Start with the cloth, because that is where Heron Preston starts. The garments going on display at ComplexCon this weekend are cut from a heavyweight cotton, tightly woven, dense enough to hold its own shape. It is recycled, not salvaged. Factory off-cuts and production scraps were broken back down to raw fibre, spun into new yarn and woven from scratch, so nothing in the finished fabric reads as secondhand. Next to the rack sits a Formula E GEN4 car in a livery Preston designed.
Preston has spent a decade finding the good material in places nobody was looking. The clearest example is still the first one. In 2016 he went to the New York City Department of Sanitation and asked to work with their decommissioned uniforms, and showed what he made from them at New York Fashion Week. Six years later the Metropolitan Museum took the work into its permanent collection, which is a strange and funny outcome for a pile of old workwear, and also the whole argument in one sentence. He did it again in 2021 with crash-test airbags from Mercedes-Benz, building three looks that inflate and deflate the way an airbag does.
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05What pushed him in that direction was a swim. He has said that being in the Mediterranean showed him the scale of what pollution was doing, and how much of it his own industry was responsible for. He came back and changed what he was making.
Ask him what the work draws on and the list is personal rather than professional. His African American heritage. Skateboarding. How people live. Playing loud dance music late at night in small rooms. The clothes that come out of that borrow their bones from workwear and military design, and what he says he wants from them is endurance: pieces that adapt, that live and age and evolve, built for longevity rather than spectacle. That is an unusual thing to want in fashion. It is an ordinary thing to want in a garage.
Racing clothes have always come from the same place. A driver’s suit is workwear with a sponsor list on it, and the patches, the piping and the flat thin-soled shoe were function long before anyone wore them to dinner. Fans have been raiding the paddock for style for decades. What the sport sells them back is a team tee and a cap.
Formula E has spent twelve seasons on a parallel idea, which is that nothing should be used only once. Its cars recover energy under braking and spend it again. When the partnership was announced on 28 September, the framing was neat enough to be suspicious and true enough to hold: Preston turns recovered materials into desirable design, Formula E turns recovered energy into racing performance.
The fabric comes out of eX-Ray, Preston’s materials programme, which studies fabric to cut the environmental impact of what he makes. It develops a material rather than choosing one off a shelf, and that is the reason the cotton feels the way it does.
This creative partnership is about rethinking what motorsport fashion can be. I’ve always been interested in taking materials, processes and ideas from unexpected places and finding new ways to give them purpose. Working with Formula E gives me the opportunity to bring that approach into a world where performance is everything. We’re looking at how apparel can be thoughtfully designed from the material up, balancing function, quality and a more considered approach to how things are made.
Heron and Formula E share a curiosity about how things work and how they can be made better. In racing, we push for greater performance while using energy and materials more efficiently. Heron brings a complementary perspective, exploring what existing materials can become through design. This partnership gives us the opportunity to develop those ideas together and apply them to the products people wear. ComplexCon is the first look at that shared ambition, with the potential to build a more considered approach to motorsport fashion over time.
What exists right now is a car, a rack of clothes and a bolt of cloth in a convention hall. The partners talk about a wider programme covering performance wear, fashion, fan merchandise, accessories and products made from upcycled materials, but beyond the preview pieces no line, price or release date has been announced. ComplexCon runs 3 and 4 October at the Los Angeles Convention Center, a room full of people who care about sneakers, art and music, and mostly do not care about motorsport. That is clearly the point.
