For artist and designer Patrick Church, art often imitates life. Whether that’s a newfound loneliness showing itself in his latest paintings or a sudden sunny disposition coming through in his latest swimwear collection, Patrick wears his heart on his sleeve—literally.
And, while the eponymous brand that he started with his husband, Adriel Herrera, continues to grow with each drop—gay icons like Christina Aguilera, Dua Lipa, Lil Nas X and Amanda Lepore have all worn his work—Patrick remains clear about his vision for a brand that always reflects his sensibility and maintains a certain mystique. Once one of his pieces is sold out, it’s sold out, becoming an instant collector’s item. It’s art, after all.
For So.Gay’s latest The Hottest Ever cover story, Patrick opened up about his time living in London and New York and Miami, why he doesn’t really go out anymore, his hot new swimwear collection, and more.
Read our conversation with Patrick, and our photoshoot shot by photographer Gato Rivero, below. Shop Patrick Church’s new swimwear collection here.
SO.GAY: Hi, Patrick! How’s your day going?
Patrick Church: It’s good! I just did a photo shoot for some new artwork that I’m loving.
SO.GAY: Is what you’re working on at all connected to your new swimwear line that you’re modeling on our latest cover?
Patrick: Everything I do is so intertwined. But I like to think of my artwork as a separate entity of my work, so I treat it a little bit differently. It’s a little bit more sporadic. And I kind of, yeah, I take a little more time with my painting. I just did a load of new ink drawings. I really like going vintage shopping, so I went and bought lots of different vintage frames for them and I’ve reframed them all.
SO.GAY: I love that. So, in the notes that I got about you ahead of this interview, one of the points was that you really consider yourself an artist first and a designer second. Can you explain that a bit?
Patrick: It’s so difficult to say, because I feel like sometimes I can really feel like a designer, but I’m definitely more of an artist. I do think of myself as a sort of visual artist—a multi-discipline artist. My work just happens to go into fashion, and I guess that’s the thing that people really know me for, is the brand that I created with my husband.
SO.GAY: Which we’re obsessed with, but before we get into the brand, and the story behind it, I wanted to go back a little bit and just hear a little bit more about how your artistic instincts showed themselves early on in your life when you were growing up in Britain. How were you expressing yourself artistically back then?
Patrick: I was always quite a lonely person. And naturally—this sounds so silly—but I’m a naturally quite unhappy person. I grew up in a really small village an hour away from London. (…) it had its challenges. I was always myself—I couldn’t hide who I was—and I think I used creativity as a form of escapism. I was always making stuff, and I knew that it was the only thing that I wanted to do. I was also obsessed with fashion; I wanted to be a fashion designer, then I went to a really small school, and my art teacher really took me under her wing. I really leaned into learning how to paint with oil paints, and I realized I wanted to mesh them both together. But yeah, I was always creating and there was never any other option.
SO.GAY: Now, of course, you’re a Brit living in New York, but what was your time in London like before you moved across the pond? What influences from London seeped into your own sensibility?
Patrick: I’m proud to be British. I love that sort of punk mentality, and I really think that shows within my brand with the DIY aesthetic. I was obsessed with Vivienne Westwood and that sort of punky, rebellious, do it yourself thing. I knew that pretty early on. After I left school—I didn’t go to university, I didn’t study any further—I knew it was do or die. I had to make it happen for myself, otherwise it wasn’t gonna happen. I saw a lot of my peers giving up on their creative process, but I never really gave up on it.
But it was difficult for me in London, because I’m an addict, and I was in a really crazy head space. I wasn’t able to focus 100% because of everything that I was dealing with, like my mental health and addiction and stuff. But I would say a year before I moved to New York, I met some quite influential people, and they saw something within me that I didn’t see within myself. I did a few art shows, I sold some of my work, and I kind of knew then that there was maybe a space for me. But it wasn’t until I met my husband…we actually met on Instagram, and we met for the first time in Italy, and he really saw something within me. I think that’s where the journey really started.
SO.GAY: You had that person believing in you, which sounds like it was the key to unlocking the vision.
Patrick: Yeah, I think it was just sort of him being like, “No, we can make this happen.” He is the champion of everything that I do. He worked in the corporate side of fashion, but we made the first collection, honestly, on my bedroom floor and my living room floor in Bushwick without any idea of what was going to happen and it kind of blew up.
SO.GAY: I want to pick your brain a little bit about the differences between London and New York in terms of sensibility, the queer scene…what do you like and dislike about either?
Patrick: Well, I think in London, people really know how to have such a good time, and we’re quite unapologetic people. There’s a lot of history there and a lot of creativity there, but I think it’s quite small. So the one thing I noticed is, like when I moved from London to New York, I just felt like I’d met so many interesting people and felt like my creativity was more championed in New York. People in New York got what I wanted to say. They got the vision.
I mean, it’s very over the top, and I think they really understood that. In the beginning, it just felt like it happened so naturally, and I met my tribe of people in New York. I met some really amazing people, and I was able to collaborate with a lot of artists, meet people that I’ve always been inspired by and, naturally, it just evolved from there. Whereas in London, I wasn’t really focused on that. I was more focused on the party.
In New York, it was a bit different, because I was married. I used to go out a little bit, but I really sort of shifted focus from going out to being like, “Okay, this thing is happening. How do I navigate this? Let me focus on it.” It was a sacrifice, of course: I stopped going out completely, and I just sort of devoted myself to this. But my work is so ingrained in my life that it doesn’t feel like work.
SO.GAY: I know you said you stopped going out, but were there places in New York that you still went to as your outlets or that were your favorite escapes in the City?
Peter: I don’t live in New York anymore, but I had a place there till a couple of months ago. I live in Miami now. But, I used to go to Battle Hymn, parties at the Boom Boom Room, small parties in Bushwick, where I used to live. I’m definitely a Brooklyn person.
So.GAY: Now that you’re in Miami, how is that seeping into how you’re expressing yourself?
Patrick: It’s very different. Here, I’m able to have a lot more time and space for my creative process, which, to be honest…it’s just me and my husband. We run everything together—he quit his job three years ago to help me full time, and he acts as the CEO of the brand—we needed more time and space to be able to actually execute our ideas properly, without distraction. So, we don’t even really go out.
Honestly, my life feels quite small sometimes. Unless I’m traveling for work, it really is just us together, working. My work is quite social, because I’m always shooting, and a lot of the time it’s our friends that we work with on shoots. We like to say that it’s like an extended family of people. Everyone’s really warm and really friendly here. It’s a great city.
SO.GAY: That makes sense, though, that, as the brand gets bigger, as it takes you to more places, you’d want a place to come back to that’s quieter and smaller and less chaotic than a place like New York City.
Patrick: Yeah, 100%. I’ve also been spending quite a lot of time in Los Angeles, and that’s something that I would maybe consider next. But, I’m always about the next thing, and I don’t know if that’s always a good thing. Yeah, we’ll see. We’ll see what’s next.
SO.GAY: I mean, there’s something to be said about never being fully settled or satisfied. You’re constantly pushing yourself out of your comfort zone and refusing to limit yourself.
Patrick: When you have your own thing, you’re just always thinking about it. I’m always thinking about how I can evolve and progress and do better. I feel like a responsibility to my clients and the people that have supported me to keep evolving and keep progressing. I feel like to do that as an artist, you actually do need to take the space and the time to recharge to be able to progress because, otherwise, things just kind of stay the same.
SO.GAY: I read somewhere that the clothing your brand makes always stems from things that you’d want to wear, that that’s where a lot of the ideas originate. Is that still true? Is that inherent to the brand’s ethos?
Patrick: In the beginning, I would paint leather jackets and stuff to wear out at night, because I could never find anything that—this is probably 10 years ago—I could never find anything that I wanted to wear, unless it was, like, Versace or something. So I would always make things, and then I remember people seeing them and being like, “Oh, my God, you should make more of this!”
So, the first collection, it was literally just pieces that I was like, “Okay, I want to wear this. This is very designed from a very selfish point of view.” And as things grew, I found that more and more difficult, especially as you’re trying to appeal to a broader order, right? But about a year ago, me and my husband were like, “Let’s take this back a notch.” With a direct to consumer brand, we’re not answering to anyone else. And I was just like, “I want to design stuff that I want to wear. I can’t lose that.” So now, we drop something new every Friday, and I just like to make sure that it’s something that I really connect with and relate to. That’s the most important thing for me.
SO.GAY: A big part of that seems to also be the idea that gender is limiting and restricting, and you’re constantly pushing back and challenging those constructs in what you design.
Patrick: I just like the thought of having zero limitations. The idea of being restricted like that is really depressing.
SO.GAY: You also used to hand paint everything. Now, some of your designs are printed onto clothes based on those original paintings. As your brand becomes a bigger business, does it affect your relationship to the work or end product at all? It obviously remains your art, but the business side of that can complicate that, I’m guessing.
Patrick: To be honest, we’re really clever about it. I just don’t want to be one of those brands that blow up and then just disappear, right? I think what we do is really special, and people really connect with the clothes. The way that we keep that something special is we don’t mass produce anything, so we will do small batches of each thing—once it’s sold out, it’s sold out. They almost become collectible pieces. I have a lot of clients that archive all of their pieces and then look at them as art pieces, you know?
It’s really about not selling out. If we do something that people really connect with, maybe we’ll do it again, but in a different color way. Or I’ll make new artwork that’s similar, but it keeps it tweaked. It keeps everything feeling really special, but still allows us to grow as a company. I would never want it to feel like we’re mass producing anything. I always want it to feel special, and I just never want my stuff in loads of stores. I think it’s sort of nice that you can only get it from this one place, and we can completely control the visual.
SO.GAY: A ton of major celebrities that have worn your clothes, like Christina Aguilera, Dua Lipa, Megan Thee Stallion on Saturday Night Live… Speaking for myself, as a gay guy who loved all of our female pop icons growing up and still do, that must never get old, seeing some of the biggest divas of the modern era wearing your brand.
Patrick: Oh, it’s so cool. I remember when Lil’ Kim wore my stuff. I think she was the first person to wear my stuff, because I used to sell it at Opening Ceremony. SZA also wore my stuff, I think on Saturday Night Live, and I just remember freaking out. I just love seeing those kinds of moments happen, because I just never thought anything would happen with my work. So, to have that sort of acceptance, it does make you feel incredible.
SO.GAY: There’s a different kind of validation in that. That’s not why you’re in the game, but it’s almost like an added bonus.
Patrick: Yeah, Teyana Taylor, as well. She was a big supporter from the beginning. She was always buying the pieces, and we became friendly and I painted her tour bus for her a few years ago.
SO.GAY: You’ve said that you use your artwork, in general, as a way to sort of document your life, almost like your version of a diary. How is that showing itself now, whether that’s in this new swimwear line or in another recent project?
Patrick: It really depends on my mood. Like, I really do paint from my head and how I feel. The last few months, I’ve felt really lonely, and I think that the artwork has felt a little bit more chaotic and dark. I don’t really say how I feel; I just put it into my paintings. So, yeah, things have felt a little bit more chaotic, but now I’m working on a new series of paintings, and they’re colorful and a bit lighter, so maybe I don’t feel as heavy. I do use it as a diary, and maybe it’s because I know we’re coming into summer, and I’m really excited about the new swimwear collection. It’s our biggest launch of the year, and I always love to do it, so maybe these paintings reflect that.
SO.GAY: I mean, it’s impossible not to look at the new swimwear line and not feel happy and ready for summer.
Patrick: I always get so excited about launching our swimwear, because I just really feel like that’s sort of one of the signature pieces of the brand. Around this time of year, I get a lot of messages from people that are like, “When’s the new swimwear coming?” So, it just feels really good to create a different story each year for it, and I really do love these new designs.
SO.GAY: What’s it like seeing someone wearing one of your speedos in the wild?
Patrick: That, for me, is better than anything. When I see them in the wild, it’s so fun, and I always run up to them like a child. I just feel like it’s a connection, especially for queer people; people can really connect through clothing, and I feel like if you have a piece, you automatically resonate with each other somehow.
Everything can feel so boring at the moment. Everything is so watered down! Everything feels so dull, so I really try and keep that whimsicality within my work, and keep it authentic and quite flamboyant. I think when people are wearing one of the pieces, they really can connect with each other.
SO.GAY: To wrap things up, Patrick, we’re talking because you’re So.GAY’s latest cover star. What is “so gay” about you?
Patrick: What isn’t? [Laughs] I mean, I’ve always been so gay, and I think I just try to live authentically and am not afraid to be flamboyant or afraid to be myself. I really try not to dim or dull myself down. I try to be unapologetic and to have that punk mentality.
SO.GAY: That’s the London coming out of you. Patrick, this has been great. Thanks for chatting.
Patrick: Thank you so much.
Shop Patrick Church’s new swimwear collection here.
