Who is Heron Preston, H&M's new creative menswear director?

Friends with Virgil Abloh and Kanye West, the streetwear designer is known for creativity and sustainability

Heron Preston was born in San Francisco, before moving to New York to study design. Getty Images

H&M has named American designer Heron Preston as its creative menswear adviser.

Preston will act as a creative director while producing his own seasonal capsule collections and advising across the main menswear line, the Swedish fast-fashion giant said, calling the hiring a “long-term partnership”.

Along with the late Virgil Abloh, rapper Kanye West and music producer Pharrell Williams, Preston is the latest American to be snapped up by an European company for his fashion savviness, creativity and, perhaps most importantly, his credibility.

A designer, photographer and DJ, the multi-hyphenated Preston was born in San Francisco, before moving to New York to study at Parsons School of Design. There, he began documenting the city's street life in a viral blog that caught the eye of Nike, who hired him as a global digital producer.

In 2012, Preston crossed paths with a group of friends that included Abloh, the late Louis Vuitton menswear creative director; Matthew M Williams, Givenchy creative director; and Justin R Saunders, founder of cult design studio JJJJound. Together the quartet founded the streetwear brand Been Trill, and soon Preston was also working as art director for Kanye West on his Yeezy brand and The Life of Pablo tour.

From left, Heron Preston with his fellow Been Trill designers – the late Virgil Abloh and Matthew M Williams. Photo: Been Trill

In 2016, after witnessing the effect of pollution first-hand, Preston had an unlikely collaboration with the New York Department of Sanitation. Inspired to show how fashion can be less polluting, he designed a line of zero-waste clothes called Uniform that sold out immediately, while the following year he launched his eponymous fashion label at Paris Fashion Week.

In 2018, he was approached by Nasa to create a space-themed capsule collection to honour its 60th anniversary. He followed that up with a line for workwear brand Carhartt that blended utility with luxury. He also designed the tour merchandise for Justin Timberlake’s Man of the Woods tour.

Preston also runs HPC Trading, an online platform for art, fashion and music, and has recently begun experimenting with sustainable materials, such as a collaboration with MycoWorks in 2022 to create a fruit bowl from an innovative material made from mushrooms.

In 2023, he founded Led Studio – which stands for Less Environmentally Destructive – as a hub for creative thinking around how to reduce environmental impact.

With H&M, Preston will have a wide-reaching remit. Acting as design adviser across menswear, he will help cement future talents and collaborations, as well as bolster the brand's profile around sustainability.

With fast fashion widely acknowledged as driving unsustainable levels of waste, Preston will head new initiatives around recycling, including a project to repurpose donated clothes into a new collection. His first collection with H&M is expected to arrive in 2024 via a 40-piece capsule.