At 30, Patrick McDowell already has the résumé of designer lore: winner of the 2025 Queen Elizabeth II Award for British Design, guest speaker at the United Nations on sustainability in fashion, and celebrity clients that include Lady Gaga, Keira Knightley and Sarah Jessica Parker.
Now the London-and-Venice-based British fashion designer has turned his attention to Asia, where he will speak at Hong Kong’s Fashion Summit (HK) conference at the Hong Kong Palace Museum on September 3.
McDowell first came to the city at 17, having financed the journey by making bags and selling them to friends. Hong Kong struck the teenager from Wirral near Liverpool as “an amazing washing machine of the whole world in one place”. It remains a fitting image for a city that excels at ideas, textiles, capital and speed.
“I respond really well to that,” McDowell says. “I like working very quickly, and I like that kind of immediacy in Hong Kong.”
A model walks the runway at the Patrick McDowell Ready to Wear Autumn/Winter 2026-27 fashion show at London Fashion Week in February 2026. Photo: Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images
Over a decade on, he returns with a consequential retail foothold at Joyce Boutique, whose racks have long offered a regional test of fashion’s next proposition.