From American dynasty to Parisian couture: meet bright young designer, August Getty
“I’ve always said the best place for my clothes is the bedroom floor,” says August Getty in his Los Angeles studio—a sprawling, white space in Los Angeles’s Culver City, complete with neon branding above a glass-walled atelier. “I want the woman to have the same feeling in my clothes as she does out of them: that strength, that bravery, the beauty, the glamour.”
It’s quite the cavalier attitude to have towards one’s couture; perhaps an indication of the fact that Getty has grown up surrounded by finery as standard. The 25-year-old great-grandson of oil baron Jean Paul Getty—who was, at a time, considered the wealthiest living American in recorded history—August has a lineage of glamorous women from which to draw inspiration. From 1960s supermodel Talitha Getty (his grandfather, John Paul Getty II’s second wife) and philanthropist Lady Victoria Holdsworth (his grandfather’s third wife), fashion designer Rosetta Getty (whose collections are designed and realised in an adjacent atelier on the same lot) and his sister, Nats Getty, a model-designer and LGBTQ+ rights activist. Not to mention the Hollywood elite he counts as friends.
The Getty family has captured the intrigue of many over the years, more recently director Ridley Scott, whose film All The Money In The World (2017) was based on the 1973 kidnapping of John Paul Getty III, as was Danny Boyle’s television series Trust (2018). However, ask August Getty whether he feels the weight of this hefty ancestry, and he shrugs. “Not at all. It’s all I’ve ever known. The person that’s born climbing a coconut tree isn’t afraid of falling out of a coconut tree. I hope!”
To focus solely on the designer’s past, however, would be to miss an auspicious present—namely his couture presentation for the Paris shows in the Salon d’Été at the Ritz, which he’s completing when Vogue visits the atelier.
Click Here: Sports Water Bottle Accessories
Above: The Los Angeles studio of designer August Getty. Image credit: Amy Harrity
Getty began his self-taught fashion career in ready-to-wear, first showing at New York Fashion Week aged just 19. A high-octane, Hollywood-inspired collaboration with artist David LaChapelle followed, as well as a more sedate presentation in Paris, where the Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode spotted him. This January, he was invited to debut as a guest designer on the couture runways, presenting a salon-style show, also at the Ritz, where models in sculptural, meticulously embellished looks lounged around a white grand piano; old-world glamour personified.
For all the elegant women in his orbit, there is one who has held his attention since he was three: “My mother is everything to me,” he says. “She has all these beautiful gowns and shoes”—despite being a self-confessed tomboy, Ariadne Getty is an avid collector of fashion, favouring Luisa Beccaria, Roland Mouret, Alexander McQueen and Stella McCartney suiting. “We were in the middle of nowhere in England and I’d just create this woman and imagine her in these gowns,” he continues. “Running through the fields, the gardens, the house and from there [my #GettyGirl] kind of developed.”
Indeed, there is a glamour to his aesthetic that is perfect for the red carpet crowd. Jennifer Lopez was an early adopter. Soon after, in 2016, Rachel McAdams accepted the Oscar for Best Picture alongside the cast of Spotlight in an August Getty Atelier emerald silk gown with a plunging T-back. Miranda Kerr attended a Golden Globe 2017 after-party in a strapless ivory dress, complete with thigh-high split, by the designer. While both Sara Sampaio and Zendaya favoured his signature ‘cupcake’ style—the former wore a crystal-beaded version for May 2019’s Met Gala, and the latter wore a custom leather creation at June 2018’s MTV Movie & TV Awards.
Above: Rachel McAdams, Sara Sampaio and Zendaya wearing August Getty on the red carpet. Image credits: Getty Images
For this season, Getty explains, his muse took a turn. “The storyline behind the #GettyGirl was completely different, much darker,” he offers. “Apparently I’m one of the only couturiers who uses green, which is considered unlucky in Paris. But if someone tells me something is unlucky, I’m not going to take it out of the collection, I’ll add 18 more looks. I’ve already got the OK to show, I’m going to fucking show!” he laughs. In hushed tones amongst his 25-strong atelier team, he explains that the collection is believed to be haunted. “There’s this house in Venice, for inspiration, and everyone who buys this house dies mysteriously. We had a picture up of it and the whole time, people in the studio were getting hurt, pictures were falling off the walls, racks would fall down—only for this collection.”
His second couture collection is shaping up to be more grown up, too, with an almost Lynchian sensibility that danger is lurking. There’s the aforementioned oxidised copper green, jet black velvet trains crawling with Swarovski crystal spiders, fishnet and a bodice inspired by a fountain Getty saw in a Paris cemetery, which will be finished in hand-painted, hard leather that stands on its own, as though inhabited by a ghost. “It starts with the phantasmagoria, the movie trailer in my head, and then it will be an intrinsic effort to watch certain movies,” says Getty, who turned to 1920s German expressionist films such as Metropolis, Nosferatu and The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari for inspiration.
Above: Designer August Getty and a model in his Los Angeles studio. Image credit: Amy Harrity
“I’ve seen such a different designer emerge since he has changed to the couture calendar,” notes his mother, Ariadne, who’s the CEO of both August Getty Atelier and Rosetta Getty. It was ‘Mama G’, as August’s friends refer to her, that first noted her son’s flair for fashion design when he started designing gowns for forks using serviettes as a toddler. Soon he moved on to Barbies, cutting up his mother’s shoe bags for material. “I started buying shoes I wasn’t going to wear, for the shoe bags,” says Ariadne. “I would walk into a store, Harvey Nichols, wherever, and I’d see someone trying on shoes from a box with a green shoe bag and I’d say, ‘Those!’” These days, she’s just as proud of her son’s creations, and is wearing one of his bell-sleeved leather jackets to meet Vogue. “I have jackets from pretty much every season. I love them,” she says.
When asked about August’s relationship to the dynasty’s past and its future ahead, Ariadne elucidates. “I haven’t said this ever before but, when the children were little, I had the last name of Williams [from her first marriage to actor Justin Williams]. So there was no ‘Getty’ anywhere,” she says. “When we would drive to Marina del Rey and go through ‘Getty Circle’, I wouldn’t say anything. I wanted them to grow up with their own complete identities, without the weight of the name and I’m really happy I did that. I always knew he was going to create something very special and meaningful over a long period of time and be referenced in the future through his designs. He’s created his own dynasty, which I love. Obviously, the name is there, but he’s on his own track.”
For now, that track leads to Paris and the couture schedule. But what’s next? “I know that there will be a time when I need to cross the pond and [move] to Paris. The most rewarding part of my career is doing couture and hopefully, down the road, to do haute couture,” August says, adding: “Dior was one of the youngest to do haute couture and he was 42, so I’m taking my time.”
Above: A detail of designer August Getty and a model in his Los Angeles studio. Image credit: Amy Harrity