“There has never been a hierarchy for me,” says Samuel Ross of his multidisciplinary creative approach. “Art, design, fashion… I love it all. I’ve never been able to make up my mind. They all feel urgent, and there are messages to be communicated for each of those media respectfully.”
The Brixton-born polymath, who grew up in a liberal-minded household and was home-schooled for seven years, says that he always knew he would work in the arts. “The idea of being an artist never really had a separation from my sense of purpose and self,” he tells me, when we meet in Milan to discuss his latest project, an installation created in partnership with the whisky brand the Balvenie for the city’s Design Week.
Samuel Ross designing the concept for Transposition
After graduating from De Montfort University in Leicester with a degree in graphic design and illustration, Ross began his career in product design but found the experience limiting. A natural self-starter, he used his spare time to set up a number of websites spanning different cultural sectors, which caught the attention of the late Virgil Abloh, then the creative director of Kanye West’s company Donda. Abloh was, he says, “casting the net out and looking for a new generation of talent”; he brought Ross on board as his intern, then as his design assistant, and gradually the pair began working more closely together on Abloh’s many projects, including the establishment of his fashion brand Off-White. “We moved into much more of a brotherhood dynamic,” recalls Ross. “We had this creative dialogue going, but we also gave each other targets that were ambitious, that were about growth and about democratising a sector that had been relatively private.” He remembers vividly the last time he spoke with Abloh before his death. “It was the night before he passed, and he was supposed to catch a flight to debut a new body of work at Design Miami. The last message he sent me was, ‘Yo, I might not be there, but go to my show’.”
From his mentor, Ross has clearly inherited a strong sense of drive, as well as the ability to blend creative instincts with commercial acumen. He started his own fashion label, A-COLD-WALL*, in 2014, growing it over the next decade from a “bedroom business” to a global success story with revenues that peaked at £16 million in 2023. At the heart of the brand, he says, was his faith in “the ability clothing had to give people the opportunity to move up and down the social-class spectrum in the UK”. He continues: “I am inherently British Caribbean, so I needed to tell a story that was reflective of my environment, and that’s where a lot of the colour palettes, forms and references came from – postmodern architecture, the failings of Brutalism, state culture… I simply proposed what was in front of me and gave it a new vernacular.”
Ross sold the business in 2024, having already begun building his industrial-design company SR_A with the money he had won from winning the 2019 Hublot Prize. “It gave me enough capital to fund this new idea, which was about re-interrogating what craft, luxury, design and the atelier can mean for a future generation,” he explains. Collaborations with brands as varied as Beats, Apple, Hublot and Acqua di Parma have enabled him to grow revenues by 45 per cent year-on-year over the past half-decade. “We have the autonomy and freedom to work with only the artisanal partners we select – for instance, we produce all our leather goods in British tanneries.”
The concept of craft is one for which Ross says he has “great reverence”; he feels a responsibility to be a “custodian” of the sector and the diverse skills within it. His partnership with the Balvenie for Milan Design Week was a case in point: he drew inspiration from the complexities of the artisan-led distillery process and set out to articulate elements of it through a sensorial experience. Set within the historic foundry in Milan’s Isola district – an apt backdrop against which to tell a story all about making – the installation featured vast copper frames (a reference to distillation techniques) and walls of flowing water that took centre-stage in the immersive experience. On entering the space, visitors experienced a drop in temperature, a mist on their skin and the percussive sound of water droplets raining down. “It was about celebrating whisky as a liquid nectar through sound, animation and scale,” says Ross.
Transposition by Samuel Ross for the Balvenie
For those who were unable to travel to Milan for Design Week, there’s a fresh opportunity to see the world through Ross’s unique lens when he curates this year’s London Design Biennale this June. Themed around ‘Surface Reflections’, the Somerset House-based exhibition is a way for Ross – who, since 2020, has been helping accelerate the careers of promising young creative figures through his Black British Artist Grants programme – to promote talented designers from all backgrounds. “Voices that come from particular regions should be embracing their own cultures and ways of making, rather than trying to join a homogenised perspective that is not their own,” he says with conviction. Championing the next generation of talent is, in his eyes, vital to sustaining growth. “The arts play a huge part in keeping us as a country on the global stage – but young people need references of objective success. What I want to do is pass on some of the lessons that were passed to me, to ensure that the future of the UK economy is bright.” In Samuel Ross’ hands, it surely will be.
Samuel Ross in front of his installation in Milan
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