After training at the London College of Fashion and gaining experience with designers such as Rick Owens, Craig Green, and Matty Bovan, Prothmann formed a studio practice that operates with the rigor of a workshop. Pieces are developed and produced in house, allowing him to think of garments as objects with their own internal architecture. Leather recurs not as a symbol of luxury, but as a material with memory, capable of holding tension, age, and gesture.
Prothmann’s work gravitates toward people who move between identities and environments, and his pieces resist strict gendered categories. What emerges is a vocabulary that feels both grounded and slightly mythic, with garments that suggest lived experience, physical labor, nightlife, and the quiet moments in which a person recalibrates their sense of self. He often cites conversations with friends, long nights, and the landscape of London as materials as essential as leather or suede.
A Letter from Leo
Dear Friends,
I have been thinking of Gaia. Not the myth alone, but a mother whose body is the earth, whose arms are the stones, whose breath is the wind that circles our lives. She is strength and she is shelter. In these hours, when freedoms tremble and identities are made to answer for themselves, I ask: where does she live now?
I imagine her by the Giant’s Causeway, folded within the dark basalt labyrinth, hidden yet unafraid. There she gathers her circle: blacksmiths and guardians, riders and landkeepers, chefs and night women; all radiant, all beloved. They form her sanctuary, not through walls but through presence, the presence of community.
For them I have made garments like armour, garments like memory. Aprons for the blacksmiths, their hides drawn from the remnants of life; bombers for the riders, vast and defiant; sculptures for the guardians, frozen yet in movement, their colours borrowed from Theaster Gates’ fierce palette of yellow, blue, maroon, stone, and white. For the women of the night, hides bound with bolts, rough and protective, a whisper of horses’ armour, a remembrance of Amy Winehouse’s voice that still moves like smoke through my room.
And yet I also searched for another skin. With Inversa Leathers I found Silverfin, invasive and unwanted, transformed into handbags and emblems; small plaques riveted into place, both structure and symbol. With Converse’s Chuck’s, I took the universal shoe and unravelled it into something new, something fluid, for all who walk these streets.
This collection is not mine alone. It is borne of friends, of conversations that stretch into night, of music that drifts between classical and deep techno, composed by Holden Federico to mirror our turbulence and our hope. It is borne of Playbody’s performance, of London’s riders and guardians, of those who danced and stayed close. It is borne of the city itself, and of the people who remind me that creation is never solitary.
So here, at the Mandrake’s terrace, suspended between earth and dream, I offer you this sanctuary of Gaia. May you find in it the strength of community, the quiet of myth, and the freedom of imagination.
With love,
Leo
