Aries

Aries was founded in 2011 in London by Sofia Prantera, an Italian-born designer who had previously co-founded the London skate brand Silas (with the SKINS-era graphics that defined late-1990s London skate culture). Aries — named for Prantera's astrological sign — was conceived as a women's-led, gender-fluid London streetwear brand that engaged with rave, club, and counterculture references without imitating American streetwear. The vocabulary settled around several signatures: hand-screened graphic tees often featuring borrowed counterculture quotations or appropriated art, the No Problemo logo (a riff on the brand's relaxed Italian-British attitude), graphic acid wash denim, and a deep relationship with collaborative artists (Linder Sterling, Slim Aarons archive, Helmut Newton estate). Collaborations with New Balance, Reebok, Umbro, and the Diesel x Aries project have positioned the brand within both streetwear and luxury fashion conversations. Aries operates a single flagship store on Wardour Street in London Soho, plus international wholesale through Dover Street Market, SSENSE, MR PORTER, and others. The brand remains independent with Prantera as creative director. Few brands have so legibly carried a London skate-graphic lineage into a contemporary luxury-streetwear positioning, and few have engaged so explicitly with cultural-collage as a design methodology.