He appears out of nowhere, as if a ripple in the continuum. A time traveler sent back from the end of the world.

It's on a crisp February morning in the Berlin neighborhood of Mitte when Errolson Hugh, the designer behind Acronym, materializes across the street. He is a difficult man to miss. Beautiful bald head. Goatee of a conquistador. A slight, almost imperceptible limp to his gait. But dawg…the clothes! The clothes are what really elevate him to the realm of aberrational—all Acronym or Acronym collaborations, presented in monochromatic blackish. There's the big bubble jacket with a fishbowl hood. Moon-boot Nikes. Windproof pants so gusseted and drop-crotched that if you spelunked to the bottom you might find a Horcrux. All clothes are armor, but Errolson's silhouette is literally so, in that it seems to render him impervious to even the harshest elements. Some sort of ninja god-slash-astronaut. Like you could have pushed him out of a spaceship to fix a meteorite puncture.

I flag him down like a tarmac doof. He adjusts course, smiles. Does a little 'sup nod.

“What's up?” he says. “I'm Errolson.”

In the constellation of fashion brands, Acronym is a little out there, a tiny satellite world operating at the edge of its own nebula. Unlike fashion houses in Paris, Milan, or even New York, Acronym forgoes traditional runway shows and doesn't spend a dime on advertising. Its seasonal collections are tiny: typically no more than 15 pieces at a time.

Originally founded as a boutique design agency in 1994 with Michaela Sachenbacher, Acronym got its footing by quietly designing outerwear for other brands before eventually bifurcating to carve out a business with its own label a few years later. The clothes are beautiful, sewn from expensive cutting-edge fabrics with names like SCHOELLER® 3XDRY® DRYSKIN™ and HIGH-DENSITY GABARDINE, and they possess a sort of dark, caustic energy; think Yohji Yamamoto meets Yojimbo meets Metal Gear Solid, all thrown in a NutriBullet. All of it is prohibitively expensive, too. A pair of pants—say, the P23A-S, which are conical in form, somehow both baggy and snug—will run you upwards of $1,500. And yet whenever a new Acronym collection drops online?

Poof. Almost everything sells out instantly, ghosts of garments barely there.

At the center of it all is Errolson Hugh, a cheery, unfailingly polite fellow who just so happens to look like the final boss in a video game. Up close, his mustache is scraggly, curling slightly over his upper lip like a big spoon. He's 47 now. But his pores are nonexistent, which gives him the look of a man 15 years his junior, a truth that's betrayed only when he laughs—which is often—and crinkles appear in the corners of his eyes.

“People often use the word ‘dystopia’ or the phrase ‘cyberpunk’ in relation to us,” Errolson says. “But really, our whole thing is, Acronym is really about agency. It's about enabling somebody to do something they couldn't otherwise. It's inherently optimistic.”

His fans are all over the place. Names like John Mayer and A$AP Rocky and influential science-fiction author William Gibson. Henry Golding of Crazy Rich Asians? Why, he's a close personal friend from back in the day. (On the topic of his buddy's crazy-rich glow-up: “Such a trip!”) Jason Statham, another covert Acronym fanatic, recently conscripted Errolson & Co. to design flight suits for the new Fast and Furious spin-off with The Rock, Hobbs & Shaw, the particulars of which involve a “Russian oligarch” and “parachuting down into radioactive Chernobyl.” And at least one former U.S. president has dallied in Acronym: Last winter Bill Clinton walked right into the neoliberal streetwear temple Kith in New York City, and 40 minutes later walked right out with a new pair of $750 water-repellent military trousers.

“The thing to remember about Acronym is that they're making products at almost prototype level,” John Mayer tells me in an e-mail. “These aren't mass-produced by any means, and they're artisan-made. There's a spirit inside of them not all that different than that of a costume department for a Marvel movie. It's as cosplay as whatever level you consider the Marvel movie Spider-Man costume to be cosplay.”

He's been called your “favorite designer's favorite designer.” The most known unknown. Someone whose whole deal is peeking over the bleeding edge of what's yet to come and bringing that knowledge back to the present. “People often use the word ‘dystopia’ or the phrase ‘cyberpunk’ in relation to us,” Errolson tells me. His voice is soft and hard to place, with some residual vapors of his native Canadianness. There's a sedative quality to it. Like he could do a mid-career pivot into reading the news for NPR. “I think there's definitely some aspects of that. But really, our whole thing is, Acronym is really about agency. It's about enabling somebody to do something they couldn't otherwise. It's inherently optimistic.”