“I don’t want this to sound cliché,” Aaron Potts said during his presentation at New York Men’s Day, “but I’m happy to say this season started with watching Summer of Soul.” The Academy Award-winning 2021 documentary by Questlove that covers the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival using footage from the event set the tone for spring and informed Potts’s overall vision for the season.
“It touched me so deeply and I wanted to find a way to recreate the era,” he added, with the caveat of avoiding making costumes or being too literal. “I wanted to express the feeling of liberation, joy, and community.” The latter has become a key element in fashion of late, particularly to designers like Potts who exist outside the mainstream—those who have navigated the industry looking to stay niche and off-center. Community is, in fact, how Potts also runs his business. A friend of his made the season’s prints, an intern made the hats, another produced the soundtrack, and his cousins helped finish off hems and other details. It takes a village, they say.
Spring saw Potts lean into what he’s become known for—those shape-altering, hulking A-line dresses and bottoms—and explore how he could grow his business without straying too far from his distinct genderless vision. Potts is at his best when he focuses on honing his signature cut. This offering displayed a controlled hand when it came to creating and manipulating volume. Most striking were a pair of horizontally striped trousers (paired here with a tank top), a powder blue dress, and a white cotton shirting top with cargo pockets. It’s in these pieces and a few others of the same nature where one can appreciate Potts’s eye for shape and for cutting balanced volume for the body.
New for this season and under the A. Potts umbrella are a series of bodycon pieces. The designer mentioned that he’s been having “a bit of a tough time with unisex,” which is a recurring theme for brands seeking to offer genderless assortments. Traditional retailers don’t particularly know how to buy and merchandise these assortments so they’re successfully exposed to all customers, so they often feel the need to fall back on requesting binary gender-specific items from their designers. Such is the case for Potts, who said that his buyers requested womenswear pieces in traditional sizing, which he will add to his wholesale assortment moving forward while keeping his direct-to-consumer offering true to his genderless vision. As Potts continues to expand his vision into this space, it’ll serve him well to keep in mind the details that keep his usual assortment differentiated.
“There are people who love it [his unisex vision] and live it,” he said. People like him, in fact. After all, he added, his vision “is not about a gender, but about a shape that works on your body; something that inspires you and makes you feel like who you are. I just want people to have these tools to be themselves.” Potts is an industry veteran, and he’s worked for enough brands and been “shoved in a box” before, so this time around he’s not letting anyone bend his arm. “I’m at a point in my life where I’m just like, ‘Fuck that,’” he said. “If you try to play the game and be what people want you to be, they’ll kick you to the curb.” Amen to that.
