I’m generally anti-algorithm, but sometimes it does come through—as when it started serving up posts from @beans1_, a.k.a. Toby Hudson Jones, 22, a model and fashion student at London College of Fashion. Click on their page, and you’ll find them working a babygirl look in Dazed, gothing out for Alasdair McLellan in Dust, and demonstrating how Our Legacy should be worn. Scroll even further, and you’ll see #BeanForCeline—a dream casting (which led to an ad campaign) that Jones almost turned down.
Back in 2022, Jones, then working “a really boring minimum-wage job,” was encouraged by a model friend to give posing a chance. “So on the bus on my way to work, I applied to 10 agencies, and Anti-Agency was the only one that replied,” says Jones. “Applying to agencies with purple hair is probably why I didn’t hear back from most places. And then about three months in, I got an email about meeting the Celine team. Typical for me, [my partner and I] had booked this holiday, which I had forgotten about. So I went and agreed to everything, and then once I’d met the team, I remembered, so I was trying to tell them that I wouldn’t be available. I had no idea what I was being optioned for. I don’t think my agency believed me [when I said I was going away]. I mentioned it to my mum, and she called me stupid. Eventually, it clicked what was happening.” Starting at the top seems to come naturally for Jones, a climber. “I’ve got ADHD, so I would climb everything as a child. I was trying to find my way on top of things.”
You might say that Jones’s style is also top-down; their “ever-changing hair” has been a signature since high school. For their Celine debut it was blue; at this point they say, “I don’t know what my real natural color is.” Another distinctive trait: silver rings (a goat and a claddagh) from The Great Frog and a wardrobe heavy on pieces from Drop Dead Clothing, a Sheffield label favored by Billie Eilish and Justin Bieber and founded by Oli Sykes (the lead singer of Bring Me the Horizon, a band Jones was into).
Workwise, Jones is trying to find a way to maintain their self-image as a nonbinary person in an industry that remains organizationally binary. “A lot of casting people I’ve worked with have been great and super accommodating, and I’ve enjoyed most of the projects, but it’s the structure of how fashion works—it’s very rigid.” Jones is primarily cast for menswear shoots, and while the final results look good, the model says castings “place me back into a masculine role.” One of their school projects was investigating unisex lines; Jones found these to be mostly better in theory than practice. “It’s a lot of taking preexisting items and calling them unisex rather than trying to do something else,” they note. Kim Jones’s work at Dior Men, with womenswear elements and patterns brought into menswear, was an exception, they say. “It is interesting how one-sided the exchange is between menswear and womenswear,” Jones says. There’s this “idea that menswear silhouettes are potentially unisex and then womenswear is a separate category that can pick and choose what it wants but cannot have anything transferred out of it.”
The Mancunian found their way to fashion design through a cousin who pursued the same course of study. The third-year student is just wrapping up a placement with Palmer Harding and thinking about focusing on costume: “I’d much rather have something specific that I’m really passionate about and put all my energy into that rather than constantly thinking about the future and what’s next,” says Jones. The dream? To work with Colleen Atwood (Beetlejuice, The Little Mermaid, Chicago) one day. Certainly they’d come well prepared: Jones’s mission is to watch at least a film a day this year.
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