Released in conjunction with the online launch of the FW18 collection, A-COLD-WALL* founder and creative director Samuel Ross has debuted his brand’s accompanying campaign, shot by London based photographer Hamish Stephenson and styled by Yi Ng and Elliot Long. Below we go behind the scenes of  the campaign in a set of candid imagery.

The collection we saw in February offered a distillation of the guiding principles behind A-COLD-WALL*. Both contemplative and conceptual, the season presented many of the aesthetic codes that Ross observed during his time living in Leicester, Northampton and Leeds, intentionally de-contextualised within the fictitious setting of the National Gallery as a means of stripping away the class-based preconceptions about both the venue and the clothing.

The designer drew part of his inspiration from the modernism of Sir Anthony Caro, the renowned English abstract sculptor whose metal works would often include found industrial material. Ross was drawn to the power of context and the way in which Caro could transform the agency of a material, be it steel beams or wire mesh, from profane to sacred, simply through reconfiguring the context in which they were presented. Accordingly, the materials we associate with utilitarian workwear uniforms, a raison d’être for Ross, were reconfigured in a way that defied our instinctive associations. Whether it’s the vernacular of British council housing or thermo-reactive nylons, Ross is interested in bending perceptions and abstaining from conventional approaches.

Cue the FW18 campaign in which we’re presented with what appears to be a modern day Sisyphus (The king of Corinth who, in Greek mythology, was punished by having to repeatedly roll a boulder up a hill), dressed in technical outerwear, flexing with the weight of giant boulders on his back. Perhaps an evocation of how prejudice and preconception can weigh you down and impede progress, or perhaps not, the interpretation is left subjective, either way it’s a suitably powerful follow-up to what was a brilliant collection.