Andrea Pompilio’s creative philosophy: finding the right path through wrong turns

Andrea Pompilio is an Italian fashion designer with a career spanning collaborations with Prada, Calvin Klein, and Yves Saint Laurent. His work is defined by a thoughtful exploration of modern masculinity—balancing structure and fluidity, tradition and irreverence. Pompilio’s designs favor an outlook that transcends strict European codes, resulting in garments that move comfortably between the runway and the street. Since establishing his own label, he has cultivated a reputation for collections that marry sophisticated tailoring with a lived-in sensibility, often reinterpreting traditional sartorial elements through an international lens.

Since 2017, as Creative Director of Onitsuka Tiger, he has brought this same restless intelligence to one of Japan’s most storied sportswear houses. There, he has braided European craft with Japanese heritage and a broader global outlook, producing collections that feel like conversations across continents. Throughout his work, Pompilio returns insistently to the primacy of emotion and intuition—qualities he views as stubbornly human and resistant to replication. In his hands, fashion becomes a way of seeing the world that finds beauty in its imperfections and freedom in its contradictions. In this conversation with hube’s editor-in-chief, he reflects on the beauty he finds in the “wrong” things, the principles that shape his work at Onitsuka Tiger, and the limits of AI in fashion.

Sasha Kovaleva: You grew up in a creative household with your family deeply involved in clothing. How did this environment shape your earliest understanding of beauty and form?

Andrea Pompilio: It definitely affected me. The family business was totally different from what I’m doing now, but I grew up in a very creative environment. So more than affecting my good taste, I believe it affected my mind—it opened my mind to absorb all the information in the family, and especially when I grew up, from every different point of view: art, cinema, music. All of this created my creativity. It’s more that they passed an open mind to me, my family, so that by the time I grew up I could absorb so much information in a very different way. That definitely helped a lot.

SK: The human body is one of the most enduring and significant themes in the history of art and often serves as the starting point for discussions about beauty. Fashion is intricately connected to the human body, to its proportions and functionality. How do aesthetics and utility intersect for you?

AP: I don’t consider myself an artist, first of all, because I think there’s a big difference between art and fashion. Fashion people just make beautiful things, beautiful clothes, playing with proportion, for example. But I don’t consider myself, or even my colleagues, artists. I think art and fashion connect, but there is a big, big difference.

I’m always attracted to very weird things and very wrong things, and I think what’s made my career quite successful is that I’ve always been interested in wrong-taste people, wrong color combinations, and so on. I created my whole thing from this—my signature, in a way, is built on this kind of thing. Sometimes we love it when we’re styling, my colleagues, collaborators, and I, because it reminds us of something—“Oh my God, she looks like she came out of the house to go pick up the bread downstairs.” But for me that’s cool. It’s the easiness.

Maybe it’s because I grew up in Italy, and there, and in Europe in general, we have a totally different way of dressing compared to the rest of the world. We’re very attached to the fashion industry. We know what’s good and what’s not good; we all have very good taste. So the fact that I grew up always with very good taste next to me makes me much more interested in bad taste than in the good one. That, for me, is extremely interesting, because I reinterpret almost everything I see as bad taste in my own vision, with my own eyes. Sometimes, to other people, it looks beautiful; they say, “Wow, this is great, how did you do it?” But everything comes from the bad side. Nothing comes from the good.