Although you might not know Betsy Johnson’s brand Uniform yet, you definitely saw her Paris Fashion Week debut. The off-schedule moment dominated Instagram thanks to a collaboration with Lyas and his La Watchparty concept, where the content creator invites hordes of his followers to experience livestreamed fashion shows as a collective. But there was one twist with the viewing party for Johnson’s show: as the 2,000-strong crowd watched on a giant screen in the Théâtre du Châtelet, that screen slowly disappeared into the rafters to reveal the actual runway happening live on stage. As expected, the audience lost their minds, along with half the internet, when the show went viral the next day.

“Lyas knew I was working on a collection for so long, and he was one of the people egging me on, like ‘you need to release it’,” Johnson says over video call, sitting in a coffee shop in her home town of Grimsby. In order to keep the surprise a secret until the very last minute, for audience members on both sides of the screen, Johnson had to bundle the fashion press up a fire escape for the catwalk, while the watch party attendees used the main entrance. Then, while Lyas’ crowd were in situ, Johnson and her entire team – hair, make-up, styling and models – all had to work in complete silence as not to be detected, no mean feat for the hectic backstage of a fashion show. The night was, of course, a huge success, but behind pulling off that blockbuster feat was the elegant and considered collection, born from Johnson’s experience as a working class Northern creative.

Since 2018, the Paris-based designer has worked as a stylist, consultant, conceptual artist and creative director, but it was in January 2024 that the idea for Uniform came. Johnson didn’t want to use her own name for the brand – for “obvious reasons,” she says – so chose Uniform for its disparate connotations: a reference to the community of school and sport, but also for its “political charge”, how uniforms can homogenise and control people. Made up of reinterpreted versions of parkas, polos and tracksuits, it was important to Johnson to source the fabrics from Grimsby, which directly tied to the themes of the collection. “It’s about taking these materials that I was often quite resentful about, ones that represented restrictive masculinity, and reconciling them through this collection,” she says. “It felt like a reconciliation with home, and a reconciliation with things I felt had held me and the people that I love back. Reinterpreting them and making them for us.”

Below, Johnson talks us through five key looks from Uniform’s debut collection, from Daily Mail brandalism to subtle sportswear codes.

THE POLO SHIRT

I wore a polo shirt to secondary school every day. It reminds me of school memories and the basics of uniform, but also Fred Perry and the kind of teenage boys I was around. Also, the kind of friends my dad would have – the Mod-y scooter scene he was in when I was growing up. And then it’s also got this connotation of self-destruction – you’ve got your Pete [Doherty]s, your Amy [Winehouse]s – these British figures that ultimately came from nowhere, and it’s ended up being an emblem of their demise. For me, the polo shirt has so many connotations of the working class in decline.

It’s a key look because it’s this very masculine garment that we wanted to reinterpret for the girls. My sister’s trans, and I think she’s had a lot of issues with this place [Grimsby], and so have I. A lot of what we do is to feminise things that are very masculine and have had negative associations for women, but it’s still got this element of, like, ‘I can’t quite be where I want to be, but I look great.’

THE DAILY MAIL PRINT

This was a print from Everyone Hates Elon, a group who do brandalism [replacing corporate advertisements in public spaces with political artwork]. It was their graphic designer who created this print. It’s just very ironic, and it’s the kind of stuff that we have all over our studio walls.

Six years since Brexit, and [the idea behind] that headline has been something that has affected a lot of my friends in a direct, physical way. It’s affecting the tone of what England’s supposed to be about – the good parts of England. My dad’s a bit of a Facebook warrior. He gets into a lot of political arguments with people who side with the right. My family are Gypsy and very much love football culture, but it’s just giving that kind of Englishness a bad fucking rap. Like, what are we doing here?

THE POLICE DRESS

This navy one-shoulder dress is made of six police shirts that one of my team went out to find. Me and my first tailor ended up spending four hours taking them all apart. We actually reconstructed this on me originally.

I had a very bad experience when I was a teenager, and I know so many of my close friends who’ve had so many terrible experiences with the police, especially during lockdown. It was important for us to pull out material archetypes for this first season and not turn them into something loud, but turn them into something that’s elegant, precise, or “chic” but in a subtle way. It's such a beautiful piece, but from something that’s not beautiful, which feels like a reclamation.

THE PARKA DRESS

I grew up around Noel Gallagher, Liam Gallagher, Paul Weller, Miles Kane – they were gods. So I think parkas were just part of, in my opinion, a masculine uniform. You bought a parka, and that was it! There are not necessarily negative connotations of the parka, but I knew it was something that I wanted to play with, and we want to continue playing with throughout our collections, maybe collaborate with bigger partners on these kinds of looks. In one of the first meetings, I was like, ‘we need to get some parka jackets and make some looks’, because of what they mean to where I’m from.

THE JUMPSUIT

I wanted to make something that resembled what I wore as a teenager – like an Umbro, V-neck jumpsuit. It’s such a nice collar line. It’s so nice to implement it into women’s wardrobes, which I haven’t really seen before. Again, it’s taking something that’s really masculine and making it more feminine.

I also remember the whole onesie era, when I was about 13 or 14. Onesies were on trend, and I couldn’t afford the “cool” ones that people were wearing, even though they were fucking horrible. So, now, I thought ‘let’s try and bring back onesies’. A mentor of mine said to me, ‘you should be challenging yourself to do things that are really ugly, or something that’s just a bit wrong.’ The piece has got this institutional, restrictive look, and the material is reminiscent of Sports Direct, but also somewhat close to prison. Prison wasn’t the intention, but I wasn’t mad that the reference came after the fact.

It’s a key look for us, and it’s something we’re going to carry over in future collections. That’s important to us: systemising how we design and making sure that our carryovers aren’t just a t- shirt with a logo. Our carryovers are silhouettes, materials – a uniform that you can have in your wardrobe and interchange.