Meet the London Designer Who Made Emma Stone a Dress for Her Super Bowl Commercial
Meet the London Designer Who Made Emma Stone a Dress for Her Super Bowl Commercial
Camille FreestoneFri, February 27, 2026 at 10:38 PM UTC
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This Designer's Dresses Are More Like Drawings Courtesy Steve O. Smith
The last place British designer Steve O. Smith expected to see his darkly whimsical work was at the Super Bowl—well, on a commercial break, at least. After rounds of advertisements for GLP-1s and competing AI programs cycled through, the screen went dark as Emma Stone, under direction from the wonderfully weird filmmaker Yorgos Lanthimos, feigned distress in a black-and-white film-noir-y scene. Her dress, from Smith’s Fall 2025 collection, fit the mood perfectly: a diaphanous organza sheath that looked as though someone had taken a giant marker and scribbled a crude lattice pattern on it, ink pooling at the corners. (Ironically, the ad was for Squarespace.)
The cameo marked the latest in a series of high-profile endorsements Smith has enjoyed since launching his brand in 2022. Eddie Redmayne and his wife, Hannah Bagshawe, wore coordinating looks to the Met Gala in 2024, and Cate Blanchett and Emma Corrin have each worn his designs in magazine editorials in the past few years. Last year, Smith won the 2025 LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize.
His pieces, which he thinks of more as drawings, are moody, whimsical, haunting, and delightful all at once. Smith has cultivated a meticulous process for translating his sketches into garments, transferring scribbles of silk appliqué onto organza. When we chat via Zoom ahead of his London Fashion Week luncheon for Fall 2026, Smith sits in his studio surrounded by the thousands of drawings that have been distilled into his collections. The process is visible everywhere: sketches tacked to the wall behind him, shelves lined with plastic tubs filled with many more.
This season, he tells Bazaar, is grounded in its allusions to artists of the 1920s and ’30s, exploration of new fabrics—a delicate silk georgette—and a novel appearance of color—his previous collections have remained monochromatic.
Ahead, we chat with the designer about the references for his Fall 2026 collection, his relationship with his work, and how that shapes his client interactions.
Courtesy Steve O. SmithWhat exactly inspired the collection this season?
I was inspired by Otto Dix’s ‘Metropolis’, the late-1930s evening gowns and appliqué work of Madeleine Vionnet, and the paintings of Edward Burra, who was an English artist around the same time. I guess I like their depictions of different spaces in time.
‘Metropolis’ is a depiction of the Weimar Republic with the Kit Kat Club in the middle. The two screens on the sides are the left-behinds from that era, people who joined the army and were told that they were fighting for a very different Germany—and then how that kind of all fell apart after the First World War. Burra’s depictions are of Paris. They depict a similar sort of societal unease. Whereas Vionnet’s work is more of a reference in terms of construction and embellishment.
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This collection marks the first time we've used color in some of the pieces. We worked with a dye workshop in London to match exactly to the ink washes. I would bring them little swatches, and they would make a corresponding dye. And then we've also worked with embellishment, so a lot of glass beads.
Do you consider these garments pieces of art? And if so, how do you envision your work being collected or consumed?
I think of them as drawings, distinct from clothing and art. Each time I work on a collection, I’ll do roughly a thousand drawings or more. I just keep doing it over and over again. That’s how I’m able to do something new and unexpected: I force myself to draw all day. I end up drawing ideas rather than the things I set out to draw.
We only work made-to-order, so we have quite a few really amazing private clients. One drawing from the last collection is something that we're working on for the singer Raye for her U.K. tour. That will just be hers—and she'll also buy the drawing. For instance, another client in September saw one of the dresses from the new collection, loved it, bought it, got the drawing, and we took that out of the collection. We think of the pieces as unique, one-of-a-kind, in the same way we think of the works on paper. I'm not a printer, so I can't do exact replicas. That approach translates into how we interact with our clients.
Courtesy Steve O. SmithYour clothes feel dark and scary and light and whimsical all at the same time.
I think that all comes from the drawing. When you do it over and over again, you get quite erratic line work and moody drawings. When you translate it into the garment, the design keeps some of those aspects.
I know your drawings are usually made with silk appliqué, but what other materials are you working with this season?
Previously, we've worked a lot with transparent organza and crêpe de chine. This time, we've expanded to use georgette. It's a lot harder to work with, but it's such a beautiful fabric. It has a slightly transparent element. It's also been amazing for working with color. We've worked more with wool and with glass beads. We've been working with an amazing embroidery designer who is in-house with us now. She has been creating incredible embroideries that feel almost like congealed ink, in the way she stacks the sequins and uses the directionality of the bugle beads.
What do the celebrity placements so far mean to you?
It's great. I think of what I'm doing as its own little thing, so I try not to get too focused on that part. But they are still really amazing. I'm obviously such a big fan of Emma Stone and Yorgos, and the celebrity endorsements have been amazing. And a lot of them have bought those clothes, so it's actually been really helpful to my business. We hope for more great opportunities like that.
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
Photo credit: Courtesy Steve O. Smith
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