In 2016, while working as an in-house designer in London, Ed Curtis began planning a project that felt more personal. In his South London bedroom, Curtis created a 360-degree installation of paint and paper in striking, riotous color—somewhere between the chaotic splatters of Francis Bacon’s studio and an explosion in the art room of a kindergarten. He adds that it felt like a breakthrough, or at least an expression of what he really wanted to be doing. “I liked the idea of making a space into one giant painting, and that was definitely the first project that got me really excited. I always had the intention of merging it with fashion, but I think it really did take me five years to work out how the two could come together.”

The five years Curtis is referring to is the stint he spent working under Katie Hillier and Luella Bartley at their cult label Hillier Bartley, which, with its refined, rakish tailoring and throwback glamour feels a world away from Curtis’s energetic, boldly graphic designs. It makes more sense when you learn that Curtis’s introduction to Hillier and Bartley came through Marc Jacobs, with whom he interned in 2012 as a student at the London College of Fashion. After graduating and hearing that the pair were to be taking over the Marc by Marc Jacobs diffusion line from a studio in London, he was put in touch. Just over a year later, when the line closed, they kept Curtis on to launch Hillier Bartley.

While Curtis speaks fondly of his five years at the brand, which he left last year (he still moonlights as a print consultant for J&M Davidson, the British heritage label at which Hillier is creative director), he felt the urge to start building his own, distinct visual DNA. “Working professionally as a designer, you’re constantly referencing other people’s work, and I guess I wanted to build my own world from my own art, which I could have as my own resource to constantly reference,” he explains. “And now, in the last year, all of it has been merging together, and all the work I’m doing is constantly feeding back into the clothes.”