We take the craft of high fashion and point it at real people.
The loud ones. The marked ones. The ones who give a fuck about not giving a fuck, because standing out takes a strength most people never find. We put them on a pedestal.
Money was never the point. A great image is casting and an eye, not a budget. Give us the right face and an empty room and we'll hand you a cover. That's the whole thrill: we can go toe to toe with anyone.
The name says it plain. On the road building it; in the house cutting it. Road, house. And a tip of the hat to Dickhouse, to Jackass: doing something real, loud and a little reckless with whatever's in reach. That energy, aimed at fashion.
High fashion, the scene, tattoo culture, streetwear, luxury. One standard for all of it. And we back the ones coming up, not just the ones who've already arrived.
A shoot doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be real. We don't move on that.
I'm a photographer and creative director. I make high-fashion images with real people, and I've spent years sharpening the eye it takes to tell a good frame from the one.
I work out of London, across fashion and the culture around it: campaigns, portraits, the scene. A brand or an artist no one's heard of yet, it gets the same eye either way. That's the whole point of Roadhouse.
I got here the long way. Small-town Wales, where nothing happened so we made our own: skating, nu metal, a bit of chaos, a camera never far from the middle of it. I came up around business. My mum was always building something: a music shop, then a salon. She knew how to make a thing work. The culture came through her husband: an alt-rock pub, a nightclub, and a pull further into the alternative world I was already half-living in. Between them I learned how you build something from nothing, and what a scene feels like from the inside.
When they launched a clothing label, I helped drag it from streetwear to semi-luxury. First through my own network, then trade shows in New York and Berlin, shoots in LA: Joshua Tree, Venice, the Viper Room. I learned branding and direction with my hands, not in theory, and I walked out of a business degree to do it properly. That stretch taught me more about making an image than any classroom could.
Then it moved into an office. And I don't work indoors. I need the road. So I got moving: directing e-commerce for a fashion store on Redchurch Street in Shoreditch, then creative direction for a luxury tattoo studio. That's where I watched someone work a camera and knew straight away that this was the thing I'd been circling my whole life.
Four years in, it's all I do, and I'm nowhere near done: reading where the culture actually is, where the new energy's coming from, and aiming high-fashion craft straight at it. I've never traded on status. I didn't come from money or connections, but I came up in the rad world, and I've never faked any of it. The camera earned me the rooms I was never handed. That realness is exactly why the work looks the way it does.
I believe the idea and the casting win, not the budget. Terry Richardson's Tom Ford proved that to me in a single frame. And a shoot doesn't have to be perfect. It has to be real. I don't move on that.
This is Roadhouse. The road over the office. High fashion, pointed at real people, built by someone who came up on the outside and got in the only honest way. Through the lens.
Nathan Garland
Roadhouse
London