Mr Viral
American-born, London-based designer Conner Ives closed out his fall 2025 runway show at London Fashion Week in late February wearing a slogan t-shirt that read “Protect the Dolls.” Ives walked out to take his bow, stretching the tee with both hands as if to underscore his statement. It was an intentional callback to when, in 2005, Alexander McQueen did the same with a top that spelled “We Love You Kate.” Like McQueen, Ives was looking to make a statement for the people in the room, only here he was declaring his love and support to trans women—affectionally referred to as “dolls” in the LGBTQ+ community. That Ives’s t-shirt would become a viral, must-have fashion item worn by pop stars, designers, and actors, raising tens of thousands of dollars for trans lives in the process, is a serendipitous, unexpected consequence.
Conner Ives at his fall 2025 ready-to-wear show.
Photo: Daniele Oberrauch / Gorunway.com
Alexander McQueen at his spring 2006 ready-to-wear show.
Jean Baptiste Lacroix
Troye Sivan took the stage at Coachella on Saturday evening as a guest of Charli XCX wearing the t-shirt, which was sourced by his stylist Marc Forné, who cropped it and paired it with a pair of double-belted 032c jeans and Dr. Martens boots. And he might have just created the gay summer uniform in doing so, considering Ives sold more than 200 t-shirts between the time the pop star took the stage and the designer woke up in London the following morning. A week prior, videos of Pedro Pascal celebrating his 50th birthday alongside Honey Dijon, the American DJ and producer and fashion darling, who is trans, went viral. Pascal, whose sister Lux is also trans, had come by the tee via his stylist Julie Ragolia. A few days before that, on the occasion of his birthday, the designer Haider Ackermann posed alongside Tilda Swinton wearing the t-shirt, which he received from his partner, Justin Padgett, who is Ives’s publicist.
Troye Sivan, Lorde, Charli XCX, and Billie Eilish at Coachella
Photo: Troye Sivan on Instagram
Sivan and Charli onstage at Coachella.
Photo by Henry Redcliffe
“I can’t believe a t-shirt is the most popular thing I’ve ever made!” Ives joked over text message after PopBase, the popular X account that documents pop culture goings-on, posted the video of Pascal and linked to his website. Needless to say most brands would pay a lot for this kind of organic exposure.
Ives is known for opulent eveningwear and a sophisticated brand of upcycling—not exactly luxury slogan tees. Still, the t-shirt is part of Ives’s design vernacular. Having worn his dad’s funky tees from the ’80s as a child, he now sources vintage ones, shirring or smocking them into beautifully bizarre tops and blouses.
He didn’t make the “Protect the Dolls” tee thinking that it would become so popular, he made it as something to wear at his show. “It was the night before, and we still had like six or seven looks that needed to be completed, so there were still jobs to be done,” he recalls, joking: “We weren’t sitting around at 11 p.m. like, what do we do now? Let’s make Conner a t-shirt!”
Courtesy of Honey Dijon via Pedro Pascal on Instagram
The impetus came from an overarching thought he’d had this season. “I’ve always very purposely steered away from the concept of fashion as politics or politics as fashion, maybe because fashion is already quite self-serving,” he says. “I always thought that what I had to say was in the looks and in the press release, basically. But there was a shift in the last six months where that level of compartmentalization just didn’t really feel relevant anymore,” Ives says, alluding to the way the current US administration has brazenly attempted to erase the existence of transness in the country. A phrase that kept recurring in Ives’s mind was to “say it with his chest,” so he decided to do just that.
He consulted with the model Hunter Pifer, who is trans and often walks for Ives, to make sure he would “get it right.” Meaning, he wanted to make a gesture that was clear, impactful, and of service to the community rather than to himself. (Ives, in fact, was at first reluctant to do this interview, remarking that this “isn’t about [him].”)
Haider Ackermann pictured in the t-shirt alongside Tilda Swinton.
Courtesy of Justin Padgett
“There was an early version that said We
