LONDON — In his role as chief creative officer, Aaron Esh vows to restore AllSaints’ identity and make it resonate with today’s fashion audience, not by erasing the past but “packaging up the best parts of what it was in a new way.”

During a preview in the brand’s East London studio on Commercial Street, Esh said the vast majority of the old clothes are gone, and he has introduced a studio system to what has historically been a commercial operation, starting everything from scratch.

“All legacy pattern blocks from the last three decades have been dropped,” he said. Leather jackets, shearling coats, jeans and knitwear are being re-engineered around cut, proportion and hand feel, with the ambition of offering what he called a “luxury experience at a contemporary price.”

“What you really get at luxury fashion is how the shoulder line sits, how the sleeve falls, how the collar rolls. Being able to give that to people at a price point of 500 pounds, not 5,000 pounds, feels like a really amazing proposition,” said the Central Saint Martins graduate, whose indie-sleaze aesthetic has made him a buzzy name in London and attracted the attention of famed stylist Katy England, now a key collaborator, among others.

For Esh, who grew up in Islington and spends most of his time around Hackney, AllSaints is a familiar name that’s synonymous with a particular “London sensibility, commitment to craft and ability to fuse edge with refinement.”

Founded in 1994 by Stuart Trevor and Kait Bolongaro, and rooted in Spitalfields, AllSaints built its reputation on leather, music and a recognizable London type.

“I’m less interested in defining an AllSaints customer by age or demographic. I’m interested in character. Ultimately, I want people to see someone walking down the street and say ‘they’re very AllSaints.’ No branding on them, but very AllSaints,” said Esh.

The brand today operates more than 300 stores and has a major wholesale presence, including more than 100 Nordstrom locations, where it ranks among the biggest brands. “My biggest order for my brand might be 20 units. Here, we sold 500,000 units of one T‑shirt. The scale is mad,” he said.

That scale has also shifted his job description. Since joining the brand last November, he now sits on the leadership team, in monthly board meetings with the chief executive officer, chief financial officer and retail director.

“Design skills were the easiest thing,” Esh said. “This head office has 300 people, and indirectly maybe 100 report to me, with 2,000 people across the business. Managing people, driving culture and work from an excellence point of view, that’s the real work.”

One of his first moves was to change how clothes are made inside the building.

“It’s much more about setting up processes and systems for people to work in a way that gets a product like this,” Esh said, as he implemented a shift from a commercial, screen-based model to a studio system, where working from home is no longer an option.

The designs are now fitted on bodies rather than just mannequins; collections are reviewed on physical boards; garments are “interrogated” for cut, line and fabrication.

It meant longer hours and a shock to the system, but Esh said the buy-in has been strong. “They’re designers; they love fashion. Now, when someone walks in and sees value in what they’ve created, they feel proud,” he added.

Product-wise, Esh is envisioning the label as a full wardrobe, from a plain T‑shirt all the way to beautiful coats, with “a sprinkling of London attitude” in more directional pieces.

The brief is that “my mum would understand this and find it elevated,” he said, “but also you would find it chic, or an editor at a big glossy magazine would understand who this person is and why the clothes are amazing.”

Leather remains the core pillar of the AllSaints brand.

“For me, in every single shop, there should be a biker jacket. The sensibility of a fantastic biker jacket that is timeless,” he said, adding that leather also appears in new colors, finishes, weights and proportions in the fall collection “from cropped, sharply pitched silhouettes to amazing leather-treated dresses that could live on a runway.”

Denim, which he called “leather’s quiet cousin” in the business, is being rebuilt as another pillar. The new offer hinges on five core fits for men and women, each with multiple washes and a focus on consistency across categories.

“Denim is a word-of-mouth category. You find your cut of jean, and then you buy it again and again. It might not fly for the first three or six months, but within a year I think it will be the best denim in the market at that price point, without a shadow of a doubt,” he said.

How AllSaints expresses its Britishness is also a task for Esh. Rather than leaning into whimsical heritage tropes, he has opted for a tougher, nightlife-inflected London sensibility for people who do not want to dress like a Brunello Cucinelli customer but still want polish.

In the contemporary space dominated by French names like Maje, Sandro and Ami, he sees an opening in the market.

“At this level of the market, there is no British equivalent. If you take us out of here, if you go to South Korea or to New York or L.A., people find the Britishness of AllSaints quite charming,” he said.

That attitude already resonates in Asia, where AllSaints is perceived as semiluxury. “In Taiwan, it’s our third-biggest market, and in Seoul we can sit next to luxury players. You come out of the airport, and it’s Prada, then AllSaints,” Esh added.

He sees China, South Korea and India as key engines for future growth. The U.S. is currently its largest market, and the company also has a big business in the U.K., but the brand remains “underpenetrated” in many parts of Europe as well as Asia.

Alongside the clothes, AllSaints is introducing a slightly tweaked Ramskull logo, inspired by military stamps, handwritten markings and cursive signatures from the archive. The new logo is rolling out across product, visual communications and a rebuilt website.

There is also a new campaign shot by Alasdair McLellan and styled by England. It features 17 portraits of what the brand calls its community that include longtime Esh muses such as Kiki Willems and England’s son Lux Gillespie, appearing alongside a street-cast group of Londoners.

“London is about attitude; how people wear clothes in unpretentious ways. You can mix high and low. You can wear things that are new. You can wear things that are thrifted. We’ve really tried to think of all the touchpoints that make London so specific and recreate that within how we design the clothes, and how we show what AllSaints is,” he said.

Unlike some of its contemporary peers, AllSaints is not rushing back to the runway. Esh is adamant that the brand’s real runway is its stores.

On Monday, some 220 full-price retail locations were due to pull an all-nighter, stripping out old stock and installing the new collections so the reset landed globally in one hit.

Around London Fashion Week, instead of a show six months ahead of delivery, the focus will be on activations that drive people directly into stores, putting the clothes on boys and girls out and about in the city, and making sure anyone who likes what they see can walk into a store and buy it.

To support that, Esh is building a layered visual ecosystem outside the traditional show model with The Ram, a free black-and-white zine edited by Matthew Whitehouse with editorial from young London creatives. It will be released in limited quantities during London Fashion Week and available free at AllSaints stores worldwide.

The launch will also be supported by a program of music and cultural activations, including collaborations with independent London venues and an event on Thursday at Jack’s Place, the AllSaints flagship in Spitalfields.