I struggle with being categorised, belonging to a group, being a fan, team sports all feel very alien to me, it’s a quality I admire in others yet every time I have tried to join in it felt like I didn’t belong.

When I first started Aries a friend in PR suggested I should write a list of characterisations, or what I now know it’s called marketing profiling. 

Having had a brand before, I was conscious of the constraints that come from too much coherence and the creative restrictions of becoming commercially predictable, which brought us to include the concept of “incoherent coherency” into Aries’ original brand statement.

It was, as you can imagine, a flawed concept that stunted growth, caused endless commercial obstacles, confused algorithms and lost customers; yet I think we were onto something as the desire to defy classification is a concept at the core of the creative mind, what the philosopher Gilles Deleuze’s refers to as “becoming”; the ongoing process of transformation and change, which is the engine of artistic and intellectual invention. Identity as a process rather than a destination.

Fashion and contemporary culture are obsessed with identity. Categories have been politically necessary because they create visibility, solidarity and rights. Historically, many marginalised groups needed stable identities in order to organise and gain recognition, now entire industries have been built around helping people construct versions of themselves, often through aspiration. The right clothes, the right references, the right image, tags, content pillars, SEO words all help you to find your audience and commercial success.

What I find interesting though are the people like myself who seem largely uninterested in any of that and operate in a creative environment.

We live in a culture where uniqueness has become a commodity and personal style is often treated as a performance. Yet some of the most interesting people remain largely indifferent to the idea of standing out. Their appearance is informed not by strategy but by curiosity.

We tend to imagine self-expression as a process of becoming extraordinary. In reality, it often begins with something much simpler: paying attention to what genuinely interests you and allowing those interests to shape your appearance. I started to realise that what had started as a conversation about style defiance was actually a conversation about freedom.

When discussing how he dresses now and the theme behind the outfits in the shoot, Augie described his ideal style as something that looks as though he has just woken up and left the house. Dressing gowns, basketball shorts, slippers, oversized layers. There is a domestic quality to it. An embrace of comfort that feels almost ideological.

There is perhaps something in this that relates to neurodivergence. Throughout our conversation Augie repeatedly returned to the idea of doing things because they felt meaningful rather than because they were expected. Traditional social incentives appeared to hold relatively little interest. The desire to fit in, which drives so much consumer culture, never seems to have been a particularly motivating force.

These same qualities appear in his creative work. Rather than producing finished designs according to a rigid plan, he often draws directly onto garments, allowing ideas to accumulate organically. Pieces develop through improvisation rather than control. Mistakes are absorbed into the work. Nothing feels overly fixed.

Perhaps the most revealing aspect of our conversation was his fascination with awkwardness. He spoke about his love of situations where things are slightly wrong. The humour of someone trying and failing to maintain a perfect image.

The styling in the shoot references candid photographs of celebrities. Not red-carpet appearances or carefully managed campaigns, but images of famous people buying coffee or walking down the street dressed in strangely assembled combinations of expensive clothing. There is something funny about watching people who are supposed to represent aspiration become visibly human.