There is a particular kind of attention that HARRI's work has always attracted. People stop. They look. They call the pieces art objects, sculptures, cultural documents. The inflatable latex work has been worn on BRIT Awards red carpets, showcased at the Design Museum, discussed in terms usually reserved for gallery installations. All of this is earned, and all of it, quietly, presented a problem.
Art, by default, gets put behind glass. It gets admired from a distance, cordoned off, preserved. HARRI did not want a label that people admired from a distance. The question that eventually became MuseumWear was not a design question. It was a sharper one: who, exactly, do we actually want to dress?
Who MuseumWear was made for
The answer did not come from a mood board. It came from looking at the people already closest to HARRI: musicians, architects, graphic designers, painters, ceramic artists, entrepreneurs. People who had made a specific kind of decision at some point in their lives. They had moved, often far, in the name of creativity. From Kerala to London. From Eastern Europe to East London. From wherever they started to wherever the work could happen. They had given things up: proximity to family, financial certainty, the easier path. They had arrived in a city that asked them to justify the choice every single day, and they had stayed.
These are people who live inside their own creative process the way other people live inside their schedules. Inspiration is not a weekend luxury for them. It is the infrastructure of the work. And their wardrobes, HARRI noticed, often did not match the seriousness of what they were doing. The clothes were an afterthought. MuseumWear was designed to change that.
Why it is called MuseumWear
The name is a question disguised as a statement. Why do you go to museums? Why do you go to galleries, to exhibitions, to any space where someone has arranged objects or images or structures for you to stand in front of and feel something?
You go to get inspired. To reignite something. To understand a point of view that is not your own, to be reminded that people make extraordinary things, to walk out of the building slightly different from how you walked in.
HARRI's proposition with MuseumWear is straightforward: dress for that occasion. Not for a boardroom, not for a gala, not for the performance of professionalism. Dress for the state of being open to something. Dress up to get inspired.
Most clothing is designed around events: what you wear to a wedding, to an interview, to dinner. MuseumWear is designed around a condition, the condition of curiosity, of active engagement with culture and ideas. The name is the brief. If you are the kind of person who goes to galleries and openings because it is simply what you do, these clothes were made for you.
How MuseumWear was designed
HARRI did not design MuseumWear from the outside in. The process began with research. A team member sat down with creatives they knew: an architect, a painter, a ceramic artist, another painter. They looked at wardrobes. They asked about commutes, about studios, about Friday evenings, about what you wear when you have three hours before an opening and you have come straight from work. They documented everything.
What emerged from those conversations was a brief that had nothing to do with trend and everything to do with real life. The garments needed to be easy to wear, easy to wash, easy to move through a city in. The same piece had to work at 8am in the studio and at 8pm at a private view. Not by being neutral, not by disappearing into the background, but by carrying enough design intelligence that it could hold its own in both contexts without any effort from the wearer.
The MuseumWear collection is the result: denim, leather, cotton, everyday latex, printed fabrics, embroidered trousers, laser-cut leather, woven leather, silhouettes that carry the logic of HARRI's sculptural practice without any of its spectacle. The same thinking that produces a garment requiring 40 hours of hand construction also produces a pair of trousers you can get on the Overground in.
Where the inspiration came from
The textures are the point of entry. Walk slowly through the Barbican, or the Tate, or any building designed to hold ideas, and you begin to notice things that have nothing to do with the art on the walls. The repetition of the floors. The geometry of the ceilings. The way a shadow falls between two surfaces. The curve of a staircase. The grain of concrete. The dark between lit spaces.
All of this became design material. The Black Laser Printed Jeans carry the mark of a process, laser cutting producing a surface that reads like texture absorbed from a building rather than printed onto fabric. The Straight Leg Printed Trousers move through the same logic: pattern as architectural reference, not decoration. The Latex Pleated Trousers bring the material HARRI is known for into a silhouette that works without inflation, without spectacle, without requiring the wearer to be performing anything.
This is the full-circle moment that made MuseumWear feel necessary rather than merely logical: the things you get inspired by in a museum became the clothes worn by the people who go there to be inspired. The inspiration completes itself in the wearing.
The Barbican. September 2025. London Fashion Week.
MuseumWear SS26 was shown at the Barbican during London Fashion Week in September 2025. The choice of venue was not incidental. The Barbican is among the most architecturally serious buildings in London: its brutalist geometry, its deliberate relationship between space and light, its permanent mandate to hold both art and life in the same building. Showing MuseumWear there was the argument made physical.
The collection launched publicly in summer 2026. For a label whose work has lived, until now, mostly in the territory of the exclusive and the extraordinary, MuseumWear is a different kind of statement. Not less serious. Not more accessible in the sense of being compromised. Accessible in the sense of being usable, daily, by the people it was made for.
Those people know who they are. They moved somewhere for the work. They are still here, still doing it. MuseumWear is for them.
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Cover Image, Image 2 & 4 - PC: Dmytro Pochkun, Image 1, 3 & 5 PC: Rossella Damiani
