Barnaby Horn – Storytelling Through Fashion

Barnaby Horn is a multi-award-winning milliner, drag queen, and Squad grad. In a recent interview with Vada Magazine, he detailed his journey from studying English literature to breaking into the fashion industry.

His early work as a drag queen in Manchester ignited his desire to tell stories through fashion. He loved how he could control all aspects of the production and communicate a character and ideas directly to an audience. “You could just get a message across quite quickly with drag,” he says. “If you had an idea, you could just bring all those skills together and turn it into something special.”

After the pandemic, he crowdfunded the money necessary to study at Central Saint Martins, a world-renowned arts and design college in London. He soon focussed on millinery, a natural follow-up to his interest in creating hats, masks and horns for his drag shows.

Barnaby is a storyteller at heart and uses poetry in his work. Whether through literal embroidered language or the creation of a poetic scene around a design, he invites both the wearer and the viewer on a journey.

To find out more about his journey into millinery and his creative practice, read the full interview here.