Introducing Heron Preston

Heron Preston, founder and designer of his namesake label, is part of a new generation of fashion designers who, versatile and curious, is helping to redefine the way we think about streetwear, luxury and sustainability. As many people grown up in the post-internet era, he has an eclectic talent. He is an artist, a creative director, a creator of content, a clothing designer, a DJ... there are no borders. For him to experiment, playing with different arts and disciplines is as easy and necessary as breathing. And everything that he does becomes an immediate success.

It is the true birth of Heron Preston which, a couple of months later, debuts at Paris Fashion Week, gaining global attention with his style always on the edge between street, workwear and couture. Although from this moment on, fashion becomes his main activity, the thirty-year-old continues to divide his time between artistic installations and DJ sets.

Born and raised in San Francisco, Heron Preston Johnson was inspired at an early age by his police officer father, who sparked Preston’s interest in uniforms and encouraged his education. For his junior and senior years, Preston attended New Technology High School in Napa, California, a school funded by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that featured glass classroom walls and provided each of its 200 students with a computer. “I remember seeing tours of business people walking through the hallways and I felt like I was in a fishbowl, or in an experiment about some new futuristic world of education. It was in that high school that I learned how to code. I also had a new media class where I learned to use software programs like Photoshop, Illustrator and Dreamweaver,” Preston said to Elle in 2016. Although Preston taught himself to code HTML, he credits the New Tech High with the diverse skill set he accumulated, which inevitably led him into the blogging world that later acted as a springboard for his career.

A skater and confessed internet nerd, Preston naturally developed an interest in graphic T-shirts as a teenager. One of his friends happened to have access to a screen printing factory outside of San Francisco and the two began making T-shirts, Preston’s first foray in fashion design. Along with learning to code, blog and design, Preston’s time at New Tech High helped him hone his social skills, in particular within professional environments. “It was group-based learning. We did a lot of presentations,” Preston said to Freshness in 2006.

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