by “There has never been a hierarchy for me,” says Samuel Ross of his multidisciplinary creative approach. “Art, design, fashion … I love everything. I could never decide. They all feel urgent and there are messages that have to be communicated respectfully for each of these media.”
The Polymath, born in Brixton, who grew up in a liberal household and was taught at home for seven years, said he always knew that he would work in the arts. “The idea of being an artist never really had a separation from my sense of purpose and himself,” he tells me when we meet in Milan to discuss his latest project, an installation that was created in collaboration with the Whiskey brand The Balvenie for the city’s design week.
After graduating from De Montfort University in Leicester with a degree in graphic design and illustration, Ross began his career in product design, but found experience restricting. As a natural self -starter, he used his free time to build a number of websites that extend different cultural sectors, which attracted the attention of the late Virgil Abloh, the then creative director of Kanye West, Donda. Abloh was, he said, “emitted the network and searched for a new generation of talents”; He brought Ross on board as an intern, then as his design assistant, and gradually the couple started working closely together with Abloh’s many projects, including the establishment of his fashionable brand that does not know. “We moved into much more dynamics of the brotherhood,” Ross recalls. “We had this creative dialogue, but we gave each other who were ambitious who were about growth and the democratization of a sector that was relatively private.” He remembers lively when he spoke to Abloh the last time before his death. “It was the night until he died and he should see a flight to the debut of a new work at Design Miami. The last message he sent me:” Yo, I could not be there, but go to my show. “
Ross has clearly inherited a strong driving feeling and the ability to combine creative instincts with commercial ingenuity from his mentor. In 2014 he founded his own fashion label A-Cold-Wall*and grew he from a “bedroom business” to a global success story in the next decade with income that reached 16 million pounds in 2023. He continues: “I am naturally the British Caribbean, so I had to tell a story that reflected my surroundings, and there came many color palettes, shapes and references – postmodern architecture, the failure of brutalism, state culture … I simply suggested what was in front of me, and gave him a new vernacular.”
Ross sold the business in 2024 and had already started to build his SR_A industrial design with the money that he had won by winning the 2019 Hublot Prize. “There was enough capital for me to finance this new idea about which craft, luxury, design and the studio can ask for a future generation,” he explains. Cooperation with brands that are as different as Beats, Apple, Hublot and Acqua di Parma have enabled him to increase the income by 45 percent in the past half decades. “We have autonomy and freedom to work only with the craftsmanship that we choose – for example, we produce all of our leather goods in British tanneries.”
The concept of the craft is one for which Ross says he has “great awe”; He is responsible for the responsibility to be an “administrator” of the sector and the diverse skills in it. His partnership with the Balvenie for Miland Design Week was a typical example: he was inspired by the complexity of the distillery process led by craftsmen and set out to articulate elements of it through a sensual experience. In the historical foundry in the Milan Isola district a suitable backdrop, before which a story about the production was told-the installation kept the installation large copper frames (an indication of distillation techniques) and walls with running water, which took up the intermediate in the one-diving experience. When entering the room, visitors experienced a temperature drop, a fog on the skin and the percussive sound of water droplets, which regulated downwards. “It was about celebrating whiskey as a liquid nectar through sound, animation and scale,” says Ross.
For those who could not travel to Milan for the design week, there is a new opportunity to see the world through Ross’ unique lens if this year he curates this year’s London Design Biennale. The topic of “surface reflections”, which made from Somerset House-based exhibition, has been an opportunity for Ross-The since 2020 to accelerate the careers of promising young creative personalities through his program for black British artists Grants in order to promote talented designers from all areas. “Voices that come from certain regions should take on their own cultures and opportunities for manufacturing instead of trying to join a homogeneous perspective that is not their own,” he says in conviction. Promoting the next generation of talents is of crucial importance for growth in its eyes. “The arts play a major role in keeping us as a country on the global stage – but young people need references for objective success. In Samuel Ross’ hands it will certainly be.
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