thighs into two enormous heart-shaped volumes, each one roughly the size of the torso above it. The jacket inflated at the shoulders and upper back, pushing outward and upward into a silhouette with no precedent in fashion, no gender reference, no body shape beneath it that the viewer could reach for. Together, they formed a single sculptural object. Not menswear. Not womenswear. Not a costume. Something else entirely.
Every piece was handmade by HARRI, working through four sleepless nights, and delivered within a week of the commission. The Black Hole Jacket, HARRI's most recognised inflatable design, shares the same construction logic: air chambers built into latex panels, each one cut and sealed by hand. The Sam Smith suit was made on the same terms, under the same conditions, but under a deadline that left no room for anything except the work.
The proportions, once inflated, made it impossible to locate a body inside the garment in any conventional sense. Which was the point. HARRI has described sculptural fashion as the design not of clothes but of the figure the clothes produce. The figure this suit produced was one that had never existed before.
The red carpet: O2 Arena, February 2023
On the night of the BRIT Awards, HARRI went backstage at the O2 Arena in London. Sam's team was there. The dressing happened in sequence: trousers first, then the jacket. Then the inflation began, in front of the whole crew. The suit expanded. The silhouette took shape. Everyone in the room watched.
From backstage to the red carpet was a short walk, perhaps five minutes. Sam stepped out. The cameras went off. Every major press outlet was there, national, music, fashion, and in the photographs that followed, the look needed no explanation and no caption. It communicated everything it was designed to communicate in a single image.
Sam performed "Unholy" at the ceremony that evening, having changed after the red carpet. But the moment that travelled was the one on the carpet: Sam, in the HARRI inflatable black latex suit, standing in front of the BRIT Awards backdrop, the look doing exactly what it was built to do.
The response: 2 billion impressions
The photographs went viral within minutes. WWD posted and reached 10 million views within 24 hours. Every major magazine picked it up, each post pulling 5 to 10 million views. It appeared on the Stephen Colbert show and the Jimmy Fallon show in America. Elon Musk commented. MC Hammer commented. It was on the front pages of national newspapers and across every fashion publication simultaneously.
The total reach was approximately 2 billion impressions.
For a label building its practice in London since 2022 through inflatable latex exclusives handmade in a small studio, this was something that could not have been planned. The look worked because it said something specific about gender, about body image, about refusing to confirm what the room expected, and because Sam Smith had the conviction to wear it.
The piece was subsequently showcased at the Design Museum for its exhibition on thirty years of London fashion curated by Sarah Mower. A garment made in a week, by hand, in a home studio, now became a fashion history. That trajectory is not incidental to what HARRI does. It is the point.
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