1017 ALYX 9SM
Matthew Williams was born on October 17, 1985, in Evanston, Illinois, and his family moved to Pismo Beach, California, when he was two — a relocation that placed him inside the 1990s skate-and-surf culture that would prove as formative for his generation of designers as punk had been for Vivienne Westwood’s. He was, by his own description, a skate rat, immersed in the visual language of Stüssy and LRG and the DIY graphics of board culture, and when he enrolled at UC Santa Barbara to study art, he lasted one semester before dropping out to pursue a creative career that would follow an improbable path from light-up jackets to haute couture.
The path began in 2007, when Kanye West’s stylist asked the twenty-one-year-old Williams to design a jacket embedded with LEDs for West’s Grammy Awards performance with Daft Punk. Impressed, West recruited Williams into his orbit, and the young designer spent the following years art-directing music videos, setting up the studio for West’s first fashion brand Pastelle, and working within DONDA, West’s creative content agency. A chance encounter with Lady Gaga in a sushi restaurant led to Williams becoming the first artistic director of the Haus of Gaga between 2008 and 2010, creating some of her most memorable early looks. These experiences — designing for spectacle, operating at the intersection of music and image, understanding that clothing in the twenty-first century was inseparable from the cultural apparatus that surrounded it — were the education that UC Santa Barbara could not have provided.
In 2012, during the Watch the Throne tour, Williams and a group of creatives including Virgil Abloh, Heron Preston, and Justin Saunders formed Been Trill, a DJ collective that hosted parties in London and quickly mutated into a fashion brand. The dripping “Been Trill” logo and giant italicized hashtags built a cult following through Tumblr, and the merchandise — priced around a hundred dollars for t-shirts — attracted endorsements from West, A$AP Rocky, and Rihanna. But in 2015, the collective sold the brand to PacSun, where it appeared on twenty-seven-dollar mall-retail basics that stripped it of its exclusivity overnight. The lesson was brutal and instructive: cultural credibility, once commodified without care, evaporates instantly. Williams would not make the same mistake twice.
ALYX was founded in 2015 in New York with his then-wife Jennifer Murray and Luca Benini, the founder of Slam Jam, and named after their eldest daughter. The brand launched as womenswear — “the culmination of his disparate experience and passions, with references spanning from Supreme and Jean Paul Gaultier to bondage and nineties skate shops” — and was selected as an LVMH Prize finalist in 2016. The menswear debut in 2017 attracted Kanye West and Travis Scott, and in 2018, the brand rebranded to 1017 ALYX 9SM: 1017 for Williams’s birthday, ALYX for his daughter, 9SM for 9 Saint Mark’s Place, the brand’s founding studio address.
The move to Ferrara, Italy, in 2017 — to be closer to Benini and to the factories capable of executing Williams’s vision — signaled the core proposition: industrial hardware manufactured to luxury standards. The signature rollercoaster buckle, a faithful reproduction of the closure used on safety harnesses at Six Flags Magic Mountain, produced by the same manufacturer that supplies the theme park, became the defining object. Made from anodized aluminum set on heavy-duty Italian Cordura belting, the buckle migrated across the entire product line — chest rigs, belts, bracelets, bags, sneakers, jewelry — and its success was immediate and enormous. It was the physical embodiment of Williams’s thesis: that industrial design, technical materials, and utilitarian function could constitute luxury without recourse to heritage codes or ornamental tradition.
The collaborations confirmed the thesis at scale. Kim Jones invited Williams to design accessories for Dior Men’s Spring/Summer 2019, and the utility buckle appeared on belts, caps, backpacks, and saddle bags, becoming one of the most discussed accessories from the collection. The Nike Air Force 1 collaboration in 2020 replaced the shoe’s lacing system with the ALYX buckle. The ongoing Moncler Genius partnership — 6 Moncler 1017 ALYX 9SM — merged alpine puffer construction with industrial hardware across multiple seasons. In June 2020, Williams was appointed creative director of Givenchy, the second of Kanye West’s former creative associates to helm an LVMH house, following Virgil Abloh’s appointment at Louis Vuitton in 2018. The tenure lasted until January 1, 2024, when Williams stepped down to refocus on his own brand — a departure that coincided with the broader cooling of the streetwear-to-luxury pipeline that Abloh’s death in November 2021 and West’s public unraveling in 2022 had symbolically ended.
In 2023, Hong Kong entrepreneur Adrian Cheng took a majority stake in 1017 ALYX 9SM, and the brand’s headquarters began shifting to Paris with plans for freestanding boutiques in ten key cities globally. What Williams built — from LED jackets and Tumblr hashtags through a failed mall-brand experiment to a rollercoaster buckle that sits in the permanent collections of the fashion world’s most serious retailers — is the proof that industrial design can be a luxury language, and that the generation that came up through music, skateboarding, and Kanye West’s creative apparatus could produce objects as rigorous and as lasting as anything that emerged from the traditional fashion schools.