Mr Samuel Ross is about to start philosophising. He furrows his brow in thought, his tattooed hands resting on the small white desk in his office: “There’s this sense of exclusion in the fashion industry,” he says, “which actually causes this pin head… and if you can find a way to have this inflection point and communicate it…” I’m trying to keep up, but I must look lost, because he trails off and laughs: “Wait, I’m talking too heavy, let me try to come back down.”

The designer is known for his tendency to get a little too, well, cerebral. I find myself wishing I’d brought a dictionary to our interview, which early on has somehow turned into the kind of deep-and-meaningful you find yourself having at 4.00am at a house party. We’re talking about how it is that he’s managed to create such a strong brand at such a young age – at only 29, his brand A-COLD-WALL* is already worth upwards of an estimated £12 million – and we’re already slightly off track.

This is not surprising when you consider the designer’s notoriously complex reference points. Mr Ross mines the cross-sections of socio-geographic relationships within the UK, weaving architectural references and spatial theory with his background as a young black guy who grew up between London, the North and the Midlands (he was born in Brixton and later moved to Leeds and Northampton), and grapples with themes in his collections that are both intellectually highbrow and rooted in gritty, British life.

“I think part of the magic is that I’ve had an incredibly normal upbringing in working-class England,” he says, speaking with a little more clarity. “I can relate to the guys in Birmingham who grew up only wearing Nike TNs and shell nylon. I can also relate to my family who grew up next to Brockwell Park in Brixton and the guys who would only wear 400 GSM grey Nike tracksuits. And that all comes into play when capturing a generation’s spirit.”

And capture that spirit he has. It’s not an overstatement to say that Mr Ross is one of the most important fashion designers in the UK right now. After spending a few years as a “one-to-watch” (he was a finalist for the LVMH Prize and won the Fashion Award for British Emerging Menswear Designer in 2018), he has grown A-COLD-WALL* into one of London’s most notable contemporary brands. “It’s not ‘buzzy’ anymore,” he says. “It’s established.”

Backstories aside, let us not underestimate the hard business strategy at the heart of A-COLD-WALL*’s success. Mr Ross divides his consumers into distinct categories, and builds specific products with them in mind. For “The Artisan”, for example, someone he describes as “the guy who might want to go and see the Rachel Whiteread exhibition at the Tate,” he makes clothes that are more expressive in their silhouettes or their fabrics. Then there’s the “Conscious Professional”, who is more straightforward in his clothing choices, and is likely to be looking for something more functional to support his work and day-to-day life.

While this approach might seem austere, to Mr Ross, it is quite the opposite. “It’s this balance of the modernity of the professional workplace versus what you lounge in,” he says. “It’s building clothes for men’s lifestyles and categories, which, again maybe sounds cold, but it’s part of humanising the product.”

When we meet at his studio on the Strand, he is incredibly charming and friendly, shaking my hand and showing me to a chair before offering up some sanitizer. When conversation inevitably turns to the impact of the coronavirus, Mr Ross is calm and upbeat. “We have such tightknit relationships with our producers and our wholesale partners that we could actually pivot quite quickly. We were able to decentralise and keep up a solid momentum,” he says. Throughout the pandemic, Mr Ross reports that A-COLD-WALL* has had its highest revenue recorded for online sales: “We’ve actually seen a lot of silver linings in relation to Covid, which I kind of believe are relevant to consumers being forced to make a critical decision of who they want to spend their capital with online. So in a way, we’ve had an opportunity to accelerate.”

This growth spurt comes at a pivotal time for A-COLD-WALL*. After spending its first few years categorised – perhaps unfairly – as a concept-heavy brand that’s almost ready-made for hype-hungry youth, the designer’s most recent season feels decidedly more adult. The hoodies and T-shirts that the brand came up on are still there, but they’re more refined, with a rain hood here, a concealed zip there, retaining a utilitarian, streetwise aesthetic that doesn’t get lost in artistic posturing.

There’s often talk of a disconnect in London’s fashion industry, where the unbridled creativity of upstart fashion graduates from schools such as Central Saint Martins and the London College of Fashion is let down by their inability to turn that creative magic into bottom line sales. But Mr Ross isn’t from those schools, and he didn’t study fashion – at least not at university. His alma mater is De Montfort University in Leicester, where he graduated with a BA in graphic design and illustration, going on to work at Imperial GB, a company known for its work creating cookware. Mr Ross has found strength in bringing the functional aspect of product design to the fashion table.

Indeed, Mr Ross’s role models aren’t clothing designers, but people who design buildings. He cites the seminal architects Messrs James Turrell, Massimo Vignelli, Shusaku Arakawa, Francis Kéré and Christo as inspirations. These are people, he says, who “have shaped how we view the world. The goal isn’t just to have a successful business, the goal is to affect the psyche of how we view space, shape, form, colour and design.” He pauses again to see if I’m still following. “Stop me if I’m getting too ephemeral,” he laughs.

Those already familiar with Mr Ross will, of course, know that he spent the early part of his fashion career as the protégé of Mr Virgil Abloh. A DM on Instagram eventually led to an internship, culminating in a three-year working relationship that spanned everything from working with the designer on the collective BEEN TRILL (a goldmine of the early streetwear zeitgeist from which also emerged Mr Heron Preston and 1017 ALYX 9SM’s Mr Matthew Williams), through to the start of Off-White and working with Mr Abloh on Mr Kanye West’s collections for A.P.C. “It was like something you’d see in a film to be honest,” says Mr Ross of the first time he met Mr Abloh in person in Paris. “First night, I got there, dropped my bags, went straight to the club to meet Virgil and Kanye. The surrealism of being from the Midlands, and almost crossing over into this new world of North American fashion and hip-hop culture, and integrating into that…”

Mr Ross is in no hurry to forget the positive impact of his mentors. In the aftermath of the killings of Mr George Floyd and Ms Breonna Taylor at the hands of the police in the US, Mr Ross set up a series of initiatives, donating £10,000 to Black Lives Matter and delegating grants of £2,500 each to 10 black-owned businesses and entrepreneurs across eight sectors. The recipients include Mr Michael Omotosho, who builds household appliances with inbuilt light and energy solutions, and Mr Haisam Mohammed, who runs Uniform, a groundbreaking fragrance brand in Stockholm that’s inspired by the stairwells of high-rise buildings. “It maybe felt a bit cold and precise and systematic or process-led to do that, but that is what people are missing, these [educational] programmes. They don’t need a warm fuzzy moment, they need cold, hard sales,” he says. “It’s not about kinship or friendship. The man in the boardroom doesn’t need to ‘be’ the change, he needs to facilitate and empower the change.”

Mr Ross clearly feels a lot of social responsibility on his shoulders alongside his business success. So how does he manage it? “In a way, I don’t process it. I guess there’s a fear of complacency, which is probably linked to work addiction,” he says. Coming from a school of designers that includes Messrs Virgil Abloh, Jerry Lorenzo and Kanye West, Mr Ross is fully aware of the competitive anxiety that comes with the territory. “We’re more interested in the sport than the end result to a certain degree. Outside of the addiction to the work, there’s an understanding, fundamentally of what it takes to produce and reach a goal of exceptional product, and it takes a lot.”

When I ask him what he does to relax, he smiles, bemused – as if I’ve just asked him if he believes in aliens. “As I approach 30, this idea of self-development is supplementing relaxation, because fundamentally that’s just more fulfilling. I always make this joke about not having a lot of friends, because you just work, you’re so committed to it. Of course, I’ll watch Netflix sometimes, but like, I guess relaxation has been traded for self-development,” he says. “Maybe not the most enjoyable trait, but it’s true!”

We’ve been talking well over our allotted interview time, but neither of us has noticed – despite his tendency for lofty discourse, Mr Ross is a warm conversationalist, everything he says buoyed by a kind of understated self-belief. “It sounds moderately spiritual, but my confidence in my work is led by what I believe people need and want and what I should be offering them,” he says. “There’s a truth and honesty there.” Once you decode some of the heavy thinking behind Mr Ross’s brand, that’s exactly what you’ll find – reliable, wearable, and honest clothing, created by a man who is designing a product that people want to buy. And you can’t argue with that.