There are artists who change their sound. There are designers who change their aesthetic. And then there are artists who seem determined to question the entire system of categories around them.
NEO 10Y belongs firmly in the third category.
Long before NEO 10Y became known for music, vegan activism and his vision of “Ancient Futurism”, Nik Thakkar was making waves in the fashion world. His creative career placed him alongside some of the industry’s biggest names, with projects connected to Jean Paul Gaultier, Louis Vuitton and Tom Ford, while his own label, Ada + Nik, pushed fashion towards a darker, more experimental and technologically driven future.
In 2015, Ada + Nik won the GenArt Prize for Design at New York Fashion Week – a significant recognition for a label that blurred the boundaries between fashion, technology, music and gender expression.
But something was changing.
In 2017, Thakkar became vegan.
What might initially have looked like a personal lifestyle decision would eventually become one of the central philosophical pillars of his creative identity. Rather than treating veganism simply as a question of what people eat, NEO 10Y began connecting it to a much larger conversation about compassion, consciousness, exploitation and liberation.
And that created an intriguing tension with his fashion past.
Here was someone who had worked within an industry historically intertwined with animal-derived materials, now publicly challenging the idea that animals should be viewed as resources for human creativity, consumption or fashion.
The contradiction became part of the transformation.
His activism subsequently expanded through collaborations and campaigns with organisations including PETA and The Vegan Society. He became involved in campaigns challenging leather and speciesism, while using his visibility as an artist to bring animal rights into spaces where the subject is often treated as peripheral.
For NEO 10Y, however, animal liberation doesn’t exist in isolation.
His work increasingly brings together veganism, queer liberation, spirituality, environmentalism and social justice under a single idea: oneness.
That philosophy is reflected in his music. Songs such as CHOOSE LOVE, ANTiDoTE, Shortcut To World Peace and ONENESS (WHO WE ARE) explore love, consciousness and interconnectedness, while his performances transform those ideas into immersive combinations of sound, fashion, visual art and spectacle.
It is here that his past and present begin to make sense as one continuous trajectory.
The futuristic fashion designer didn’t disappear.
He became the futuristic musician.
The fascination with technology became an exploration of consciousness. The rejection of conventional fashion categories became a rejection of conventional cultural categories. And the provocative visual language of his earlier career evolved into what he now describes as Ancient Futurism — an attempt to bring ancient wisdom, spirituality and ideas of interconnectedness into a radically futuristic cultural world.
Perhaps the clearest symbol of this evolution is his relationship with National Animal Rights Day.
In 2024, NEO 10Y hosted the London ceremony at Wellington Arch. In 2026, he returned to host the London event again, putting an artist with a background in international fashion, music and queer culture at the centre of a major animal-rights gathering.
It is a remarkable journey: from fashion runways to animal liberation; from designer to performer; from aesthetics to ethics.
But perhaps “reinvention” isn’t quite the right word.
Because looking across the arc of his career, NEO 10Y doesn’t appear to be abandoning his previous identities.
He is combining them.
Fashion. Music. Veganism. Spirituality. Queerness. Activism. Technology.
Different languages expressing the same underlying idea:
that the future should be more conscious, more compassionate and more radically connected than the world we inherited.
And perhaps that is the most radical evolution of all.
This isn’t happening in a cultural vacuum. NEO 10Y’s trajectory has already taken him through the pages and platforms that shape contemporary culture — from Billboard, Forbes and Interview Magazine to Channel 4, where his appearance on Higher Ground brought his ideas around consciousness, psychedelics and a vegan future into mainstream television.
He’s spoken about veganism alongside Jimmy Carr, appeared across international fashion and culture media, and built a career that moves effortlessly between the runway, the recording studio, television, activism and the art world. For an artist who has spent his career refusing to stay in one box, perhaps the most NEO 10Y thing of all is that the box itself has become obsolete.