Meet Patrick Church, the Joy-Inducing Designer Behind Instagram's Biggest Fashion Statements

POPSUGAR: There's a fantastical, almost larger-than-life quality to statement dressing, and you've described your fashion sense as flamboyant and "extra." How do you want your clothes to make us feel?

Patrick Church: Wearing sort-of "extra" clothes transports me to a different place, so I want someone to feel excited, like they're in a fantasy dream or something. That's nice to have, especially as the world can be so mundane.

PS: You put on something glamorous and it energizes you — you feel better for it.

PC: And you feel excited to wear it, you know? I could never find anything I wanted to wear, so I made things that I wanted to wear. I could never find anything that was like, "Oh my god, I need that." It comes from a very selfish point of view, my design.

PS: One of the things you've brought up before in milk.xyz is how exclusionary Fashion Week can be, and the fashion industry by extension. Couture usually caters to a select few, but you've been a real champion of inclusivity. As a designer, how do you make fashion accessible?

PC: I think it just can't seem threatening or elitist. I know I feel that a lot of the time, so I'd hate for someone else to feel like that.

PS: You consistently cast a wide range of models. Queer people of color are at the helm of your campaigns, which is fantastic and not at all common. What does inclusivity mean to you?

PC: Inclusivity is everything. I always felt like an outsider growing up, like I never felt part of anything. With my work, it was very much a selfish thing I was doing in the beginning — a cathartic release for me. My creativity helped me and still helps me through some dark times and some really awful experiences, but now that I see the brand growing, I see it's very much for other people. The work really brings people together; it feels like a family. Even though people are wearing my clothes or looking at my artwork, it's so much about celebrating them.

PS: The new collection is a celebration of feminine dressing: the silky feel; the feathery frays; the draped silhouettes; the chain links, even. Tell me about the inspiration behind it.

PC: I really wanted to go back to the root of all of all this, which was by mistake of me painting things on my bedroom floor: putting things together in a really naive way without the idea of final outcomes or the pressure of, will it succeed? The last collection I did, it felt a bit stressful and I was listening to a lot of other people. I wanted to go back to my instincts — which I should trust — and do something that I really thought worked.

I went to Miami quite a few times this year, and I love the sort of artificial landscape there. It doesn't feel real, and I wanted to create a . . . not kitsch, but glamorous kind of feel. I like to just have a lot of fun with it, you know? Have it not be so serious. I design a lot of the prints with my husband, Adriel [Church-Herrera], who's really good at helping me with prints and coming up with silhouettes. It's very soft and sexy and camp.

PS: You've said that gendering clothes is stupid and restrictive. Tell me more about that.

PC: As soon as I was able to dress myself, I never thought of gender when buying clothes. I always used to buy women's clothes, but I never even thought about it. I did the first collection and put these boys in dresses, which just made people go crazy: people just couldn't understand it. But to me it was so instinctive. I hadn't even considered it. I was like, "Aw, they'd just look so good in it." I don't consider gender when designing: I just make things for people, and I think people are more than gender. It's about the soul of someone.

PS: What's given you the confidence to come in and shake up the rules, like adopting a see-now-buy-now model?

PC: I don't really know how I'm shaking them up, but I guess I am. I trust my gut. I'm very stubborn: I want to do things the way I want to do them, and I feel like I know what I'm doing. I'm not very confident in many areas of my life, but creatively I know exactly what I'm doing. It's the only area of my life where I just feel like I can trust my instincts, and I know they normally lead me to better places.

A lot of it is working with my husband, who I feel is very clever. We spend a lot of time talking creatively, and he was saying, "I feel like this is getting really tired, the way we make something six months before [it's available to purchase] and people are bored of it." I feel it, too; I feel the pressure creatively to have stuff available immediately. It's such a disposable culture now — we get sick of things after five minutes.

PS: We Instagram one time and it's over.

PC: Exactly! Personally, I buy things, I wear them once, and I sell them because I won't wear them again. It's that thing of, how do we make this work for us as a small brand? And we were working really well with dropping last year, so I was like, "F*ck it, let's do things differently." It's the sort of American dream thing of doing it yourself.

PS: Do you think that confidence comes from being an artist first and a designer second?

PC: When I started this off — like a year-and-a-half, two years ago when I made my first collection — I very much was like, "I am an artist." The soul of the brand is that, thinking like an artist and not necessarily conforming. I've never been a conformist. I've always sort of done my own thing and led my own way. Even when I'm faced with challenges now, more corporate things, it's like, how do I keep my integrity? Life is about compromise, and you have to compromise to an extent, but I have to maintain that integrity.

PS: That leads into the conversation around your pièce de résistance, the leather jacket. As much as you sell prints to scale, the hand-painted garments are really a signature, blurring the line between art and design.

PC: When I was younger, I used to be obsessed with Vivienne Westwood, the sort-of punk movement in England, the DIY aspect of that. I still find it exciting: destroying, customization. It takes a lot of work, a lot of patience, a lot of time, but it's a signature thing for me now. I think they're art pieces in themselves, like they could be framed. This season with the leather, we've actually amped it up a lot: made things much more intricate with lots more colors. It looks really high fashion, but the fact is, it's painted by hand.

The more I'm painting and doing my artwork, the more I feel that they're becoming separate entities, the fashion and my artwork. But I feel like I can be an artist, I can be a fashion designer: I can be good at both.