What Happened to Heron Preston?

In the past decade, few names have resonated within the cross-section of streetwear, luxury, and cultural commentary quite like Heron Preston. From collaborating with NASA to upcycling city sanitation uniforms, Preston’s eponymous brand once sat at the forefront of a new wave of designers who blurred the lines between hype and high fashion. But as the dust of the 2010s settled, a question quietly emerged: Where does Heron Preston stand today?

To understand Heron Preston, you have to understand the ecosystem that bred him. The San Francisco-raised designer studied at Parsons School of Design before weaving himself into the DNA of Kanye West’s creative inner circle. Early stints as an art director and consultant on Yeezus and The Life of Pablo honed his obsession with iconography, uniformity and storytelling, the seeds of the visual language that would become his signature.

Like Virgil Abloh, Matthew Williams and Yoon Ahn, Preston emerged as a defining voice in the mid-2010s luxury streetwear boom, a cohort that didn’t just sell clothes but sold culture. When he launched his label under Italy’s New Guards Group (NGG) in 2017, the timing was perfect. Streetwear was rewriting fashion’s old hierarchies and Preston’s brand embodied that revolution.

While Abloh steered Off-White to LVMH, Williams built 1017 ALYX 9SM, and Ye disrupted every industry he touched, Preston carved his own lane as a cultural fixer, a DJ, consultant, art director and all-around creative force. Early on, he worked under Kanye as an art director for Yeezus and the Life of Pablo era, experiences that sharpened his appetite for merging industrial design with raw cultural statements.

In 2016, Heron Preston launched his namesake label with a manifesto: sustainability, utility, and subversion. The breakout moment? The UNIFORM project with New York City’s Department of Sanitation. Preston turned discarded sanitation worker uniforms into runway pieces, a radical statement at a time when high fashion was still warming up to the idea of upcycling and sustainability as design codes.

This same year, he unveiled his debut collection at Paris Fashion Week, presenting industrial graphics, Cyrillic lettering, and a signature color palette anchored by safety orange. The brand’s signature wordmark “СТИЛЬ”, Russian for “style”, became a recognisable flex for the young, globally minded fashion crowd who gravitated toward clothes that looked both post-Soviet and street-savvy.

By 2018, Preston was cemented as one of the new kings of fashion’s hype cycle. His NASA collaboration, dropped to mark the agency’s 60th anniversary, epitomized the era’s love for ironic, referential collabs. Bomber jackets with retro NASA patches, reflective work pants, metallic windbreakers: it was streetwear with a Space Age twist, and it flew off shelves.

At this time, Heron Preston sat alongside Off-White, Palm Angels, and Alyx as the luxury streetwear labels of the moment, stocked by SSENSE and MATCHESFASHION, sported by influencers, rappers, and athletes alike. His runway shows in Paris were appointment-viewing, a blur of tactical vests, utility belts, and trail sneakers that reflected the era’s taste for functional dystopia.

But as the 2010s closed, the luxury streetwear bubble started to show cracks. Supreme sold to VF Corp. Virgil Abloh shifted Off-White’s energy to Louis Vuitton’s menswear throne. The graphic-heavy, logo-driven aesthetic that once felt fresh was becoming routin and so too, critics argued, was Preston’s design vocabulary.

Then came the pandemic. As lockdowns squeezed retail channels, even cult labels with loyal followings struggled to maintain the same cultural velocity. Meanwhile, younger consumers began to look elsewhere: toward designers like Martine Rose or Grace Wales Bonner, whose work felt more tailored, subcultural and unpredictable.

In 2021, Heron Preston’s relationship with NGG, the Italian fashion incubator that also held Off-White, Palm Angels and Ambush, started to loosen. Quietly, the brand’s once-flashy Paris runways gave way to a lower-key presence. His collaboration with Calvin Klein in 2021 felt like a clean, mature pivot, a bridge to new audiences but also a sign that he was exploring other avenues.

Heron Preston was tapped as a creative consultant for Calvin Klein, where he tried to inject his sustainability ethos and streetwear sensibility into the legacy American label. The Heron Preston for Calvin Klein capsule leaned into minimal, elevated basics, a departure from his industrial graphics, but a nod to his knack for storytelling through uniformity.

Preston also expanded into more personal projects, DJ sets, and niche collaborations, including a dive into NFTs and digital fashion, a lane that many early-2010s streetwear designers explored as the metaverse hype peaked. Yet none of these projects recaptured the lightning-in-a-bottle cultural resonance of the NASA jackets or DSNY hoodies.

In a pivotal twist this year, Preston has done what few designers in his space ever manage: he’s taken his name back. In 2025, Preston officially announced that he has reacquired full and exclusive rights to his brand from New Guards Group, the same company that helped him scale in 2017.

This comes at a time of turbulence for NGG itself. Since being acquired by Farfetch in 2019, and then South Korea’s Coupang in late 2023, the group has faced restructuring challenges, including filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in Italy in November 2024. It’s no coincidence that other flagship names like AMBUSH and Palm Angels have also reclaimed their brands, as designers reassert independence amid the corporate chess moves that once supercharged their global reach.

In a telling statement to The Business of Fashion, Preston put it bluntly: “I have been through hell to protect what I have built. I fought for my name, my work and my vision. Now I am back with more purpose than ever.” The words underline what makes Heron Preston different, his stubborn commitment to the same sustainability-first, workwear-rooted ethos that made him stand out in the first place.

Now based in Brooklyn, Preston has wrapped up recent external gigs, including a role as creative advisor for H&M menswear, to focus squarely on rebuilding his label, on his terms. His next collection is expected this October, and if his past is any guide, it will double down on the tension between utility and culture that has always been his signature.

So, what happened to Heron Preston? Like VLONE, like Pyrex Vision, like Been Trill, his brand is part of the wider story of a generation that turned streetwear into a cultural phenomenon, built on collaboration, community, and the blurred lines between the underground and the runway.

It’s a story of an era that changed, and an artist now fighting to evolve alongside it. His name may not dominate Paris runways or be draped over every rapper’s shoulders in 2025 the way it did in 2018, but its influence endures in a generation of designers who saw how a sanitation jacket could be high fashion, how NASA could be streetwear, and how industrial design could tell deeply personal stories.

For fans, Preston’s buy-back marks a reset, a chance to see if the designer can harness the same radical spirit that made him the creative everyone wanted to work with in the first place. As the luxury streetwear boom moves into its next phase, more localised, more sustainable, more rooted in community than hype drops. Heron Preston’s next chapter could end up being his most relevant yet.

The uniform is still under construction. The orange still pops. The vision is still intact, but this time, it’s fully his own.